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
This language of place is, according to the Pope, inadequate to describe the realities involved, since it is tied to the temporal order in which this world and we exist. In this he is applying the philosophical categories used by the Church in her theology and saying what St. Thomas Aquinas said long before him.
"Incorporeal things are not in place after a manner known and familiar to us, in which way we say that bodies are properly in place; but they are in place after a manner befitting spiritual substances, a manner that cannot be fully manifest to us." [St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplement, Q69, a1, reply 1]
Hell and Satan exist?
Yep,right here on Earth.
Yet I truly believe a God of love and mercy would not condemn those of us whose sins have been chasing a few girls,cheating on a test or stealing candy from a store.
Hell is for those like Pol Pot,Hitler,Stalin,Saddam,etc.The REAL bad folks of which there are way too many as it is.
That was a mistranslation. The Italian word JP2 used was piu, which is sometimes translated "rather," but more often translated "more". "More than a place, hell is ..."
The Pope's point was that hell is as much a state of being, a state of separation from God, which begins for some here on earth. He wasn't denying its reality, physical or otherwise.
Only a child could believe in hell.
It's separation from God. That's all I need to know to not want to end up there.
I am a Christian because of grace, not because of fear of bad stuff, though I acknowledge that the bad stuff is bad.
God creates us with a free will. God is omniscient. He knows before we are created by Him how we will exercise our 'free will'. Therefore He knows which of us will reject Him and, by this standard, be condemned to an eternity of suffering. Why would a loving, omniscient God create a soul that He knows before its creation will, after a cosmic blink-of-the-eye called life, be consigned to hell?
It's strange that liberals, leftists and hollywood all believe in the devil and demons but don't fear hell, eternity & God. But, who is to understand their thinking anyway. It's going to be very sad for them in the end unless they wake up.
Joel Osteen won't want to hear this.
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
1250 Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called. The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism. The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth.
1251 Christian parents will recognize that this practice also accords with their role as nurturers of the life that God has entrusted to them.
1252 The practice of infant Baptism is an immemorial tradition of the Church. There is explicit testimony to this practice from the second century on, and it is quite possible that, from the beginning of the apostolic preaching, when whole "households" received baptism, infants may also have been baptized.
1253 Baptism is the sacrament of faith. But faith needs the community of believers. It is only within the faith of the Church that each of the faithful can believe. The faith required for Baptism is not a perfect and mature faith, but a beginning that is called to develop. The catechumen or the godparent is asked: "What do you ask of God's Church?" The response is: "Faith!"
1254 For all the baptized, children or adults, faith must grow after Baptism. For this reason the Church celebrates each year at the Easter Vigil the renewal of baptismal promises. Preparation for Baptism leads only to the threshold of new life. Baptism is the source of that new life in Christ from which the entire Christian life springs forth.
1255 For the grace of Baptism to unfold, the parents' help is important. So too is the role of the godfather and godmother, who must be firm believers, able and ready to help the newly baptized - child or adult on the road of Christian life. Their task is a truly ecclesial function (officium). The whole ecclesial community bears some responsibility for the development and safeguarding of the grace given at Baptism.
1282 Since the earliest times, Baptism has been administered to children, for it is a grace and a gift of God that does not presuppose any human merit; children are baptized in the faith of the Church. Entry into Christian life gives access to true freedom.
My own take on this:
It is disingenuous to say that Christ's Sacrifice is all-sufficient and there is nothing we can do to merit salvation and then say that we must believe in order to be saved. If there is nothing we can do to affect our own salvation, then even our own faith is moot and Christ died for all... period. As it is, Baptism is the beginning of our life in faith, not the culmination of it. From there, we have our infancy in the Family of God and God, through His Holy Spirit, will raise us.
Just as you don't take away the free will of your children in raising them, there is no conflict between infant baptism and the Christian's duty to conform his life to Christ. We might just as soon say we had violated a child's free will in calling him into this world at his birth.
I don't know about the pope, but I believe that infant fant "baptism" in the Baptist Church is referred to as the dedication of a child and that baptism is done later at the behest of the baptizee.
>>Yet I truly believe a God of love and mercy would not condemn those of us whose sins have been chasing a few girls,cheating on a test or stealing candy from a store.<<
You are 100% incorrect, and have no scriptural support for your position. You ought to read the book of Romans.
God's standard for us is the 10 Commandments. Breaking one is no different than breaking all of them, regardless of the amount or weight of the sin (be it 'chasing girls' or outright adultery, be it stealing a candy bar or a cadillac). All of us are sinners who deserve hell for violating God's standards.
This is what makes Grace all the more sweet. This is what makes God's love and mercy all the more a blessing. When one is in Christ, and has his sins forgiven and atoned for by Christ's sacrifice, he is no longer under that condemnation.
God in his infinite justice cannot let lawbreaking go unpunished. No earthly judge would do it, why would God, the creator and sustainer of all life, allow it?
>>Hell is for those like Pol Pot,Hitler,Stalin,Saddam,etc.The REAL bad folks of which there are way too many as it is.<<
Other men are not the standard. God's law is.
There is a great lie, a great deception about the ugly reality of sin. Don't buy into it.
There is no such thing as Purgatory. There is Heaven, and there is Hell, and you will be in one or the other on your last day. Purgatory is a fantasy invented by men who believe that people can work their way into salvation. It is by grace, and grace alone that one can be saved. And this grace is a gift from God. No amount of reasoning or arguments will save one. No amount of good deeds or positive thoughts will amount to anything without being ransomed by Christ's blood.
Confess, repent, and forsake your sins (even the "small ones") and trust in Christ for your salvation - not the whims of a man in Rome.
Ever been married? That is real torture.
I never realized that your church taught you that heaven and hell are not real...
There have been numerous (to say the least) posts on that very subject. Use keyword Calvinist or Arminian and you may find them.
My take is that when God delegates responsiblity by conferring free will (don't dare suggest that to a Calvinist), then God deliberatly doesn't peek ahead at the outcome. It just stands to reason. How else do you explain the NUMEROUS instances of God being disappointed with people throughtout the Bible. You can't be disappointed if you really expected the outcome.
In summary, God can know all but doesn't always choose to know all.
I am liking this guy....
Baptism is a dedication of the newcomer to the faith, typically by parents. Confirmation is the sacrament that allows a young adult to affirm, or exercise their free will in choosing a life dedicated to the faith. In the case of an adult convert, confirmation typically follows baptism immediately.
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