Temple Work Research Articles

Politics as the Church's Business: William Temple's Christianity and Social Order Revisited

ABSTRACTChristianity and Social Order was a creature of its time and, although influential over several decades, is challenged by today's plurality and globalization. Nevertheless, the ascendancy of Radical and Neo-Orthodoxy repeats imbalances of the Christendom Group which Temple was concerned to counter. Temple's greatest weakness for today is his failure to appreciate the trend towards profound social plurality, and its challenge to his strong idea of nationhood. However, today's global economy suggests that plurality must be held in tension with other aspects of the dominant market model. Temple's work reinforces important critiques of market economics, including scepticism about the alleged impossibility of moral agreement. This in turn suggests that total abandonment of Temple's Middle Axiom approach may be premature. A better-developed theology of correctives would reflect classic Christian vocabulary, cohere with Temple's approach, and offer a route toward the revitalization of the Anglican tradition of public theology.

Archbishop William Temple and Public Theology in a Post-Christian Context

ABSTRACTSixty years after William Temple's death, little in the way of constructive theology has been done with the body of writings he left. Part of this is due to the way in which his legacy has been (mis)appropriated by some of the scholars and church leaders who are seen as his heirs and admirers. An over-emphasis on the ‘middle axioms’ approach exemplified in Christianity and Social Order, and later promoted heavily by Ronald Preston, explains much of this lack. Although the ‘middle axioms’ approach is still applicable, the principles set out in Temple's most famous work need to be re-examined and perhaps expanded in the light of a post-Christian plural society. The purpose of this essay is to examine a broader range of Temple's work than is commonly done. By doing so, I will propose that the virtues of intellectual excellence, graciousness, and the welfare of the wider (non-church) society are guiding principles for ecclesial being, speech and action that are fully present in Temple's writings.

“Martyrs in Flames”: Sir John Temple and the Conception of the Irish in English Martyrologies

In the violence over Protestant marches in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s much of the debate centered on two towns, Portadown and Drumcree. Students of seventeenth-century Irish history will note that those towns were sites of some of the most infamous stories of rebel atrocities in the 1641 uprising. The continuity of such images reinforces the notion that ethnic and religious conflicts are immutable and perhaps inevitable. A certain fatalism surrounds the acrimony of Arab and Jew, Muslim and Christian, English and Irish arising from the conviction that such conflicts have raged, as if unchanging, over centuries. However, when viewed over time, the struggles between such groups are dynamic rather than static and have helped construct how each group sees the other and how it identifies itself. In the dynamism surrounding Anglo-Irish relations a number of important turning points can be identified. One of the most important is of course the seventeenth century, particularly the 1641 uprising. More than thirty years ago W. D. Love noted how for three centuries Irish historiography and Anglo-Irish intercourse had been molded by the events of the mid-seventeenth century and had compelled historians to support or deny the charges made by each side about the events of the 1640s. In trying to understand the searing nature of those events, and how they came to frame political as well as historical debates from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, a number of historians have noted the importance of Sir John Temple and his propagan distic piece, The Irish Rebellion. Temple's work offered not just an interpretation of the 1641 uprising but a portrait of the two peoples, English and Irish, as basically and permanently incompatible—a thesis that has had remarkable staying power. Published in 1646, Temple's work was a departure from the Tudor and early Stuart canon on Ireland. While Temple borrowed much from earlier commentators such as Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies, his analysis differed from them and set out in a new direction by defining the Irish as ethnically distinct. Spenser and Davies suggested that the problem of Ireland arose not from the land, or even its people (although Spenser devoted considerable discussion to the ways Irish customs undermined English success), but from foolhardy or poorly executed English policy. Even though the late Tudor and early Stuart commentators saw the Irish as barbaric, the Irish were thought to be amenable to the benefits of English culture and rule, although their reformation might require draconian measures. Even the divisive issue of religion was not thought insurmountable. Davies and Spenser argued that a religious reformation begun after peace and stability had been secured in Ireland would succeed. In contrast, Temple viewed the 1641 revolt as conclusive evidence that the Irish were irredeemable and posed a deadly threat to England and its people.

Sir William Temple, Political Scientist?

Less than justice has been done to Sir William Temple as a political scientist. It is true that his reputation now stands higher than it did in the nineteenth century when Courtenay, his biographer, observed, “Neither in science nor in politics, were his opinions founded upon an accurate combination of facts and principles,” and added, “Of Political Economy Temple knew nothing” and when Macaulay dismissed the essay on government as “exceedingly childish.” Three modern studies have done much to revise this unflattering estimate, but some aspects of Temple's political thought have remained unconsidered or confused. Professor Herriott in his analysis of Temple's ideas on government has pointed out the novelty of those ideas but has given little attention to the significance of Temple's approach and method. Dr. Marburg's excellent book, though it does not deal primarily with Temple's political ideas, has made a valuable contribution towards their understanding. But her views on Temple's attitude to science and his use of its method are open to question. Professor Woodbridge, in his recent very full study of Temple, praises “the astonishing originality” of the essay On the Original and Nature of Government, and remarks as its great merit that its argument is based “upon historical probability, observation and experience,” but he does not emphasize the inductive aspect of Temple's work nor discuss the relation of his political thought to the scientific movement. Apart from Professor G. N. Clark's explicit but passing references to Temple's significance as one of the first of the inductive political thinkers, the extent to which Temple participated in the prevailing scientific climate of opinion and was influenced by it has been generally overlooked or greatly underestimated.