O God of light and love, who illumined thy Church through the witness of thy servant William Temple: Inspire us, we pray, by his teaching and example, that we may rejoice with courage, confidence and faith in the Word made flesh, and may be led to establish that city which has justice for its foundation and love for its law; through Jesus Christ, the light of the world, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Tomorrow Anglican Churches commemorate Archbishop William Temple.
George Bernard Shaw called him, “a realized impossibility.”
William Temple, 98th Archbishop of Canterbury, was born in 1881. At the age of two, he had the first attack of the gout that would be with him throughout life and eventually kill him. His eyesight was bad, and a cataract, present from infancy, left him completely blind in the right eye when he was 40. However, he was an avid reader, with a near-photographic memory, and once he had read a book, it was his. He was a passionate lover of the music of Bach. In literature, his special enthusiasms were poetry (Browning and Shelley), drama (the Greeks and Shakespeare), and a few novels, especially The Brothers Karamazov. He believed that theological ideas were often explored most effectively by writers who were not explicitly writing theology.
He was at Oxford from 1900 to 1904, and was president of the Oxford Union (the debating society of the University). Here he developed a remarkable ability to sum up an issue, expressing the pros and cons so clearly and fairly that the original opponents often ended up agreeing with each other. This ability served him in good stead later when he moderated conferences on theological and social issues. However, it was not just a useful talent for settling disputes. It was, or developed into, an important part of his philosophy, a belief in Dialectic, derived from Hegel and from Plato. He thought that beliefs and ideas reach their full maturity through their response to opposing ideas.
In 1906, he applied for ordination, but the Bishop of Oxford would not ordain him because he admitted that his belief in the Virgin Birth and the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus was shaky. However, Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, after a careful examination, decided that Temple’s thought was developing in a direction that would inevitably bring him into an orthodox position, and decided to take a chance on ordaining him (deacon 1909, priest 1910). He may be said to have won his bet, in that by 1913 Temple had indeed committed himself fully to the orthodox position, and could write: “I believe in the Virgin Birth…it wonderfully holds before the imagination the truth of Our Lord’s Deity and so I am glad that it is in the Creed. Similarly I believe in our Lord’s Bodily Resurrection.”
In 1908 he became president of the Workers’ Educational Association (founded by Frederick Denison Maurice), and in 1918 joined the British Labour Party, and worked actively for the implementing of its platform. He also became vigorously involved in movements for Christian co-operation and unity, in missions, in the British Council of Churches, in the World Council of Churches, in the Church of South India (a merger of Anglican, Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches into a single church, with provisions for safeguarding what each group thought essential).
In 1916 he married Frances Anson, and the night before the wedding he stayed up late to finish writing his first major theological treatise, Mens Creatrix (the Creative Mind). Eight years later he published a companion volume, expanding and clarifying the ideas of the first, called Christus Veritas (Christ the Truth). In 1921 he was made Bishop of Manchester, a heavily industrial city. In 1926 Britain experienced what was known as the General Strike, in which most workmen in all trades and industries went on strike, not against their particular employers, but against the social and economic policies of the country as a whole. In Manchester this meant primarily a coal stoppage. Temple worked extensively to mediate between the parties, and helped to bring about a settlement that both sides regarded as basically fair. In his book Christianity and Social Order, published in the same year he became the Archbishop of Canterbury, he attempted to combine faith and socialism. He defended the working-class movement and supported economic and social reforms.
Temple became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942, when a German invasion seemed likely. He worked for the relief of Jewish refugees from Nazism. In March 1943, he addressed the House of Lords, urging action to be taken on the atrocities being carried out by Nazi Germany. He said:
My chief protest is against procrastination of any kind. … The Jews are being slaughtered at the rate of tens of thousands a day on many days. … It is always true that the obligations of decent men are decided for them by contingencies which they did not themselves create and very largely by the action of wicked men. The priest and the Levite in the parable were not in the least responsible for the traveller’s wounds as he lay there by the roadside and no doubt they had many other pressing things to attend to, but they stand as the picture of those who are condemned for neglecting the opportunity of showing mercy. We at this moment have upon us a tremendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God.
Procession on the day of Temple’s enthronement as the Archbishop of Canterbury
Temple publicly supported a negotiated peace, as opposed to the unconditional surrender that the Allied leaders were demanding.
His gout worsened. His last public appearance was at a clergy retreat (a time spent in a secluded place, with silence, prayer, meditation, reading, and listening to sermons), where he was taken by ambulance and spoke standing on his one good foot. He died on 26 October 1944.
Some quotes of Archbishop William Temple:
Our present time is indeed a criticizing and critical time, hovering between the wish, and the inability to believe. Our complaints are like arrows shot up into the air at no target: and with no purpose they only fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves.
The church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.
Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, the nourishment of the mind with His truth, the purifying of the imagination of His beauty, the opening of the heart to His love, the surrender of the will to His purpose.
When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don’t, they don’t.
If your prayer is selfish, the answer will be something that will rebuke your selfishness. You may not recognize it as having come at all, but it is sure to be there.
My worth is what I am worth to God; and that is a marvelous great deal, for Christ died for me. Thus, incidentally, what gives to each of us His highest worth gives the same worth to everyone; in all that matters most are we equal.
The only thing of our very own which we contribute to our salvation is the sin which makes it necessary.
The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies.
