The Archbishop of Canterbury has attacked the bonus culture of the City, condemning the failure of bankers to repent for their excesses.

Dr Rowan Williams, who has consistently taken a left-of-centre line on economic issues, said that the Government should have acted to cap bonuses. He warned that the gap between rich and poor would lead to an increasingly "dysfunctional" society.

Dr Williams said: "There hasn't been a feeling of closure about what happened last year. There hasn't been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance. We haven't heard people saying 'well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, empty'."

Asked if the City was returning to business as usual he said: "I worry. I feel that's precisely what I call the 'lack of closure' coming home to roost. It's a failure to name what was wrong. To name that, what I called last year 'idolatry', that projecting of reality and substance onto things that don't have them."

However, the last few decades have witnessed attempts by Christian preachers, among others, to turn the traditional embrace of asceticism, poverty and charitable giving by Christians on its head. The rise of the so-called "prosperity gospel" led to a climate when many of the most greedy felt their excessions were sanctioned by their faith tradition.

Dr Williams told BBC2's Newsnight programme: "What we are looking at is the possibility of a society getting more and more dysfunctional if the levels of inequality that we have seen in the last couple of decades are not challenged."

He also said that the crisis was a lesson that "economics is too important to be left to economists". And he went on to suggest that there was a role for "awkward amateurs" in examining how the City operates.

Dr Williams also said there was a sense of "bafflement" and "muted anger" at the bonus culture. "I think that's one of those things that feeds the . . . diffused resentment, that people are somehow getting away with a culture in which the connection between the worth of what you do and the reward you get becomes more obscure.

"What we are looking at is the possibility of a society getting more and more dysfunctional if the levels of inequality that we have seen in the last couple of decades are not challenged."

Dr Williams' comments come after one leading policy body warned the lessons of the economic crisis had still to sink in. The Institute for Public Policy Research said the rapid return to the City's bonus culture showed real reform has been "very limited".