Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message
William Temple on Incarnation and Justice
November 6, 2013
Today is the Feast Day of William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury
from 1942 to 1944. The son of another Archbishop of
Canterbury, Temple wrote passionately on the Incarnation of our Lord and what
this means for our common life and ethics.
He believed that
Christianity was primarily about this life, this common life we share, not
merely about some afterlife or our personal, private morality and actions. He believed that Christianity had become
largely irrelevant to policy discussions and the public sphere because it had
wrongly privatized and ‘spiritualized’ faith, compromising its beliefs about the
incarnation:
“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.” (from
Temple’s Christianity and Social Order)
In
this, Temple criticized both the political Left (for not stressing the dignity
of the individual enough) and the Right (for not realizing the need for social
and community action to enhance the sphere of opportunity for individuals). The collect for this day is as
follows:
O God of light
and love, who illumined your Church through the witness of your 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 lives and reigns with you and
the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
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