Posted on 03/27/2007 10:53:30 AM PDT by Mount Athos
Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, the Pope has said.
Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, Benedict XVI said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to “admit blame and promise to sin no more”, they risked “eternal damnation — the Inferno”.
Hell “really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more”, he said.
The Pope, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of Catholic doctrine, noted that “forgiveness of sins” for those who repent was a cornerstone of Christian belief. He recalled that Jesus had forgiven the “woman taken in adultery” and prevented her from being stoned to death, observing: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
God had given men and women free will to choose whether “spontaneously to accept salvation . . . the Christian faith is not imposed on anyone, it is a gift, an offer to mankind”.
Vatican officials said that the Pope — who is also the Bishop of Rome — had been speaking in “straightfoward” language “like a parish priest”. He had wanted to reinforce the new Catholic catechism, which holds that Hell is a “state of eternal separation from God”, to be understood “symbolically rather than physically”.
Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a Church historian, said that the Pope was “right to remind us that Hell is not something to be put on one side” as an inconvenient or embarrassing aspect of belief.
It had been misused in the Middle Ages to scare the impressionable with “horrific visions” of damnation, as described in Dante’s Inferno.
It had a pedigree, however, that went back to Ancient Egypt and the Greek idea of Hades, and was described by St Matthew as a place of “everlasting fire” (Matthew xxv, 41).
“The problem is not only that our sense of sin has declined, but also that the world wars and totalitarianisms of the 20th century created a Hell on Earth as bad as anything we can imagine in the afterlife,” Professor Bagliani said.
In 1999 Pope John Paul II declared that Heaven was “neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but that fullness of communion with God which is the goal of human life.” Hell, by contrast, was “the ultimate consequence of sin itself . . . Rather than a place, Hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy”.
In October the Pope indicated that limbo, supposed since medieval times to be a “halfway house” between Heaven and Hell, inhabited by unbaptised infants and holy men and women who lived before Christ, was “only a theological hypothesis” and not a “definitive truth of the faith”.
Timely visions
— “Outer darkness . . . there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” St Matthew
It is an understandable reaction. In fact, if you really listen to what the Bible has to say and it does NOT disturb you, you aren't hearing what it says. That has no bearing at all, though, on its truth claims. It does, however, bear on men's reaction to it. It is precisely the reason that men will go through amazing mental gymnastics to deny the plain truths of the gospel, and pervert their intellectual capacities to condemn the biblical God (they would say that they condemn the "teaching about" a biblical God).
Again, Romans 1 says that the plain truth of the moral nature of God, and the sustanence of the creator is evident to all men and clearly plain to them, but they don't like it and suppress it at every opportunity
Men had rather willingly deceive themselves and will deliberately believe lies rather than face the idea that they must stand before a thrice-holy God who is determined to extirpate every shred of cosmic rebellion from the universe.
The older theologians called this the "noetic" (noos="mind") effects of sin. The concept is that sin has affected our reasoning abilities as well as our capacity to choose. It is not that the unregenerate man believes that 1+1=3 (unfortunaately, I sometimes believe that kind of stuff is limited to the ranks of fundamentalist believers, who believe any number of wacky ideas), but it is that men use their (sometimes prodigious) cognitive and intellectual abilities with an undercurrent of desire to escape God. Men deliberately seek to employ logic and intellect in an attempt to throw off what they do not like. We see it here in religious threads all the time. My personal experience (and I believe the teaching of scripture) is that only a personal experience with the slaughtered and risen Son of God, and an understanding of his love and forgiveness, have sufficient power to reverse this mental state in men.
Through faith in Christ, by virtue of His atoning sacrifice - in God's eyes - I am justified, made perfect, holy, period.
Do you think Christ gave special dispensation to the repentant thief when he said "today, you will be with me in paradise"?
Yeah, but the thief didn't commit any further sins...
The bible DOES say that "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord" which militates in some measure against the idea of a progressive entrance into heaven.
I have to say that I found your statement about "snow covered dunghills" to be stupid, offensive, and, by the way, never a statement made by Martin Luther. The only place you find it is on the internet, in Catholic/Protestant debates. Luther never said it. However, even if he had, Luther was a German peasant whose language was...., "colorful" when he got wound up and going, but I would not attempt to vivisect my theological understanding of protestantism with some of his loopier statements.
Snarking in areas you don't understand just shows you don't understand what you are talking about. Yes, God died, in that he tasted death, swallowed it down, overcame it, and triumphed over it. You have a deficient, unidimensional view of death as cessation of existence. This is NOT the biblical picture of death, and howling in glee as you bawl out your misrepresentations might be good for a college dorm room bull session, but only there. Yes. Christ tasted death for every man. Here, and in your previous post I wrote you about the nature of what the Christian teaching about what happened on the cross, demonstrate that you seemingly believe you can both remain ignorant about what you are posting and then somehow transmogrify the situation so that it is not your mockery that is foolish, but what you attempt to ridicule. In that earlier jewel of a posting exchange, you said you said you did not know what the Christian teaching about the cross was, because "you weren't there."
You post that kind of tripe and then make accusations of OTHER belief systems of being irrational? I am usually eager to help answer genuine questions. However I don't have times for people who act like the simian cages where the apes sh*t in their hands and fling it at the onlookers and then gibber and howl like they have scored some kind of coup. You have a real argument? Make it. Spare us the snarky imbecilisms.
Your thinking is more Catholic than you want to admit--but then, truth is truth...
From The Catholic Encyclopedia again (a very useful online tool...):
The first effect of mortal sin in man is to avert him from his true last end, and deprive his soul of sanctifying grace. The sinful act passes, and the sinner is left in a state of habitual aversion from God. The sinful state is voluntary and imputable to the sinner, because it necessarily follows from the act of sin he freely placed, and it remains until satisfaction is made.
Thankfully, God gave us a means for his grace in satisfaction of our transgressions: the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
I like you.
You could do lots worse than those guys. I personally love Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius (a 4th century Luther, imo), Bernard of Clairvaux (we all have warts!), and, of course, Aquinas. I have to add that I believe (with Luther, Calvin, and the rest of the reformers), that these men would have been horrified at Trent. Anyway, I commend you on reading them. Some of them I have never read, I say to my shame.
And I have not read nearly enough of them to be considered a student of any one of them... to my shame as well... I do plan to do better though... :-)
I really am not trying to be argumentative, but to be blunt, you just don't know that.
I don't know exactly what the time interval was between his conversion and his death, but it is certainly probable (and highly likely - given the method of his execution) that he lived long enough to have at least one uncharitable thought/statement/action towards his roman executioners.
Yep Jesus is God He died on the Cross and three days later he rose again.
Just for you!
Show me evidence that you have ancesters in the middle ages. Can you do that?
You have a good idea, as the centurions had to smash his legs to get him to die before the Passover. No one can seriously try to tell me the guy looked down on the soldiers who BROKE HIS LEGS and said some pietistic drivel like "bless you, my son." Nope. Born at night, but not LAST night. Kind of like my wreck on a motorcycle some years back. I went over the handlebars at about 40 mph, hit on my (helmented) head and neck. Felt a loud POP, and a searing pain. My thought was "OK, bud, you have punched your f*cking ticket." I then was reminded of Christ, his death, and my assurance of pardon and the fact that if I were dying, it was a good gig, or at least the pathway into something REALLY good. All these thoughts went thru my mind (including the f word) in a milisecond. Then I hit, I bumped, I scraped, I bounced, I rolled, I broke a new bone it seemed every time I hit the ground again. I remember thinking when my foot snapped "Damn, if I am going to die I wish I would hurry up, this HURTS!" I am going to die just like I live. A sinner filled to the brim with filth if my heart can puke it out, and one who trusts in the mercy and blood of Christ to give me a righteousness that I can never attain for myself. I wish the first part (about the filth) were not true, but it is. I can push it down some, but give me the right set of stresses, enough fear, and enough self pity and it is like I never heard of God. It was true for the thief, and it is true for everyone else on this miserable mud ball we call Earth. People who claim otherwise just kid themselves.
What would you accept as evidence?
Well, maybe in one sense you are right, in that Christ's death was only efficacious for his own, and possibly you are not one of his own. Jesus said clearly "I lay down my life for my sheep...." and then a bit later "you are not my sheep."
However, on the other hand, there is an intrinsic sufficiency in the death of Christ to swallow a world of guilt, a world of hateful rebellion, and a million universes of self righteous pride. I guess it means how you use the phrase "tasted death for every man" and I admit to using it both ways.
It's only a sacrifice if you lose something.
Yeah. That is kind of the point about Christianity.
....belittle those who reject your dogma yet you can't answer the most simple of questions.
I don't belittle those who reject my dogma or your dogma and I am happy to answer genuine questions. I belittle those who mock from ignorance. If I went on a physical science forum and sneered at Einstein and mocked the idea that the universe is curvilinear because I can pull a string in a straight line from two points, I would be laughed out because I was too damn stupid to recognize that I didn't know what I was pontificating about. I don't expect you to be quoting Calvin or papal encyclicals when you ask the questions. But, you should know that you, uh, ain't exactly the first guy to ever ask these questions, and it is not exactly like there aren't any smart people who have ever considered them....., and that their response was not to throw up their hands in despair and say with Gomer Pyle "well goooolllleeee, he sure fixed our little belief system didn't he Corporate Boyle?" So, like I said, if you have a REAL question, I am always eager to answer it.
Hey, he gets it! He knows the truth and isn't afraid to preach it! I like this man.
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