Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Archbishop of Canterbury & Teacher of the Faith
November 6 · d. 1944
also known as William Temple, W.T. Temple
William Temple was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944 and the most formidable Anglican mind of the twentieth century, a philosopher and theologian who was also his church's great public voice for justice. He was the son of Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury before him, and the only man ever to follow his own father into that seat. In a primacy of barely two and a half years, cut short by his sudden death, he gave the Church of England its charter for a society ordered to human welfare and helped lay the foundations of the modern ecumenical movement. His feast is November 6.
William Temple was born in a bishop's house and died in an archbishop's, and between the two he became the most powerful Christian mind England produced in his century. His father was Frederick Temple, bishop of Exeter when the boy was born in 1881 and Archbishop of Canterbury before the boy was grown. No other man in the history of the English church has followed his own father into that seat, as William one day would. He grew up quick and cheerful, with a laugh people remembered all their lives and a memory that seemed to hold whole books at once. At Balliol College, Oxford, he took the highest honours in classics and philosophy and would argue theology with anyone who sat still long enough.
When he first asked to be ordained, the Archbishop of the day hesitated, for the young Temple could not yet say he believed the Virgin Birth and the empty tomb as plain facts, and he said so honestly rather than swear to what he doubted. Two years later his mind had settled, the doubts had resolved into belief, and he was ordained. He never lost the habit of thinking his way toward faith rather than around it, and it made him a Christian whom other doubters could trust.
He was headmaster of Repton, a great school in Derbyshire, while still a young man, and he might have spent his whole life among the clever and the comfortable. Instead he gave himself to the people the comfortable rarely saw. For years he led the Workers' Educational Association, teaching men and women who had left school at twelve, and he came to believe that the gospel had something to say to their wages and their houses and not only to their souls. As Bishop of Manchester he walked the mill towns in the years when the mills were failing, and he saw what it did to a man who wanted work and could not find it.
Out of that came the conviction that shaped everything after. The God who took flesh in Jesus Christ, Temple held, cared about flesh: about bread, about a roof, about whether a family had enough. A gospel that saved souls and ignored bodies had cut the Incarnation in half. He put it in a sentence that startled people who thought religion was chiefly a way of escaping the world. Christianity, he wrote in his great Gifford Lectures, is "the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions": the faith that God made matter, entered it, and means in the end to redeem it rather than to rescue us out of it.
He was made Archbishop of York, and then, in one of the darkest years of the war, Archbishop of Canterbury. He was by then the best-known Christian in England, and he used the office to speak for those who had no voice in it. In 1942 he wrote a short book for a sixpenny paperback series, Christianity and Social Order, and it sold in the tens of thousands and then the hundreds of thousands. In it he set two ideas against each other: the Power-State, which existed for its own strength, and the Welfare-State, which existed for its people, and he insisted that the second was what a Christian nation owed its citizens. The state, he wrote, should be so governed that the art of it becomes "the art of so ordering life that self-interest prompts what justice demands". He was giving the coming welfare society its plainest Christian argument, and giving it in the middle of a war whose outcome no one yet knew.
He held the primacy for barely two and a half years. On a wet October morning in 1944, at a house on the Kent coast where he had gone to rest, his heart gave out, and he died at sixty-three. He did not live to see the welfare state he had named, or the World Council of Churches he had laboured to gather, but both came, and both carried his mark. He had spent a rare brilliance not on himself but on the conviction that the God who became man would not be content until every man had bread, and a thing so plainly said by so great a mind is not easily unheard.
How we know William Temple is unlike how we know almost any older saint on the calendar: the difficulty is selection, not scarcity. He is documented by a vast modern record, most of it his own. He published steadily for forty years, from Mens Creatrix (1917) and Christus Veritas (1924) through the philosophical summit of the Gifford Lectures, Nature, Man and God (1934), to the wartime bestseller Christianity and Social Order (1942) and the beloved devotional Readings in St John's Gospel (1939 and 1940). His sermons, addresses, and letters survive in quantity, and the standard Life is F. A. Iremonger's William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (Oxford, 1948), a large authorized biography written soon after his death and still the foundation of everything since. Stephen Spencer's more recent studies reassess him for a later generation.
The outward frame is secure. Temple was born on 15 October 1881 at Exeter, where his father was then bishop; Frederick Temple would become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896, making the two of them the only father and son ever to hold the see. William was educated at Rugby and at Balliol College, Oxford, took a double first, and presided over the Oxford Union. His ordination was delayed: Archbishop Randall Davidson declined in 1906 to ordain a man who could not affirm the Virgin Birth and the bodily Resurrection, and Temple was ordained deacon only in 1908, once his convictions had settled, and priest in 1909. He was headmaster of Repton from 1910 to 1914, rector of St James's, Piccadilly, from 1914, a leader of the Life and Liberty movement for church reform from 1917, and a canon of Westminster before his consecration as Bishop of Manchester in 1921. He was Archbishop of York from 1929 and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942, enthroned that April. He died of a heart attack at Westgate-on-Sea, on the Kent coast, on 26 October 1944.
His public theology reached its height in Nature, Man and God, an ambitious attempt to argue from the natural world up to a sacramental understanding of all reality; in later years he grew less confident that philosophy alone could carry that weight and leaned more openly on revelation. His social teaching proved the more durable. He convened the Malvern Conference in January 1941 to think through the church's stake in the coming reconstruction, and Christianity and Social Order followed the next year. He was among the foremost churchmen to champion the Beveridge Report and the reforms it set in motion, and he helped found the British Council of Churches in 1942 and chaired the committee that would become the World Council of Churches, formally constituted in 1948 after his death. Whether he was at times too hopeful about what the state could be made to do is a question later readers have pressed; that he set the terms of the debate for a generation is not in dispute.
William Temple is commemorated on November 6 in the calendar of the Church of England and in that of the Episcopal Church, which keeps him as a teacher of the faith. He is remembered as the outstanding Anglican theologian and archbishop of his century, a philosopher who wore his learning lightly and turned it toward the poor, an architect of the welfare consensus that reshaped postwar Britain, and a pioneer of the ecumenical movement that drew the divided churches back into conversation. The William Temple Foundation, founded in Manchester in his memory, continues his work on Christianity and public life, and his name is carried by churches and schools across England. On a calendar thick with the martyrs and bishops of the ancient church, he stands as one of its most recent teachers, proof that the same faith which sent Boniface into the German forests could send a philosopher into a mill town, and find there the same God who took flesh.
Nature, Man and God: Being the Gifford Lectures 1932 to 1934(English, 1934)
Temple's philosophical summit and the source of his most famous sentence, that Christianity is "the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions" (p. 478).
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
Christianity and Social Order(English, 1942)
The short wartime Penguin Special that gave the coming welfare society its plainest Christian argument, contrasting the Power-State with the Welfare-State; his most influential popular book and the best place to begin.
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
Christus Veritas: An Essay(English, 1924)
Temple's Christology, his sustained account of Christ as the truth at the centre of all things.
Public domain: Internet Archive (full view)
Readings in St John's Gospel (First and Second Series)(English, 1939-1940)
The devotional commentary written in wartime by which many readers first knew Temple; warm, quotable, and still reprinted.
William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters(English, 1948)
The large authorized Life, written by a friend soon after Temple's death and still the foundation of all later study; long out of print and best found through a library.
William Temple: A Calling to Prophecy(English, 2001)
The readable believing short life for a reader who wants the man without the academic apparatus; Spencer's later Archbishop William Temple: A Study in Servant Leadership (SCM, 2022) is the more current and more available option.
Public domain: SPCK (publisher)
Primary sources. Temple's own books are the heart of the matter. Nature, Man and God (Macmillan, 1934), the Gifford Lectures, is his philosophical high-water mark and the source of the famous line that Christianity is the most avowedly materialist of the great religions; Christianity and Social Order (Penguin, 1942) is the short, sharp, immensely influential statement of his social vision, and the best single place to begin; Christus Veritas (Macmillan, 1924) is his Christology; and Readings in St John's Gospel (Macmillan, 1939 and 1940) is the devotional work by which many readers first met him. Nature, Man and God, Christianity and Social Order, and Christus Veritas are all borrowable or readable at the Internet Archive.
Principal biography. F. A. Iremonger's William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (Oxford University Press, 1948) is the large authorized Life, written by a friend soon after Temple's death and still the indispensable source; long out of print, it is best found through a library.
Recommended modern biography. Stephen Spencer's William Temple: A Calling to Prophecy (SPCK, 2001) is the readable modern introduction, a believing and sympathetic short life that carries the reader from the bishop's house at Exeter to Canterbury without academic apparatus; Spencer's later Archbishop William Temple: A Study in Servant Leadership (SCM, 2022) is the more current and more easily obtained treatment.
Further reading. John Kent's William Temple: Church, State and Society in Britain 1880 to 1950 (Cambridge, 1992) is the searching critical study for the reader who wants the harder questions pressed. Adrian Hastings's A History of English Christianity 1920 to 1990 sets Temple in the church he led. Simon Lee's essay "A Balliol Quartet and the Welfare State" (in Theology, 2022) traces the coining of "Welfare-State" and Temple's part in it.
Online resources. The Gifford Lectures site carries a biography and the text history of Nature, Man and God; the Internet Archive holds several of his works in full; the William Temple Foundation maintains resources on his social thought.
One of the most quoted sentences in modern Anglicanism is credited to him: that the Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members. It circulates in many forms, and the Oxford editors record it as Temple's personal dictum. It cannot, however, be located in his published writings, and its earliest documented appearance is a letter printed in the journal Theology in 1956, twelve years after his death. The saying sits so naturally with everything he taught that it may well preserve something he said; but it is a saying remembered rather than a text set down, and honesty asks that it be received as such: the Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members. His own sourced words carry the same conviction without the doubt, and there are a great many of them.
Almighty God, you gave your servant William Temple special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52