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 aren't. They're born with a sin nature like we all are. They're just innocent up until they begin to understand stuff...
they talked about sheol, which could be hell. Jesus went into hell and released the captives. Where did they come from? Musta been a lot of them from OT times.
"I've never been afraid of hell for some reason..."
Then we have something in common.
Limbo is where a baby would go. It hasn't committed any sins and only has Original Sin (darn you Adam and Eve!).
So they spend eternity hearing that stupid song and taking turns trying to "walk" under the pole?
That sounds almost as bad as hell!
thanks, mugs.
He talks mostly about a relationship with Jesus Christ in his book. It points the reader to Jesus as well as talking about Hell. If this were an occultic book, satan wouldn't want him talking about Hell (or Jesus) the way he has. satan wants us to be deceived into thinking it doesn't exist. What he has was a vision from God about the place. We can't help it if the occultic folks like the book but I do hope they read it so they can learn about Jesus.
You should be if you haven't received Jesus as your saviour. I do NOT want anyone going there, Bob J. It's not going to be a fun place to be for ever and ever and ever.
So when Jesus talked of sheol, he was talking about being dead in a grave and "unrisen"? But no brimstone, fire and demons ripping you apart for the rest of eternity?
So who made up the fire and brimstone hell?
Look it up. I haven’t researched it. Hell is mentioned many, many times in the Bible. I encourage you to look up the passages if you haven’t already. M
I don’t. I was interested because it spoke about hell and what awaits sinners who don’t repent and turn their lives over to Jesus Christ before they die. My faith doesn’t hinge on that book, believe me. I’ve known the Lord and walked through a lot of STUFF for 38 years now. I want people to be aware of the eternity that lies before them: heaven or hell. The devil has convinced many that hell doesn’t exist. Well, it does, and this book describes it pretty well. It’s not a place in which I want anyone to end up.
He better not be. Pope John Paul II was the best of the best. This Pope will be average at best.
Well, I’m interested in seeing how many times it is mentioned in the Old Testament and in direct quotes of Jesus, and the context in which they’re mentioned. Sometimes “hell” really isn’t “hell”.
Go for it, Bob J.
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