A lecture from Portsmouth Cathedral Institute event ‘Six Works that Changed the World: William Temple, Christianity and Social Order’ on Monday 6 June 2022, given by Professor Andrew Bradstock.

Christianity and Social Order – William Temple

 My aim is to present for about 20 minutes.  I will give you a little bit of biography about the author of this important book, William Temple and in particular the changing circumstances that led him to write the volume.  Then I will outline the structure of the book before focusing on one main idea, something very clumsily called ‘middle axioms’.  After this there we shall discuss the book and its ideas as a group.  First in pairs with the person next to you and then as a group as a whole.  In the plenary discussion we shall try and avoid the ‘back and forth’ of you commenting and me replying and have a round table discussion – although that is hard so we shall have to see how it goes.  

Biography

Who was William Temple?  Temple was born on 15th October 1881 to aristocratic parents.  He had an extremely privileged upbringing.  His father was Bishop of Exeter and then Archbishop of Canterbury.  So he grew up in Episcopal Palaces. 

He was educated at Rugby School, where his godfather was headmaster, and then Balliol College, Oxford where he got a double first in classics.  His first job was as a fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford where he taught philosophy for 6 years.  Temple had always wanted and expected to be ordained and in 1908 he was ordained deacon despite having been initially turned down because of his uncertain theological views on the Virgin Birth and Bodily Resurrection.  In 1910 he moved to be Headmaster of Repton School but this, despite being a traditional high-flyers career path, did not suit him at all, and so in 1914 he became Rector of St James’, Piccadilly before then becoming Canon of Westminster Abbey.  Neither job was especially demanding and Temple used his time to tour and meet contemporary theologians, to preach and to write, especially works of theological philosophy.  

During this period Temple became an influential figure in British public life, a respected author and a popular preacher who could attract large congregations. His oratorial skills were ensuring he became well-known and it was no surprise that in 1921 he was appointed Bishop of Manchester.  He was a success in the role and, in 1929, he succeeded Cosmo Lang as Archbishop of York.  He was in this post until he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942.  As Archbishop of York he developed a national and international profile as a preacher, commentator on public affairs, leader of the blossoming ecumenical movement, and prolific author writing important books of philosophy and biblical studies as well as the work we are considering tonight, Christianity and Social Order.  In 1942 he became Archbishop of Canterbury, only to die in 1944 of a heart attack, at the early age of 63.  He married but had no children.  It is said that when they heard of his death housewives wept on the trams and buses.

The last quotation captures something of the character of Temple that makes him so important.  He undoubtably came from a privileged background but he also clearly had something of the common touch.  He has been described as the ‘People’s Archbishop’.  He was first president of the newly formed Worker’s Educational Association, he was concerned with the plight of industrial workers and then the vast numbers of people who suffered during the Great Depression.  Also, very controversially, he joined the Labour Party, only to leave when he was made Bishop of Manchester because he thought as the diocese’s ‘Father in God’ he needed to be pastorally available to all. 

Christianity and Social Order

Christianity and Social Order was written in 1941 and published in 1942 as a short booklet to address the question of the social and political post-war settlement.  It was a best-seller, reportedly selling over 150,000 copies.   It is widely regarded in church circles as providing the moral underpinnings of the welfare state.  It addressed the question of what should society look like after the war, assuming an allied victory.  And it answered that question by saying it should look nothing like the inter-war period of the Great Depression with its high unemployment, slum housing, child-labour and appalling health and overall cruel, grinding poverty.

The book has seven chapters and then a very important appendix.  The first three chapters discuss what is in effect a new question.  They ask whether the Church should be allowed to comment on political and economic affairs.  To illustrate the issue Temple describes how when a group of Bishops tried to effect a reconciliation between the Miners and the Mine Owners during the 1926 strike, Stanley Baldwin, Conservative Prime Minister, asked how the Bishops would like it if he ‘referred to the Iron and Steel Federation the revision of the Athanasian Creed’ (p29).  This was, Temple, added, ‘acclaimed as a legitimate score’.  The point being made by the politician, and he was not the last, was that Bishops and more generally church people should stay out of politics. 

As I say this is a new question and it is important to get a sense of where it came from.  For example Gladstone, the Victorian Liberal politician, would have been surprised by the idea that politics was not the business of good Christian men.  For him politics was the debate about the best course of action held between Christian gentlemen (and perhaps a few of the Jewish faith) thinking about the nature of a Christian society.  What politics was not was what it is now, namely a secular business.  Temple was aware that by the inter-war period this situation was changing.  He had been present at the 1928 Jerusalem International Missionary Conference.  There, an American Quaker, Rufus Jones, had stunned the delegates with his perceptive analysis of the Modern mind, and in particular the notion that contemporary people were secular.  This meant they could investigate issues and questions without reference to the Christian faith.  Theology was becoming one more subject area, like sociology or economics or, later, politics; it was no longer the Queen of the Sciences.  The Modern Secular mindset, committed to scientific study and reasoned argument, could do without Christian doctrine or Christian ethics in a way the Victorians would have found astonishing.  As I say Temple, who was put in charge of writing the message of the Jerusalem conference, was greatly influenced by this new perspective, and greatly worried by it.  Temple realised that in the new intellectual environment he had to make the case that theology is relevant to politics and, crucially in the case he is making, he had to explain how a theologian or a Church leader can effectively contribute to a political debate that understood itself as independent of the Church.

So why should the churches comment on social, economic and political matters?  Temple made his case outlining 4 basic reasons (p32f).

1. Sympathy for those who are poor

2. The context in which people live shapes their lives, the political context (Nazism) or economic context (capitalism) affects people’s values, and the churches have a concern with people’s lives and their values

3. Christianity is committed to justice – which translates into political equality

4. No activity is outside the love of God, all are part of God’s Natural Order.

Temple then had to explain how the Christian could influence political, economic and social affairs.  Temple believed that the key to Christian influence in a secular world was the laity; ‘Nine-tenths of the work of the Church in the world is done by Christian people fulfilling responsibilities and performing tasks which in themselves are not part of the official system of the Church at all’ (p39).  What these lay people needed, and theologians could offer, was guidance, albeit it was guidance of a limited nature.  Temple wrote that first ‘its (The Church’s) members must fulfil their moral responsibilities and functions in a Christian spirit’.  By responsibilities and functions Temple meant people’s workplace duties. 

Second ‘its members must exercise their purely civil rights (such as voting) in a Christian spirit’ (p43).  The role of the churches was to provide the guidance to allow lay people to make the Christian decision; ‘it (the Church) must itself supply them (the laity) with a systematic statement of principles to aid them in doing these two things, and this will carry with it a denunciation of customs or institutions in contemporary life and practice which offend against those principles’ (p43).

The guidance could be of three different types.  In chapter four Temple discusses ‘primary’ Christian social principles, by which he meant specifically doctrinal ideas about the nature of God and theological anthropology.  In chapter five he analyses ‘derivative’ Christian social principles, by which he means ideas such as, freedom, social fellowship, and service.  These two sets of principles, should, Temple believed, be agreed by all right thinking Christians. 

The final set of principles, for which the book is most famous and which are often called ‘middle axioms’, are set out in the appendix and are, Temple posited, more controversial in that it is ‘improbable that every Christian should endorse what I now go on to say’ (p99).  This is somewhat surprising given that on the whole the axioms seem far from controversial: for example that all children should live in ‘decent housing’; that children should be educated to ‘the age of maturity’; that people should have what we would now call a living wage; that there is some form of worker representation; that people enjoy sufficient leisure time; and finally that ‘every citizen should have assured liberty in the forms of freedom of worship, of speech, of assembly, and of association for special purposes’.  The point however is that all these three sets of principles, controversial or not, are only guidance. 

What they are not is policy advice.  Policy advice is left to the experts, even if the line between guidance and policy advice is not always clear-cut (p43).  Temple writes that, ‘It is of crucial importance that the Church acting corporately should not commit itself to any particular policy. A policy always depends upon technical decisions concerning the actual relations of cause and effect in the political and economic world; about these a Christian as such has no more reliable judgement than atheist’ (p40).  The churches offer guiding principles but they are not, qua theologians, policy experts who can make executive decisions.  The point comes across clearly in an analogy Temple offers the reader. 

The Church must announce Christian principles and point out where the existing order at any time is in conflict with them.  It must then pass on to Christian citizens, acting in their civic capacity, the task of re-shaping the existing order in closer conformity to the principles.  For at this point technical knowledge may be required and judgements of practical expediency are always required.  If a bridge is to be built, the Church may remind the engineer that it is his obligation to provide a really safe bridge; but it is not entitled to tell him whether, in fact, his design meets this requirement; a particular theologian may also be a competent engineer, and, if he is, his judgement on this point is entitled to attention; but this is altogether because he is a competent engineer and his theological equipment has nothing whatever to do with it.  In just the same way the Church may tell the politician what ends the social order should promote; but it must leave it to the politician the devising of the precise means to those ends. (p58)

The problem with the analogy, and the methodology it thereby proposes, is first that in this scenario the theologian ends up giving only the most bland and vacuous of advice; namely keep the bridge safe.  It can easily be asked what civil engineer does not know this.  It might be said that political advice is much more complex, and so when the Church speaks on these matters it will be more substantial, but again, as the list of middle axioms illustrates, the Church, even at its most controversial, can only offer principles which are of the most general, and vacuous, kind.  All of the most important and mainstream politicians of Temple’s day would have easily have consented to his list.  The questions politicians faced were not of principle, or of ends, they were, and are, very much of the means to achieve those ends.  By absenting the Church from the technical discussions, Temple was absenting the Church from the very thing that politicians were discussing.   Second Temple’s principle, ‘provide a really safe bridge’, begs the question which civil engineer, and for what reason, would not build a safe bridge.  Answers to this question might include civil engineers who are incompetent, or corrupt, those driven by aesthetic considerations and willing to take risks with safety for a pleasing design, and those without sufficient funds for a safe project.  At this point what seems to be required is an effective and sufficiently powerful regulatory body, made up of experts.  But, according to Temple’s own schema, this cannot include theologians, unless they are also engineers.  In other words, methodologically, theologians are excluded from the substance of the public debate to which they might contribute, namely about safety, unless they train as civil engineers.  And what is true of civil engineering is equally true of public policy.  Once it is decided that theologians have no ability to make contributions to the technical detail of a debate, because this is a separate realm from their own expertise, then what they say will inevitably be bland and general, and of no real interest to anyone with the relevant specialist knowledge.  Temple’s methodology ensures that theology has no analytical function in this realm deemed non-theological. 

Further, Temple has to work to devise a way of relating the theological and non-theological, his predominant question becomes how can the churches speak where it has no expertise, rather than what should be said.  In other words he is forced to discuss methodological questions, again issues which are of little interest to anyone other than theological peers.

I am coming to a close now.  One further question is of course, if not Temple’s way of relating theology and politics, then what.  We can discuss that in the session that follows.  Temple’s ideas have and still do dominate a lot of the ways in which the churches engage with politics.  Politicians still don’t like it when the Church is critical of them.  Ultimately however it is my judgement that Temple’s method of middle axioms gives too much power to the expert, the technician, and that theologians need to be involved in the heart of political debates, including debating ‘means’.  He is right that Christians and the churches should be involved in politics.  The problem is that politics is in effect party politics and from this, by his understanding, the Christian is excluded.    

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