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
They may or may not, just as Christians may or may not.
Here's a link to the Church's position regarding the salvation of non-Christians. See paragraphs 846-848.
I thought the NT taught that everyone, no matter how good they tried to be, was a sinner headed for Hell - unless they accepted Jesus. Does it say otherwise?
Are you asking this question because you are UNAWARE that is has been asnwered earlier in this thread, or do you just not LIKE the answer that ws given earlier?
Here it is again: Post 153 Romans 1 teaches plainly that all men can know certain things about God and His character from nature, and that those things are plain, evident and unmistakeable. The problem with those who "never heard of Christ" is the same problem with those who HAVE heard of Christ...., we don't like the idea of being eternally accountable. The scripture teaches that we deliberately suppress the innate (built in) and extant (available for viewing) evidence for a holy creator God, whether it is some Hotentot in S. Africa or some modern American who has an abundannce of knowledge available.
Those who "have never even heard of Jesus Christ" have light like a weak flashlight. Those who hear the good news of Christ's death for sinners are like those standing in Madison Square Garden before a bank of Hi intensity lights. Men are not judged on HOW MUCH light they have, but WHAT THEY DO with the light they have.
The testimony of scripture and experience is that men universally turn away from the true God, and either worship themselves, their pleasures, or false religions.
THAT is what men are judged for (See Romans 1-2 for a more detailed explanation)
Can't you give a straight answer to a straight question? Will all these people go to hell if they don't accept JC as their personal saviour?
Jews and Muslims worship God the Father, does that count or is JC the lynchpin?
All men who are cosmic rebels against their creator suffer his just punishment, so you tell me. It ain't hard logic.
Do all Jews, Hindus, Muslims, followers of all eastern religions, tribesman in Africa, Central and South America, Eskimos, South Pacific Islanders...not to mention the millions and millions of people who died before Jesus was born, do they ALL go to hell because they haven't or even had the opportunity to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior?
is "yes", they are doomed to eternal torture. Correct?
Neither I, nor the scriptures are prepared to grant that premise. Romans teaches that men hate the true God to the point that the worship of false gods, rather than an attempt to FIND God, is rather an attempt to RUN FROM the true God, while satisfying their religious impulse.
You say they are innocently mistaken, and just doing the best they can. I will go so far as to say that if that is true (and it ain't) then NO, God would not be so unjust as to condemn a man simply for not believing in someone he never heard of. However, the biblican picture of man and his determination to subvert the knowledge of the true and living God is quite a different picture.
Easily - being baptised as an infant does not guarantee entrance to heaven (unless the infant dies while still an infant - hence the reason for infant baptism)
The Church teaches that you must be baptised in order to go to heaven. That does NOT mean that baptism guarantees entrance to heaven.
If you must be baptised to enter heaven and you wait until the person is older to baptise them - what happens to the person who dies as an infant if they have not been baptised?
That is why the Church baptises babies.
As to the people who lived before Christ, they were justified by faith, just like we are. Christ was revealed in types, symbols, promises, and tons of other stuff in the Old Testament. Jews and the surrounding nations put their hope in the promised one who would come and fix the cosmic war as the "seed of the woman" who would "smash the serpent's head" although his own heel would be crushed. This promise, given immediately after the fall, is expanded, explained, pictured, and looked to thorought the period before Christ. They had faith, we have faith. Theirs was in the coming Savior, ours is in the Savior who has come. No difference in substance, just the amount of info we have.
That is why the Church baptises babies.
So what do you think happens to the person who dies as an infant if they have not been baptised?
Just to let you know, he and I will have slightly different answers on that one. The CORRECT answer is "no one knows for sure" but we have different theories, with different levels of support for belief. It is not exactly crucial to the faith.
Not at all. Limbo was the place where people who couldn't go to heaven but shouldn't go to Hell go. (a baby who died before it was baptized, good people who lived before Jesus - if you can't go to heaven unless you believe in Jesus, how could you have believed in him BEFORE he was born? - those were the reasons for Limbo)
Purgatory was a place for those who were going to heaven - but had committed sins went to.
Say you have an old nun who did nothing but serve others for her entire life. She spends her life in prayer and praising Jesus. She dies and goes straight to heaven.
Now compare her to Adolph Hitler (or any other mass murderer or uber-evil person). He spent his life causing incredible suffering and misery for others. Then 60 seconds before Hitler dies, he sees the light and says, "I accept Jesus in my heart as my personal savior." Not just "says" it - but really and truly means it. He dies and also goes straight to heaven (because now he is saved).
That didn't seem fair. Why should an evil person who finds religion in the last few seconds of their life after a lifetime of ultimate evil get the same reward as the good nun?
That was the reason for Purgatory - yes, Hitler would go to heaven because he was saved before he died - BUT he still has to atone for the evil he did and he did that atonement in Purgatory.
I don't know what the Church's teaching is about purgatory anymore - but that was the original reason for it.
You have a bad picture of hell. Men only get what they eternally ask for. The idea that men in hell would repent and come to Christ if they "only had the chance" is hocum. There is an eternal "Thy will be done" or "MY will be done" and God both honors and effectuates that meaningful choice by His creatures. If you could go into the bowels of hell to see the most pathetic damned soul, in the agonies of his own dissolution as an eternal being, you would find an eternal venom, spite, hate and rebellion against God, so that if the price to heaven is submission, humility, and reception of grace, the answer would be "not 'no' but HELL NO!" God simply gives men what they eternally wish for, which is banishment from his presence. This is hell.
I believe what I was taught as a child - that they go to Limbo (which is not a bad place, in fact it is just like heaven except God is not there.) Then on Judgement Day they will be judged just like everyone else and would most likely go to Heaven since they didn't live long enough to sin.
What do YOU think happens to babies who die before the age of reason?
Really? Immortal worms??
Hell yes, I do! I read the article.
Men only get what they eternally ask for.
Are you saying that once in Hell, you could, in theory, accept Salvation and leave? Or once in, there is no escape?
Same thing that happens to anyone who dies after the age of reason - whatever that is. My best guess is that there is a God, and a continuation of our consciousness.
The idea of an all knowing, all loving God who creates living, feeling beings - knowing full well most of them will be tortured forever in Hell - is nonsense, IMO.
I hope you are right. The trouble is that by the time we find out for sure, it will be too late to change anything.
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