Editorial

This special issue of Theology celebrates the eightieth anniversary of the publication of William Temple’s wartime Penguin paperback Christianity and Social Order. It was published in the year that he became Archbishop of Canterbury, having been Archbishop of York for the previous 13 years, and just two years before his death in 1944, aged just 63. This extraordinary little book is written in pellucid and accessible prose and quickly sold 139,000 copies despite its wartime brown-paper cover. Once post-war rationing had ended, Penguin reprinted it in 1956 as a classic Pelican Book with its ubiquitous blue and white cover, together with the following explanation on its front inside cover:

Dr William Temple, whose work earned him the title ‘the People’s Archbishop’, strove throughout his life to rebuild the shattered social teaching of the Church, for he believed that all secular policy should be founded upon theological truth. To this end he devoted much of his preaching and writing. In 1942 he wrote Christianity and Social Order for the Penguin Specials. It is not a plea for more political influence for the Church, but a bid to make social questions subject to Christian morality and especially to the doctrine of the dignity and importance of the individual. By republishing this book in the Pelican series it is hoped that interest in the work of the great archbishop will be revived.

When Christianity and Social Order was republished again in 1976 by Shepheard-Walwyn, Ronald Preston wrote the Introduction. Comparing this introduction with the perceptive 1956 explanation, it might be that Preston wrote both. Whether this is so or not, Preston clearly did not have a hand in designing the 1956 outside front cover, where the title of the book is wrongly given as Christianity and the Social Order. As Preston would have known only too well, the insertion of this definite article thoroughly distorts the book’s central message – Temple emphatically was not claiming that Christianity can dictate a single social order. This seems to have been a slip, not a conspiracy, since elsewhere in this – and, indeed, in the 1942 and 1976 editions – the title occurs simply as Christianity and Social Order.

Two key distinctions are crucial to this book: a fairly traditional distinction between primary and secondary principles; and a distinction of Temple’s own – yet with some affinities to Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society – between what he could say as archbishop and his own personal convictions. On the first he, for once, followed Aquinas, albeit updated from his feudal context, seeing secondary principles as more fallible than the primary Christian principles (as he saw them) of freedom, fellowship and service – themselves ‘derived from the still more fundamental Christian postulates that Man is a child of God and is destined for a life of eternal fellowship with Him’. ¹ With Aquinas, he saw these primary principles as in accord, despite human sinfulness, with some form of Natural Law, which ‘holds together two aspects of truth which it is not easy to hold in combination – the ideal and the practical’. ²

On the second distinction, he argued, at a 1943 evening meeting at Lambeth Palace with Reinhold Niebuhr, against intercommunion with Catholics (which he may have accepted privately) because (like the ordination of women, which he definitely did accept privately) he believed that it endangered the dominical imperative for church unity. ³ Here he was surely acting as an archbishop arguing with the most influential public theologian of the time. From Temple’s perspective, their roles were different: Niebuhr could act simply as a prophet, whereas he needed also to act as an archbishop.

When writing Christianity and Social Order, Temple was initially tempted to leave out his own political, but fallible, commitments – knowing, doubtless, that they would be viewed as an archbishop meddling in politics – so he consulted both the illustrious John Maynard Keynes – depicted by John Kent as ‘an economist with a New Liberal background who had no interest in Christianity at all’ ⁴ – and his close friend and fellow Christian R. H. (Richard) Tawney. Surprisingly, Keynes wrote back: ‘I can think of no one important in the [English] development of politico-economic ideas, apart from Bentham, who was not a clergyman and in most cases a high dignitary of the Church.’ Less surprisingly, Tawney replied that the inclusion of Temple’s political commitments ‘adds a note of realism’. ⁵ So Temple did include his political stances (as Dr Stephen Spencer’s opening article shows in more detail), albeit as an ‘Appendix’, adding a disclaimer that they were indeed ‘suggestions for criticism rather than adoption’ – suggestions ambitiously covering: housing, education, unemployment, industrial labour, paid holidays for workers, and liberty of worship, speech and assembly; prescriptions to establish regional devolution and ‘a real Board of Education’ and a ‘National Industrial Council’; and praise for the ‘early Christian Socialists’. ⁶

After this astonishing act of speaking truth to power (as my article claims), it is hardly surprising that Christianity and Social Order is still read – receiving an abundance of both praise and criticism. Within public theology it remains a key text (as several of the articles here demonstrate), but its weaknesses are often identified as elitism (especially given Temple’s family connections), idealism and amateurism (unlike Ronald Preston, he was not a trained economist or political theorist). In addition, all those who attempt to hold together competing principles are likely to be criticized by those who simply trump one principle with another. The mischievous Anglo-Catholic editor of Theology, Alec Vidler, sometimes at odds with Temple when younger, dubbed him in 1976 ‘a theologian for Christmas rather than for Passiontide’. ⁷ The theologian John Kent, a Methodist who was more supportive of Temple, still concluded: ‘There is a wide gap … between Temple’s belief in the value of a state church, and the development in [modern] Britain of religious pluralism.’ ⁸ And, in a perceptive comparison of Temple with J. H. Oldham and Ronald Preston, William Danaher argues that it is Oldham’s concept of ‘middle axioms’ (which Professor Elaine Graham explores in her article), based on shared ecclesiological values and much used within ecumenical discussions until the 1960s, that offers the most ‘pragmatic strategy for mediating between Christian ideals and particular social policies’. ⁹

But Oldham rejected any form of Natural Law, and among his successors today there are proponents of Radical Orthodoxy, convinced that ‘true’ Christians can and must exemplify and preach values to a godless society. In contrast, Temple’s (late flourishing) acceptance of a modified form of Natural Law is more akin to liberal Catholic theologians such as Lisa Sowle Cahill. They (and I) believe that forms of ‘freedom, fellowship and service’ can readily be found outside Christian communities and not always within them. A positive tension between Natural Law, Biblical Revelation and Enlightenment Reasoning eventually came naturally to the quintessentially Anglican Temple. The results for Anglicans are not tidy, but, for me at least, Christianity and Social Order still provides a remarkable road map, despite the many changes that have taken place since 1942. Working in public medical ethics for more than three decades, it has allowed me (following my mentors Gordon Dunstan and John Habgood) to focus on the religious principles of compassion, care, trust and humility, deployed alongside, without denying, the principles of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice already accepted by many of my non-religious colleagues in medical ethics.

All of the articles that are included in this special issue of Theology were first given as papers at a stimulating conference in the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral this March, jointly organized by the William Temple Foundation – with Dr Stephen Spencer and Professor Simon Lee on its Board of Trustees and Professor Chris Baker its Director of Research – and the Centre for Anglican History and Theology, based at the University of Kent – which is co-directed by Professors Kenneth Fincham (History) and Jeremy Carrette (Religious Studies). The website of the Kent Centre can be found at <https://research.kent.ac.uk/anglican-history-theology/>.