"After death comes judgement," the Archbishop of Canterbury said in an interview this week, after being asked whether the Prime Minister should apologise for going to war in Iraq.
Talking to the former Labour minister Roy Hattersley in The Observer, Dr Williams said that the Prime Minister had acted in good faith in going to war in Iraq.
Nevertheless, Mr Blair and Mr Bush would still be answerable for what they did. The essence of judgement, Dr Williams said, was being brought face to face with the truth, with no possibility of escape.
And in a reaffirmation of traditional doctrine, Dr Williams said that all would answer for their actions "at the judgement seat" of God. We would all be "capable of suffering the torment about ourselves", he said.
It was, he said, the duty of the Church to tell society what mattered about human beings who were made in the image of God. "There are a range of matters where the Church says ‘This far and no further’ — the image of God requires more than this."
Whether gay priests fell within that range has been dividing the Anglican Church. But Dr Williams said that the Church’s recent discovery of "the disjunction between [sexual] orientation and behaviour" was possibly the solution.
He acknowledged, though, that extreme positions had been taken by some parts of the Anglican Communion in the debate. In what seemed an admonition of those "deeply prejudiced voices", he said: "There are some things that should not be said in the Church or anywhere else."
The Archbishop said what saved a person was neither good works nor faith, but "a relationship with God".