Thoughts on November 6, the Feast of William Temple

by the Rev. Scott Walters

Today was overfull, so I’ve had a hard time being still enough for long enough to hammer out a blog post. But here I am, attempting to do so before heading off to bed, the day after a presidential election season like no other. This day also happens to be the Feast of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944.

Temple isn’t someone I’d expect many people to be familiar with, but he was an important theologian in his time. Incarnation was central to his theology, and, for him, it followed that Christian faith could never be an entirely interior and spiritual matter. In Jesus, God was made incarnate in the world of societies and economies and political systems, so one’s faith should affect all aspects of a Christian’s life in the world.

In 1943, Temple addressed the House of Lords, imploring them that England had a moral obligation to respond to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. He also wrote this: “The worst things that happen do not happen because a few people are monstrously wicked, but because most people are like us.” In other words, William Temple believed that we humans are capable of unspeakable evil that must be confronted bravely at times. But he also insisted that the story of humanity is not of the monstrosity of a few people entirely unlike the rest of us but that we should be able to recognize the sources of what’s wrong with the world in our own souls as well.

This is instructive to me. We live in an era of “monstrous othering,” if I may make up a phrase. For instance, it disturbs me in deep and personal ways that we heard immigrants described as monstrous others so often during the campaign. It is also true that political rivals and even those who voted for candidates we disagree with are increasingly made monsters in our minds. I think William Temple would have Christians hold two truths at once. We are called unequivocally in scripture to defend the full and God-given humanity of the alien, of the poor, and of the most vulnerable ones in our midst. And we must do so fully mindful that what’s wrong in my opponent or enemy is a version of something that’s wrong in me.

In Christian liturgy, confession is a familiar stop on the way to communion. Literally. We Episcopalians confess our sinfulness just about every Sunday before we receive the sacrament. Not to stir up shame about my unique and monstrous badness but to acknowledge that genuine communion with other people cannot happen if we pretend all our problems are entirely the fault of only some of us.

In such a deeply divided America, this seems like a practice and a basic disposition that followers of Jesus on the political right, left, and center have to offer. To that end, I’ll leave you with what William Temple wrote in Christianity and Social Order. Whoever you voted for yesterday, I hope it strikes a chord and proves helpful to your incarnate life in God’s world with all of God’s broken and beloved children — that is, all of us — tomorrow.

The primary principle of Christian ethics and Christian politics must be respect for every person simply as a person. If each man and woman is a child of God, whom God loves and for whom Christ died, then there is in each a worth absolutely independent of all usefulness to society. The person is primary, not the society; the state existed for the citizen, not the citizen for the state. The first aim of social progress must be to give the fullest possible scope for the exercise of all powers and qualities which are distinctly personal; and of those the most fundamental is deliberate choice. Consequently society must be arranged as to give to every citizen the maximum opportunity for making deliberate choices and the best possible training for the use of that opportunity. Freedom must be freedom for something, as well as freedom from something.