Stone That Accuses? Architecture, Authority, and the Theology of Sacred Space
The Church Times essay “Liturgy of exclusion in stone” (30 January 2026) by Timothy Goode contends that traditional church architecture “signals that not all are welcome,” because its forms embody a metaphysics of hierarchy, elevation, and distance. Church buildings, he argues, function as “sermons in stone” that encode assumptions about which bodies belong. That opening intuition — that architecture signifies — is uncontroversial. What requires examination is the theology by which that signification is judged.
Christian reflection on sacred architecture has long insisted that churches are not merely mirrors of social values but mediating spaces that form belief, discipline desire, and orient worship toward God. Jeanne Halgren Kilde, in her extensive work on American and European church buildings, demonstrates that sacred architecture operates simultaneously on theological, ritual, and communal levels, shaping religious identity rather than simply reflecting cultural prejudice¹. Buildings are formative, but not reducible to affective reception.
Goode’s argument rests on a decisive shift: architecture is interpreted primarily through the lens of contemporary bodily experience and psychological inclusion. Elevated chancels, axial naves, steps, and fixed altars are read not as sacramental or liturgical expressions, but as social signals that privilege some bodies over others. Sacred space is thus evaluated less by what it confesses about God than by how it is perceived by the modern observer.
This approach stands in tension with a substantial body of architectural and theological scholarship. Thomas Barrie’s studies of sacred space describe churches as mediating environments — places that intentionally mark transition from the ordinary to the holy, from the secular to the sacramental². Thresholds, elevation, and orientation are not arbitrary metaphysical residues, but spatial grammars that enact the Christian claim that God is both immanent and transcendent. The journey through nave to sanctuary is itself a catechesis in movement.
From the biblical Temple onward, sacred space has been understood as a meeting point between heaven and earth. Mircea Eliade famously described such places as axis mundi, points where the divine breaks into ordinary space³. Christianity did not abolish this logic; it baptised it. Churches are oriented, elevated, and ordered not to exclude, but to signify that worship is a participation in a reality that precedes us.
Goode’s strongest critique concerns disability and access. He argues that steps, inaccessible chancels, and elevated liturgical furniture presume a “normal” worshipper and relegate others to the margins, even when adaptations are later added. The pastoral concern is real and must be taken seriously. Yet the theological conclusion he draws — that architecture thereby “withholds” the means of grace — is not sustained by sacramental theology.
Sacraments are not dispensed by architecture, but by Christ acting through the Church. Josef Jungmann, in his foundational work on the Roman rite, makes clear that liturgical form and spatial order serve the objectivity of sacramental action, precisely so that grace is not reduced to subjective experience⁴. Elevation does not negate participation; it signifies gift. Fixity does not imply exclusion; it proclaims that what is given is not manufactured by the community.
Goode explicitly rejects what he terms a “vertical theology,” associating it with Neoplatonism rather than with the Gospel. Yet the Christian tradition has never seen transcendence and incarnation as opposites. Romano Guardini, reflecting on liturgical space, argues that elevation and distinction are necessary precisely because Christianity confesses a God who comes from above without ceasing to dwell among us⁵. To flatten sacred space in the name of inclusion risks evacuating it of its theological content.
This architectural logic mirrors contemporary Anglican debates in striking ways. In discussions of ordination, traditional orders are increasingly criticised not on doctrinal grounds but because they are said to “signal exclusion.” Ontology is displaced by optics. In debates over sexuality, moral teaching is rejected less as false than as harmful or unwelcoming, accused of “withholding” affirmation. In each case, fixed forms that demand conversion or assent are recast as oppressive structures.
Underlying all of this is a crisis of authority. Fixed altars, inherited doctrine, settled moral norms, and sacramental orders all endure beyond the preferences of any generation. They resist constant reconfiguration. As Louis Bouyer warned, when the Church begins to treat her liturgical and doctrinal inheritance as an embarrassment to be managed rather than a treasure to be received, she undermines her own capacity to teach⁶.
The irony is acute. Goode describes historic architecture as “doctrinally incoherent,” yet it is precisely this architecture that embodies a coherent sacramental worldview: God is holy; grace is given; worship is ordered; participation is real but not self-generated. A Church that denies transcendence cannot sustain sacramentality. A Church that reduces holiness to accessibility alone cannot maintain authority. A Church that treats inheritance as oppression will eventually have nothing left to hand on.
Stone is accused because it remembers. It bears witness to a theology that does not apologise for distinction, ascent, or gift. Sacred space has never existed to reassure us that we already belong. It exists to call us — all of us, able-bodied and disabled alike — into a form of life we did not invent. The task is not to flatten that space into the lowest common denominator of comfort, but to ensure that every person can encounter the divine mystery without dissolving the mystery itself.
¹ Jeanne Halgren Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 3–27.
² Thomas Barrie, “Sacred Space and the Mediating Role of Architecture,” European Review 18, no. 2 (2010): 261–276.
³ Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), pp. 20–68.
⁴ Josef A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, trans. Francis A. Brunner (New York: Benziger, 1951), vol. I, pp. 1–15.
⁵ Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. Ada Lane (New York: Crossroad, 1998), pp. 61–78.
⁶ Louis Bouyer, Liturgical Piety (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1955), pp. 9–24.
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