1976 The limitations of William Temple

Abstract

Dr Alec Vidler (1899–1991) wrote this deliberately provocative article seven years after retiring as editor of Theology. An influential former Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, by this stage he had retired to his home town of Rye in Sussex, where, like his forebears, he served as mayor. In this article he looks back in 1976 at the strengths and weaknesses of Archbishop William Temple, who died in 1944. While acknowledging at the outset that Temple was ‘a giant among men, a great and a good man’, Vidler regards him as too privileged and comfortable in his Christian faith to ‘disturb and shake your mind, baffle and bewilder you, at once repel and draw you, as the greatest theologians do’. For him, ‘Temple was a theologian for Christmas rather than for Passiontide’. Ironically, Temple’s article included in this centenary issue, spurred by the crisis of a looming war, somewhat undermines this judgement. Editor .