Temple was the son of Frederick Temple, who also served as archbishop of Canterbury (1896–1902). The younger Temple lectured in philosophy at Queen's College, Oxford (1904–10), and was ordained to the priesthood in 1909. While headmaster of Repton School (1910–14) and rector of St. James's, Piccadilly, London (1914–17), he became the leader of the Life and Liberty movement, an unofficial body designed to stimulate change in the governance of the Church of England. He was successively a canon of Westminster (1919–21), bishop of Manchester (1921–29), archbishop of York (1929–42), and archbishop of Canterbury (1942–44).

Temple was a man of considerable energy and intellectual ability and wrote constantly, completing his largest philosophical work, Mens Creatrix (1917; “The Creative Mind”), the night before his marriage. Among other works are a volume of Gifford Lectures, Nature, Man, and God (1934), Christianity and Social Order (1942), and The Church Looks Forward (1944). Temple's sympathetic attitude toward the Labour movement led him to join the Labour Party (1918–25); he was also president (1908–24) of the Workers' Educational Association. He was chairman of an international and interdenominational Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship held in 1924, an Anglican delegate to the ecumenical Faith and Order Conference at Lausanne in 1927, and chairman of the Faith and Order Conference held in Edinburgh in 1937. The British Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches owe their formation largely to the initiatives provided by Temple, and his influence both inside and outside Parliament brought the various churches of the country to support the Education Act of 1944. Temple's theological position has been described as a Hegelian Idealism, affirming links between church and state and thus making it appropriate for Christian pronouncements to be made on social problems and economic policies.