6 - Learning the meanings: Christ in the hearts of all people

Summary

Christ in the hearts of all people

In his monumental Atonement and Personality (1901), R. C. Moberly insists not only that

“[t]he meaning of Incarnation was not exhausted … when Jesus Christ passed away from this visible scene of mortal life,” but also that it is “not more directly” “to be recognized” “in the contemplation of the Presence of the Son of Man in Heaven … than in the recognition of the Presence working here on earth, of the Spirit of the Incarnation and of the Incarnate” in the hearts of all His people.

Moberly and others of his Anglican contemporaries (e.g., Weston, Forsyth, and Temple) were brought to this conviction by a kind of triangulation, this time among systematic desiderata on the one hand, and the testimonies of Scripture and Christian experience on the other.

1. Systematically, Moberly contends against mere retributivists that “external” transactions will not win Divine–human at-one-ment apart from the “internal” transformation of alienated human beings. He declares that nothing less is necessary than a change in the very meaning and significance of the word “I,” in which we are “translated into the Spirit of the Crucified” in such a way that “[t]he Spirit of the Crucified, the Spirit of Him who died and is alive,” is “the very constituting reality of ourselves.” Like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century British Christologians, Moberly conceives of human non-optimality problems moralistically, beginning with a Kantian paradox about how a righteous God, Whose systematic role is to render to each his/her just deserts, can forgive sinners who don't merit pardon.

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