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 .
Even Pope Gregory the Great (ca 600 AD) when quoting 1 Maccabees says, "We address a testimony from books though not canonical, yet published for the edification of the Church."
I have always frankly considered those given to overt partisanship on the Limbo of the Fathers overly prone to weakness on the filioque clause.
Of course, the Two Limbos to which you allude are the same Limbo. The Fathers no doubt dandle the Holy Innocents upon their aged and arthritic knees. The "Two-Limbo" Theory, which I construe as a dangerous and heretical doctrine, must be stamped out at all costs.
Sure, and I get it. My Limbo gets all Vatican support withdrawn. Yours rolls merrily on? I am going to Rome on this one, pal. Two Limbos, indeed. Where did you pick up that one? Avignon?
"Morals on the Book of Job"
The word translated as "jot" is "iwta", meaning the Greek letter i and the word "tittle" is "keraia" meaning, I think, a feeler or an antenna like on an insect. As I understand it, the word refers to a small stroke used in writing Hebrew. Iota is of course the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet.
There is a disconnect here. I am open to an explanation
Sirach 10:26 Be not overwise in doing thy business; and boast not thyself in the time of thy distress.
Free will remember? He has certainly heard of Jesus and knows his message. Still given that he and all his co-religionist are emmersed in Buddhism, have been taught all thier lives that it is the right way and proper way to live, one would not expect that such conditioning is not easy to surmount.
There is no doubt in my mind that I would very likely be and remain a loyal Buddhist, Jew or Protestant if I had been born into any one of those faiths.
Claud, I was mistaken in my post #480 to you. The work of +John Damascene I meant to direct you to is the "Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith". Sorry!
Nothing in the Vulgate said what describe. St. Jerome wanted to omit the deuterocanonicals, that is true. What is also true is that Rome slapped him down, and he obeyed.
BTW, there is a very beautiful prophecy of Christ in the book of Wisdom; I believe it's in chapter 2.
It is true that Rome directed Jerome to include these books and Jerome complied. Jerome himself separated the Apocrypha from the rest. He stated the church reads them “for example and instruction of manners, but does not “apply them to establish any doctrine. More damning was his statement that “they exhibit no authority as Holy Scripture".
"They were to be read in the Church but not depended on for doctrine."
But, see, Jerome was not the fellow who compiled the Bible.
He was just the fellow who translated it into LATIN for the West to use.
There were councils and synods before Jerome, at which the books of the canon were discussed. The texts from these councils and synods are available online, and when you peruse any of them, you will see that they varied in their content of Old and New Testament. You will also see that all of them included some of the Deuterocanonical works in their view of the Canon. With Damascus' list, the canon remained that, and that was what was ratified at Trent.
Remember that you come at this from the cultural perspective of a Protestant, and for you, the Bible is THE thing. But that is not true of Catholics, and it most certainly wasn't true of the Catholics back in the 300s and 400s. They were not straining to get to a settled Canon so that, finally, they would all have a text to agree upon and then do the sort of parsing of the texts that a good Evangelical Bible-bash does today. The Canon of Scripture was always there, but the Bible was never the primary evangelical tool of the Catholics. Charitable works, and caring for the sick and the poor, and schools - Mother Theresa stuff - was always the way that the Catholics (and the Orthodox, which are one and the same when we speak of 400 AD) implanted themselves (once Catholicism was legal, and even before that).
The particular, singular focus on the BIBLE and on written texts and canon and parsing out particular phrases like a Talmudic scholar: this never was a Catholic forte and still isn't. Remember that there was no Protestant Church then. The Catholics were not struggling against folks like you who thought the way you do. They were struggling against folks who denied the Trinity entirely, or denied the divinity of Jesus, or denied that women had souls, or denied the Resurrection, or who claimed that the whole Jewish Law, lock, stock and barrel, applied to Christians.
There was some appeal to Scripture, to be sure, but not as something utterly apart, separate and distinct from, or indeed antithetical to, tradition. The Scriptures were simply a part of the tradition. Now, the idea that Catholic traditions are the modern equivalent of the traditions of the Pharisees which Jesus excoriated is a modern, Protestant one. There was not that dichotomy of strict textualists versus traditionalists back then. This is why, from one raised in a Protestant tradition where the Bible is something of a CONSTITUTION for the Church, the lackadaisical Catholic approach to the Biblical canon over the course of history is disorienting. Obviously in modern times, Protestants use the Bible to distinguish themselves from each other, and from the Catholics. It is only natural, if one is in that tradition, to retroject it to Jerome, and to see a guy struggling for the purity and truth of Scripture against the "contamination" of tradition, which is viewed as bad.
But truly that was not the mindset of the times. Jesus excoriated the Pharisees traditions. He was aiming at the Pharisees, not condemning all traditions for all times. Indeed, Paul's letters flat out instruct his churches to follow the traditions he taught them. Tradition is GOOD, in Scripture, if it's proper apostolic tradition.
Jerome was not a struggling Luther. Remember, Luther thought passionately enough about the Scripture business to secede from the Church itself rather than submit to what he perceived as evil threatening to dilute the purity of "God's Word" in Scripture. Jerome preferred the Jewish, Hebrew text over the Jewish Greek text, and said so. But when he was told to put the Deuterocanonica in the Vulgate translation anyway, he did not raise a gargantuan theological fuss over this, as though this would somehow contaminate the only place where the pure "Word of God" could be found.
Why?
Because Jerome was a Catholic, and like all of his contemporary bishops and doctors of the Catholic Church, thought that the pure Word of God ultimately reposed in the Holy Spirit upon the Church. He had his opinions about which sources were better for translation, but he believed that the Church had the authority to decide, not him, and obeyed the Church, which is to say that HE thought that the tradition was more authoritative than the texts he was translating.
And that is very Catholic: the Church is the authority. The Bible has authority because it comes from the Church. Independent of the Church, the Bible is good reading, but if interpreted outside of the canons of the Church, or against the Church, it can become a force even for evil. "The Devil can quote Scripture to suit his purposes."
So when you speak of "Rome, in this instance, won the day" when speaking of Jerome, you are retrojecting the views of the 20th Century onto the 5th. The difference between Jerome and you is fundamental on this. Jerome thought that the Pope and the Church had the authority over the book, and acquiesced. You would consider that to be marring the Word of God, and that the Church must absolutely be submitted to the authority of the Bible.
Which is to say Jerome was a Catholic, and you are a Protestant. There were no Protestants in 400 AD. There was no Christian on Earth who held up the canon of Scriptures and asserted that this superseded the traditions of the Church. The world of Jerome would not be recognizable to modern theologians. All of the reference points were not there. Christianity without a fixed Bible, was a Christianity in which the Bible was not very important. To a cradle Protestant, that's a scary world. But it is as it was.
"Jesus said, "The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses" (Matthew 23:2)."
True. But Jesus also performed a miracle in order to pay the Temple tax. And Jesus, after performing a healing, sent the man to the Temple to give the customary sacrifice to the priests and scribes.
In the Torah, Reuel tells Moses he can't judge all the people, and tells Moses to set up judges of the subdivisions of the people, and he does. The Torah explicitly gives the religious authorities the power to judge, to decide, from which there is no appeal. Likewise, whatever Jews personal relationship with God, they were also required to properly offer sacrifices through God's priests. Paul explicitly accepts the authority of the High Priest and the Sanhedrin.
Remember that Pharisees were NOT priests. Neither were scribes. The former were civilians full of religious zeal. The latter were religious scolars and functionaries. The sacerdotal offices were in the hands of the priests, whose function and authority was absolutely spelt out in detail by God in the Torah.
Paul spells out, (but does not create!), the Christian tradition of handing down sacerdotal authority to bishops and priests and deacons by the laying on of hands.
As to this part: "I agree with your comparison regarding the authority of the Sanhedrin and High Priest to interpret the Torah, and 'the Pope and the Vatican Curia'. Christ gave neither the authority to blend men's traditions with Holy Scripture."
Holy Scripture IS the tradition of men.
The Council of Jerusalem is in the Bible.
Where in the Bible is Sunday specified as the new sabbath?
It isn't.
The other Church councils all have their records to tell us what and where and when. There are no records of the Council of Jerusalem outside of the Bible itself, are there?
Paul says differently when he explains what the tradition is that he is teaching.
Galatians 1:11-12
"I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ."
True.
as we are, in essence, nothing.
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."
Well of course God doesn't act in vain. I doubt any of the Fathers ever said anything like that. On the other hand, do you think that God acted in vain if a created being does not attain theosis? Theosis, after all, is our created purpose, is it not? If we fail to attain theosis, does this say anything about God? Of course not. And if we are condemned, is it God who condemns us, whether that condemnation is an eternity of death or torment in hell or simply spiritual annihilation? Of course not.
You say that everything created by God is good. Clearly. But God is not the author of sin nor of the consequences of sin; we are. As +John Chrysostoms teaches, "God created without matter.", ex nihilo. So it is of course beyond argument that all "Life" is from God. +John Damascene teaches in Book 1 Chap VIII of the Exact Exposition:
"Therefore, we believe in one God one principle, without beginning, uncreated, unbegotten, indestructible and immortal, eternal, unlimited, uncircumscribed, unbounded, infinite in power, simple, uncompounded, incorporeal, unchanging, unaffected, unchangeable, inalterate, invisible, source of goodness and justice, light intellectual and inaccessible; power which no measure can give any idea of but which is measured only by His own will, for He can do all things whatsoever He pleases; Maker of all things both visible and invisible, holding together all things and conserving them, Provider for all, governing and dominating and ruling over all in unending and immortal reign; without contradiction, filling all things, contained by nothing, but Himself containing all things, being their Conserver and first Possessor; pervading all substances without being defiled, removed far beyond all things and every substance as being supersubstantial and surpassing all, super-eminently divine and good and replete; appointing all the principalities and orders, set above every principality and order, above essence and life and speech and concept; light itself and goodness and being insofar as having neither being, nor anything else that is derived from any other; the very source of being for all things that are, of life to the living, of speech to the articulate, and the cause of all good things for all; knowing all things before they begin to be; one substance, one godhead, one virtue, one will, one operation, one principality, one power, one domination, one kingdom; known in three perfect Persons and adored with one adoration, believed in and worshipped by every rational creature, united without confusion and distinct without separation, which is beyond understanding. We believe in Father and Son and Holy Spirit in Whom we have been baptized. For it is thus that the Lord enjoined the apostles 'Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit'."
Thereafter at Book 1, Chap XIV, he writes:
"Further the divine effulgence and energy, being one anti simple and indivisible, assuming many varied forms in its goodness among what is divisible and allotting to each the component parts of its own nature, still remains simple and is multiplied without division among the divided, and gathers and converts the divided into its own simplicity . For all things long after it and have their existence in it. It gives also to all things being according to their several natures , and it is itself the being of existing things, the life of living things, the reason of rational beings, the thought of thinking beings. But it is itself above mind and reason and life and essence... It [the Divine Nature] is also sinless, and can cast sin out, and bring salvation: and all that it wills, it can accomplish, but does not will all it could accomplish. For it could destroy the universe but it does not will so to do."
Its a bit like the Cappadocian "I believe in God; God does not "exist".
So, created beings can exist in eternity, but only because God wills it. We hope that God will not allow us to fall into a sort of non existence, and certainly that is not what God created us for, but that doesn't mean that by not becoming like God Who is the only immortal being "by nature", by cutting ourselves off from Him through sin and experiencing spiritual death, we won't in fact cease to "exist" at the end of time.
So, AF, if we cut ourselves off from the source of being, what happens to our being?
"Apparently there is no money attached to indulgences anymore, however, how did the RC Church wildly spin this as doctrine? Where did the authority come from?"
Alright, there are three pieces to this, and I'll give them in order.
First, the idea that the prayers and offerings of the living can help the dead to atone for their sins is in 2 Maccabbees. There, you may recall, is recounted the story of the Jewish warriors who were all slain, and were found to be wearing medallions to some goddess. One of the Maccabbees offers up prayers and offerings to God so that this sin of idolatry, for which these otherwise loyal soldiers had already paid with their lives (by being defeated in battle and killed) would be blotted out by God and not held against them in the afterlife. This is the first place in the Bible where the doctrine of the resurrection is specifically mentioned by name.
So, that is where the Biblical authority comes from that tells us that prayers and offering for the dead help them before God.
Secondly, where the Biblical authority comes from that allows the Pope to issue decretals such as the one you cited, which systematizes everything, lies in Matthew (etc.), in the power of the keys, to loose and to bind, granted to Peter by Jesus. Paul (Timothy) tells us how authority was passed to successors by the laying on of hands. And that is why the Pope has the authority to do things like the document you cited: the power of the keys, passed to him in apostolic succession.
The third thing is my own opinion: THIS is the sort of thing that just makes me cringe and groan. It's just TOO regularized, systematized, rational, and logical...it has the feel of something that was made up out of wholecloth, defended vigorously at some earlier point in history, which then has to be suffered as a "tradition" today.
Now, were the specificities concerning indulgences laid out by a Saint who had talked to God and angels and said so - there have been many such divine messages and revelations delivered through Saints, it would be easy to swallow.
But this...well...it just has the feel of a government bureaucracy administering drops of salvation, doesn't it?
And it's not very credible, is it?
THIS is precisely the part of the dead wood in the Catholic tradition that really needs to be chopped out.
The big picture is true: prayers and offerings for the dead are good things, they are beneficial, like prayers for anyone else. The traditions, including the Bible in 2 Maccabbees tell us so.
And that's where we should firmly stay: in the big picture.
When you start getting down into pounds and pence and how many ounces of forgiveness a given prayer or votary candle is worth...well...it's embarrassing that the Church used to do that, and we need to knock that stuff off today.
In my opinion.
Meant to ping you three to #557
Paul's letters were written before any Gospels were written.
When he refers to the Gospel, he is referring to the good news from God. He is not referring to Scripture at all, nor even to any of his own epistles, because Galatians is the oldest book of the New Testament.
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