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Robert Campbell Moberly

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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ROBERT CAMPBELL MOBERLY (1845-1903), English theologian, was born on the 26th of July 1845. He was the son of George Moberly, bishop of Salisbury, and faithfully maintained the traditions of his father's teaching. Educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, he was appointed senior student of Christ Church in 1867 and tutor in 1869. In 1876 he went out with Bishop Copleston to Ceylon for six months. After his return he became the first head of St Stephen's House, Oxford (1876-1878), and then, after presiding for two years over the Theological College at Salisbury, where he acted as his father's chaplain, he accepted the college living of Great Budworth in Cheshire in 1880, and the same year married Alice, the daughter of his father's predecessor, Walter Kerr Hamilton. In 1892 Lord Salisbury made him Regius Professor of Pastoral Theology of Oxford; and after a long period of delicate health he died at Christ Church on the 8th of June 1903. His chief writings were: An essay in Lux Mundi on "The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma" (1889); a paper, Belief in a Personal God (1891); Reason and Religion (1896), a protest against the limitation of the reason to the understanding; Ministerial Priesthood (1897); and Atonement and Personality (1901). In this last work, by which he is chiefly known, he aimed at presenting an explanation and a vindication of the doctrine of the Atonement by the help of the conception of personality. Rejecting the retributive view of punishment, he describes the sufferings of Christ as those of the perfect "Penitent," and finds their expiatory value to lie in the Person of the Sufferer, the God-Man.