Vatican Considers Dropping "Limbo"

ANSA.it ^ | 11-29-2005 | unknown

[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 .

[Paved Paradise]

Like I said, been there done that. Thank God (and I mean I do truly thank HIM) that I don't have to have this all perfected - if the answers were so clear-cut, there'd be no debate on this. I believe there are true believers in the RC and Protestant denoms. But the arguments of both are weighty and sound.

[Vicomte13]

"As the designated custodians of the inspired word of God, they knew which books were canonical, and which were not, and they knew this without the assistance of the yet to appear Catholic Church."

And the Jews did not agree among themselves, and when the High Priest sent down translators to Egypt to translate the Scriptures into Greek, his emissaries translated the Septuagint, which includes those books. The Jews didn't have a particular, specific canon. They used Septuagint, mostly. Some used Hebrew texts. There were variations. The Essenes' Hebrew texts reflect the language of the Septuagint, when it differs, much more often than the Massoretic Text (which wasn't compiled until several centuries after the Christian era).

You're not hanging your authority about what Scripture IS on Scripture at all. You're hanging it on a perception of Jewish authority. But the Jews had no canon, and the Septuagint translation was the only one made for general use when there was still a high priest sitting in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Massoretic Text was not solidified, because it didn't NEED to be (given, in effect, the "Vatican" of Judaism reposing in the High Priest and the Sanhedrin) until the Temple was destroyed and central authority was shattered.

You cite Revelation. Yes, that particular prophesy is closed. But "this book" refers to that particular writing, Revelation. It was not written as part of the Bible - there was no Bible when it was written. "This book" doesn't mean the Bible. It means the Book of Revelation.

Obviously the statement of "nothing to be added" in Deuteronomy is not to be taken to mean for the whole canon. because that would exclude Joshua and everything else that came after.

[Vicomte13]

"Keep Holy the Sabbath."

Yes, it does.
And we don't.
The holy sabbath is on Saturday.
We celebrate the Lord's Day, because the sabbath day was for the Jews, and we're not Jews.

[SoothingDave]

Inform me then.

Post 475:

We think the Church is the instrument God used to make the canonical determination.

You bleated about how we think the Church determined the canon "without the authority of God." To the contrary this is exactly what we think, that God set up His Church and gave it the authority (on loan from Him) to settle things like the canon. Whatever is bound on earth is bound in heaven, etc.

The canon is a settled issue. We do not believe that there will be more added to or taken away from what we have already determined (through God's revelation through the church) to be canon.

So you are wrong on both counts. The only defense you have is that when Jesus said "Scripture," though His audience at the time, and the plain meaning of the word at the time meant the Septuagint," He really secretly meant the entire canon a later determined by the Church.

This is a stretch.

SD

[gscc]

But the Jews had no canon, and the Septuagint translation was the only one made for general use when there was still a high priest sitting in the Temple in Jerusalem.

When Jesus say: " till heaven and earth pass, one jot, or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled."  Was he referring to Hebrew or Greek text?

jot or tittle: "Jot" refers to yôd, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet; "tittle" is a slight serif on a Hebrew letter that distinguishes it from another, similarly formed letter.

[trisham]

bookmark

[Recovering_Democrat]

Theologians meet to look again at fate of unbaptised tots...

This one really seems to be a no-brainer to this evangelical Christian...

[Romish_Papist]

"Rev. 22:18, 19

18 I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book.

19 And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book."

That refers to the Book of Revelation, not the Bible on the whole. Revelation was written before the canon was set so it could not possibly apply to the Bible completely, just that part of it. That is not to say that people should add to or take away from the Bible (Luther) but that example you gave is not intended for the Bible as a whole, just Revelation.

[gscc]

Luther did not exclude anything that Jerome and other early fathers did not also exclude as inspired. The Council of Trent, however, did canonize books that were previously held as edifying but not inspired.

[gscc]

The canon was set by God in His own time - it was merely revealed through the Church, not settled by the Church.

[Romish_Papist]

So then why do you ascribe that Luther and Jerome (who included them after all because he deferred to those in authority over him) had authority that the Council did not?

[F.J. Mitchell]

This seems only fair since the bar is too often raised too low for us less adroit folks.

[Vicomte13]

Kolokotronis, please tell us what Jesus' words were in the original Greek that have been translated "jot nor tittle" in the King James Bible.

The more important words here is not "jot nor tittle", its the single word "Law".
To Jews, the Old Testament is not "The Law".
The Torah is The Law.
Quite unlike Protestant Christians, Jews do not place equal authority on every word and every text in the Bible.
The Torah, the first five books, THAT is "The Law". THAT has greater authority than everything else.

The rest, that's all good and inspirational, but The Law is the Torah.

(Catholics make this distinction, to a degree, with the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, standing and singing "Allelujia!" three times, and crossing themselves thrice when the Gospel is read by the ordained minister; by contrast, the other readings are often done by a lay reader, and heard sitting.

So, what did Jesus say here?

He said that the Law, which is to say The Torah, was fixed by God for all time. None of it would pass away until all was fulfilled. He was not referring to 1 and 2 Kings, nor to the Psalms, nor to Joshua. He was not referring to "The Old Testament". He was referring to the Pentateuch, and only the Pentateuch. Because THAT, and only that, was "The Law" to the Jews circa 32 AD.

And every synagogue then, as now, had its own Hebrew scroll of THAT, the Torah. That's what was studied and focused upon. Jews in the Temple day were not Protestants. They were much more like Catholics, with the High Priest as Pope (with the authority to set law) and the Sanhedrin as the Curia, to decide matters in dispute. There were ordained priests, and there were the equivalent of brothers. There were also the equivalent of nuns, women who had taken the Nazirite vow. (The Proto-Gospel of James that Mary, mother of Jesus, had herself been committed to the Temple as a Temple virgin in her childhood, but that is another story.)

It is not surprising that we discover, in Paul's letter to Timothy, that the new Christian ministers were set up, and followed many of the forms, of the Jewish priesthood that they all knew, just as it's not surprising that the earliest Protestant sects: Lutherans and Anglicans, look very, very Catholic in their structure and forms.

So, every Jew, whether Pharisee or Saduccee or Essene or non-partisan - and even the Samaritans (who, very Protestant-like, took textualism to a whole new level in Samaria by rejecting all other traditions, written or Templar, EXCEPT the Torah) - had a common reference point in the Hebrew scroll of the Torah, which graced all synagogues, and was and is The Law.

Jesus was referring to 5 books of the Bible, the part that are The Law, and nothing else.

[Hound of the Baskervilles]

God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments.

[gscc]

Jerome recognized the differences between the Greek Septuagint and the original Hebrew, and made his translations from the Hebrew text instead of the Septuagint. He recognized and argued that the Septuagint was not the inspired originals, and that a more accurate translation would logically be made from the original Hebrew language of the Old Testament from which the Septuagint was taken. Jerome's translation grew in importance and soon became the accepted Latin version. The version Jerome produced in the 4th century A.D. came to be regarded as the official Scripture of the Roman Catholic Church. But even then (contrary to revised teaching today), it clearly distinguished between the libri eccesiastici and the libri canonici. The Apocrypha was accorded secondary status, and not God inspired Canon for doctrine.  Note that Jerome translated from the Hebrew text - none of the Apocyrphal Books are to be found in the original Hebrew. None of the apocryphal writers laid claim to inspiration.  The Jewish scholars of Jamnia (ca. A.D. 90) did not accept the Apocrypha as part of divinely inspired canon.  The Jewish Talmud teaches that the Holy Spirit departed from Israel after the time of Malachi, both of whom lived about four centuries before Christ, while the books of the Apocrypha were composed in the vicinity of two centuries before Christ.  Clearly Jerome and Luther did not exclude - the Council of Trent did, however, include these books which never part of Jewish or early Christian canon and are not divinely inspired.

[MEGoody]

Where's their proof or lack thereof?

Seems like what the pope is saying is that there was never proof limbo existed in the first place.

[SoothingDave]

The Jewish scholars of Jamnia (ca. A.D. 90) did not accept the Apocrypha as part of divinely inspired canon.

Interesting choice of an authority you select there. Why would a Jewish council, reacting to the rise of Christianity and meeting after you yourself admit the "Jewish Holy Spirit" was no longer around to guide them, be an authority figure for what the Christian Bible should be?

Did Jesus breathe the Paraclete upon the Church or this council at Jamnia?

SD

[Hound of the Baskervilles]

"I understand this perfectly, my point is that some on this thread consider the act of baptism itself to have some power, without going into all the other aspects of belief, it should be obvious to anyone that a mere physical act confers nothing. Baptism is a mere outward symbol."

First, there is nothing MERE about anything done in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Baptism confers the grace of God, freely given. The Church, at the command of God baptizes children to engender in them the life of grace and remove original sin. But that's not where it stops. The parents and the Christian community must help the child to make use of that grace through ongoing exposures to the Word and the Sacraments.

[Hound of the Baskervilles]

"Today, the Church is simply saying that theologians are gradually moving away from this speculation, and the Church is stating with greater force that the fate of infants dying without baptism is an open question."

I'm betting not. I have heard it with my own ears, John Paul II and Mother Teresa speaking of aborted babies in heaven. Because as I posted the Church teaches that the Church is bound by the sacraments but God is not. I have a feeling they will edge closer to the idea of heaven for unbaptized babies. I could be wrong though.

[Kolokotronis]

" False! We're created in God's "image and likeness."

The logical argument against annihilation is that everything that God created is good (man especially), and God does not act in vain."

Some of the Fathers disagree, though you have stated the Western/Aristotelian view. I'm at the office right now. Lets pursue this later in the evening. Try to remember, AF, that your discussion, unlike those of Aquinas, will be with an Orthodox Christian, not a Mohammadan! :)