It is rare to have a prophet as an archbishop

Rowan Williams will be enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury on Thursday. In thinking about this remarkable man, my mind has constantly gone back to one of his predecessors, and only one of them: William Temple, who died in 1944 at the early age of 63 after only two and a half years in office. George Bernard Shaw said of Temple: "An Archbishop of Temple's enlightenment was a realised impossibility. Nothing like him had happened since..."

I won't finish the quotation because, characteristically, Shaw then refers to an obscure early 19th-century Archbishop of Dublin. But nor has anything like Williams, with his intellectual powers, poetic language and natural authority, happened since Temple.

Nowadays only those old enough to have fought in the Second World War remember Temple. Sir Edward Heath has said that the impact of Temple on his generation was immense: "William Temple was foremost among the leaders of the nation, temporal or spiritual, in posing challenging, radical questions about the nature of our society." What is particularly surprising about this commendation by a former Conservative Prime Minister is that Temple was highly critical of the capitalist system.

It was Temple's wartime broadcasts that made him a national figure. I recently listened to recordings of some of his radio talks. They were given in 1940 and 1941 at the low point of the war. Of course I wasn't expecting Churchillian rhetoric, but I knew that soldiers had listened in number whenever Temple was on the air. "Now we understand what Christianity really is" was a phrase that recurred in their letters.

What I heard surprised me. The voice wasn't warm as Rowan Williams's, but thin, precise, sounding like the Oxford don that Temple once was. "Axe" was pronounced to rhyme with "exe" as in the river Exe. The content was rigorous argument – if A, then B and so we see C. A talks producer today would have said: "Please, Archbishop, omit the references to Plato, Shakespeare and Mazzini. Tell some amusing stories, and take out the one about the lady 'who prayed for patience and was rewarded with an ill-tempered cook'; few men at the front line have employed cooks."

Temple offered his listeners fresh insights into Christianity during a time of war. In fighting barbarism it was necessary to return to God, not so much saying "I believe in God" but, rather, "I put my trust in God"; trust, which is always on the way to being love. In prayers for soldiers, yes, one can ask that they come safely home, but first pray that God will keep them steadfast. Death was worse for those who wait than for those who die in a good cause. We must find something to live or die for in peace as well as in war. What was this to be?

What followed was the most striking aspect of Temple's broadcasts, his sustained criticism of pre-war society. Coming as it did from such an establishment figure – himself the son of an Archbishop, a public schoolboy, Oxford scholar, philosophy lecturer, headmaster, Canon of Westminster, Bishop of Manchester, Archbishop of York and then Canterbury – it must have seemed extraordinary.

High unemployment, he said, was a sign that the peacetime economic system had been inadequate. It comprised unbridled self-interest. As a result, controls must be kept in place after the war, the state must plan economic activity, management must be responsible to the state as well as to boards of directors, and the more fortunate sections of society must accept a lower standard of living.

Indeed, to listen to Temple's broadcasts is to understand why Labour won a landslide victory in 1945. He also argued for a federated Europe for security and, as he put it, for spreading wealth. And he eloquently urged his listeners to respect nature and care for the environment. In all these ways, Temple spoke as a prophet, both in the secular sense as one who foretells and in the religious sense as one who speaks for God.

Now to have a prophet as Archbishop is a rare occurrence. Temple's two immediate predecessors preferred consorting with kings and prime ministers and thought it best to keep the Church away from national controversy. His successor was a brilliant administrator. But long before he arrived at Canterbury, and also when he was Archbishop, Temple ceaselessly travelled, from platform to platform, from pulpit to pulpit, all day long, every day.

Temple wasn't particularly choosy where he spoke; he just spoke. And when he was not preaching, he was writing letters, in his own hand, to anyone who wrote to him, and he was turning out an ever-flowing stream of articles, pamphlets, courses of lectures, and books.

We shall have to wait to see what kind of archbishop Rowan Williams will be. However the job is done, the workload is backbreaking. One predecessor described it as "incredible, indefensible and inevitable... an impossible job for one man, but only one man could do it."

One wouldn't wish on anyone Temple's arduous routine. But the reason why Temple comes to mind when I contemplate the new Archbishop and what he might achieve is that, to me at least, Rowan Williams seems more like a prophet than anything else.