Posted on 11/29/2005 3:42:52 PM PST by Claud
Vatican considers dropping 'limbo'
Theologians meet to look again at fate of unbaptised tots
(ANSA) - Vatican City, November 29 - The Catholic Church appears set to definitively drop the concept of limbo, the place where it has traditionally said children's souls go if they die before being baptised .
Limbo has been part of Catholic teaching since the 13th century and is depicted in paintings by artists such as Giotto and in important works of literature such as Dante's Divine Comedy .
But an international commission of Catholic theologians is meeting in the Vatican this week to draw up a new report for Pope Benedict XVI on the question. The report is widely expected to advise dropping it from Catholic teaching .
The pope made known his doubts about limbo in an interview published in 1984, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's doctrinal department .
"Limbo has never been a defined truth of faith," he said. "Personally, speaking as a theologian and not as head of the Congregation, I would drop something that has always been only a theological hypothesis." According to Italian Vatican watchers, the reluctance of theologians to even use the word limbo was clear in the way the Vatican referred in its official statement to the question up for discussion .
The statement referred merely to "the Fate of Children who Die Without Baptism" .
Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, gave the commission the task of looking at the issue again in 2004. He asked experts to come up with a "theological synthesis" able to make the Church's approach "more coherent and illuminated" .
In fact, when John Paul II promulgated the updated version of the Catholic Church's catechism in 1992 there was no mention of the word limbo .
That document gave no clear answer to the question of what happened to children who died before being baptised .
It said: "The Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God...In fact the great mercy of God, who wants all men to be saved, and the tenderness of Jesus towards children... allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who die without baptism." This view is in stark contrast to what Pope Pius X said in an important document in 1905: "Children who die without baptism go into limbo, where they do not enjoy God, but they do not suffer either, because having original sin, and only that, they do not deserve paradise, but neither hell or purgatory." According to teaching from the 13th century on, limbo was also populated by the prophets and patriarchs of Israel who lived in the time before Jesus Christ .
Only little children?
All this confusion as to what is doctrine and what is dogma is because the RC Church relies on the traditions of man and not the Word of God.
The comparison between the Pharisees and the Catholic Magisterium is striking. The Lord accused the Pharisees of "teaching as doctrine the precepts of men" (Mark 7:7), labeling the oral Torah as "the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8). The Pharisees held to the equal authority of Scripture and Tradition. They taught that Moses had handed down the Law received on Mount Sinai in two ways. The first was through his oral teaching. They called this the unwritten Torah or oral Tradition. The second was the written Torah or Scripture. They taught that the written Law and the unwritten Law together made up the complete Torah, the Word of God. Jesus rejected the man-made authority and oral traditions of the first century Jews. What Jesus rejected, the Roman Catholic Church has now restored. It has elevated tradition to the same level of authority as God’s inspired Scriptures. Its pope and bishops have laid claim to universal jurisdiction and sole teaching authority using tradition to justify doctrine that cannot be justified by Scripture.
Not only that but even as recently as the 1950's, the moms would not go outside with their baby until the baptism was performed. Basically you had baby at the hospital, brought baby home and KEPT baby home for a week or maybe two and then you went right to church and had baby baptized.
I think this limbo thing, along with a few other things, should've been scrapped long ago - it's not scriptural really.
Yes and yes. Though not all beliefs we may have reach the level of dogma.
Is the Catechism dogma or discipline?
The Catechism is an attempt to teach our teachings. I wouldn't say every word is dogmatic.
Is the part in the Catechism that rejects the death penalty in the modern world, and opposes war in all but the most limited of circumstances (which the Church said were not satisfied in Iraq) dogma or discipline?
They are both attempts to apply dogmatic principles to the present situation. The dogmatic principle is that we should avoid the taking of life when it is avoidable, while still keeping in mind the common good. The application of the principle is not a proper subject of dogmatic proclamation.
SD
My thoughts precisely. They've added things and taken things back over the past couple of thousand years. Just think how much some people suffered emotionally all those years ago that lost a baby before baptism and actually believed in this ridiculous notion. The name alone should conjure up the idea of a joke. In fact, my nephew, who is now 16, was not baptized and my mother-in-law who is R. Catholic, upon her very first visit to see him after his birth (grandson was in Texas; grandma in Ohio), she went into the bathroom and secretly baptized him in the tub. His mom still doesn't know but I do! Anyway, I don't blame my mother-in-law one bit and it surely didn't hurt. It's just that she did it out of fear for his soul going to Limbo.
"I don't think I can help you, then."
You're right, you can't.
Because no such authoritative distinction really exists.
It's all quite ad hoc.
Everything is mandatory, and the distinction between what's infallible and what isn't has depended, over the course of history, on how hot the argument was, and with whom.
Legalism got the Jews in trouble, and it gets Catholics in trouble when they start focusing on the compendious written traditions, which contradict.
It gets Protestants in trouble because their much smaller corpus of material, the (abridged) Bible (the concept of Purgatory is certainly hinted at in 2 Maccabbees, but Luther expunged that book from the Protestant Bible), contradicts itself all over the place.
The truth is that there IS God, and people have kept on encountering Him and His angels since the dawn of time. God DOES have an opinion about things, a moral opinion, and we know much of it and need to follow it lest we imperil our physical lives as well as our souls. And we need to cling to that.
The more that we cling to the work of our own hands, the more that we start to fight with each other, divide into camps, become bellicose, and thereby become evil.
We don't know enough to be able to formulate answers with precision. We DO know that piety (including sacraments), good acts (mitzvahs), and humility are efficacious for salvation.
Thank you for that explanation. That was interesting and informative and I didn't really know how it worked.
"No. It's just tiresome."
To you, perhaps.
It's an important question, to me.
I need it answered. I won't pester you to answer it, because it is tiresome to you.
Perhaps someone else will.
To ascribe "deciding" to God in the human sense is a category error. The notion of decision-making presumes deliberation. Deliberation entails "before" and "after." Since there is no "before" and "after" in God, no movement, there can be no deliberation or decision-making. God is pure act. His will is simple and eternal.
The summa explains this, if you're truly interested, and not just throwing up some fog.
What motivating factors act upon him to cause him (or give him reason) to do this or that?
Again, you have a misconception of God's nature. God is the uncaused cause. There is no cause prior to God.
Does God exist?The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.
Yes. Jesus recognized the teaching authority of both.
Matthew 23:1-3Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: "The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you."
Matthew 18:17
if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
God never gave the Pharisees or the Church the authority to add or take away from Scripture:
The Pharisees confronted Jesus by asking: "Why do Your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with impure hands?" (Mark 7:5). This was in accord with the oral tradition not according to the Law as handed down by God. The Lord accused the Pharisees of "teaching as doctrine the precepts of men" (Mark 7:7). The Scriptures said absolutely nothing about washing one’s hands before eating. Nonetheless, the Pharisees enforced ceremonial handwashing as if God Himself had ordained it. In this way, they had elevated the teachings of men to the same level of authority as God’s inspired Scriptures. Paul added: "Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however is found in Christ." He goes on to say: "Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!. These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence."
Jesus also emphasizes: "Nothing outside a man can make him 'unclean' by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him 'unclean.' After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean'? For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods "clean.") He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' " Jesus is continuing His assault on the Pharasaic Laws.
Jesus also warns: "I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." The Law here in not the human law of the Pharisees or the Tradition of the RC Church - it is the Holy Scripture.
According to Christian beliefs - a person must believe that Jesus Christ is their savior, or they cannot enter Heaven.
The question arises - what about all the people who lived before Jesus was born? If they lived a good life - did they go to Heaven? If believing in Jesus is a requirement for entering Heaven - how can they enter if they didn't believe in Jesus? And how COULD they believe in Jesus before he was even born?
The Church came up with the concept of Limbo to account for these people. Why should they be doomed to Hell just because they were born before Jesus? And, how could they enter Heaven if they didn't believe in Jesus.
The concept of Limbo was created to solve this Catch-22.
Of course, if the Seventh Day Adventist are right - all this is beside the point.
They believe that NOBODY is in Heaven or Hell yet - nor will they be until the end of the world. They believe that one somebody dies - they are just "sleeping" and will awake at the end of the world to be judged.
If they are right - there are no such things as ghosts - because all dead people are "asleep" and therefore can't be hovering around Ouija boards or seances.
As a child, I could never understand when the Bible talks about Judgement Day - just who would be judged, since all dead people were already in Heaven or Hell. Just when are the dead judged? As soon as they die? At the end of the world?
Personally - I am in no hurry to find out.
Aren't you hear, basically, looking for the Unified Field Theory of Dogma/Infallibility/Discipline? That isn't legalistic?
The more that we cling to the work of our own hands, the more that we start to fight with each other, divide into camps, become bellicose, and thereby become evil.
It's clear you don't believe the Holy Spirit guides the Church. So why stay within? It seems to me the Orthodox Churches might appeal to you more, with more left to "mystery" and fewer attempts to explain them.
SD
"All this confusion as to what is doctrine and what is dogma is because the RC Church relies on the traditions of man and not the Word of God."
The Word of God, is what?
Surely not the traditions of man comprised by the Bible.
The Bible itself never refers to itself at all as such.
And when the Bible uses the reference to the "Word", it is referring to the Word made flesh. Jesus is the Word of God.
The written Bible is not.
It contains the words of men inspired by God, to be sure, but limited by their own understanding.
The Word is God, per John.
The Bible is not the Word, because the Bible is not God.
Indeed, to call the Bible, which is the written tradition of Jewish and Christian men "the Word", and to really believe that IT, and not the continuing inspiration of the Holy Spirit upon man and the Church (which is what Jesus promised men would have, in the Gospels) seems vaguely idolatrous, holding up a graven image (the Bible) and calling it God (the Word).
The closest way we can, any of us, know the Word of God, is by turning directly to the Holy Spirit - God - and asking Him to speak to us in our consciences.
He never fails to.
Trouble is, there are other spirits out there too, and they can talk to us too, and lead us astray, so JUST because we are keenly aware of a supernatural power guiding us and speaking to us does NOT perforce tell us we're talking with God.
So, we need something to vouchsafe for us that the spirit that talks back to us when we call on the Holy Spirit is, in fact, the Holy Spirit, and not the Devil or some unclean thing. We can never be sure to do that on our own.
And THAT is why Jesus left a Church, a community of worshippers, with traditions and signs. The Apostles knew when they were communicating with God, when the Holy Spirit was upon them. They passed it along, not just in the written works that became the Bible, and other written works that didn't, but mainly through the expedient of the direct laying on of hands. The apostles were with God. That they chose to lay hands on another man and make him a shepherd of souls too, a bishop, was a strong control over who could authoritatively speak. Not a CERTAIN control, because bishops, too, fall into sin.
But have a vast community all pulling in the same direction, and who is teaching strange doctrines becomes clearer.
The traditions of the Church, written as the Bible, written as other doctrines, and unwritten, constitute a corpus that is like an insurance policy. You can't really be certain that every doctrine and dogma comes from God. That's an overreach. But you CAN be certain that God is THERE, and so when you go there, and go through the rites and the sacraments and call on the Holy Spirit and talk to him, that who you are talking to is really God and His angels, and not the Devil masquerading as such.
We each, individually, have to walk down the path of life with its temptations. The Holy Spirit is there to help us. But evil spirits are there to lead us astray. We need some assayer to be able to know for certain the one from the other. And the Church, with its vast repository of experience and its lists of people who have encountered angels and performed miraculous acts under the power of God is that bulwark, that fortress, so that we know that the spirit who talks to us in our conscience is really God, and not an evil impostor.
HOW do we know? Because if our conscience starts to tell us to do things that are offensive to the moral traditions of the Church, where we know from proofs over the ages of miracle after miracle all the way back to Jesus and prophets before him, we know that it's not God talking to us, but the Devil. Aware of that, we have a place to go that can help us keep our feet on the right path, which we can't see, while we call on the Holy Spirit to drive out the Devil.
The RC Church, at its best, relies on the real presence of God.
Of course, the temptation to legalism is ever present...
God has washed us in the Blood of Jesus Christ. It is appropriated by faith in the sufficiency of Christ's Atonement. Being washed in Christ's Blood is not a thing that can be accomplished in any ordinance (Catholics would say "sacrament") that can be performed by the hands of sinful (meaning ANY) man. For by GRACE are we saved by FAITH, and that not of ourselves, it is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. (see Ephesians 2:8-10)
You reject the New Testament then?
SD
"The Law here in not the human law of the Pharisees or the Tradition of the RC Church - it is the Holy Scripture."
More specifically, it is the Septuagint Old Testament, and not the New Testament at all, given that it had not been written yet when Jesus said that. Jesus' biblical quotes almost invariably use the Septuagint form (where it varies from the Hebrew text of the Massoretes).
That the NEW Testament is "Scripture", and contained under what Jesus said there, is a tradition of the Catholic Church, dating from the 3rd or 4th Century. What Jesus is talking about here was the Jewish Scripture, not the New Testament.
So you deny that the New Testament is God-breathed?
Nothing. What existed along with God before He created everything? Nothing.
His Will alone. "Uncaused Cause" is a very succinct phrase.
SD
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.