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
Exactly...Fire and Brimstone...Brimstone is sulphur...Sulphur burns with no flame...
Baptism is an ordinace where a believer publicly professes their belief in Christ. In every Biblical instance, Baptism always follows professed belief, and belief always comes after the Word.
You ought to stick with what the Bible says, and not what the Catholic church says.
Go straight to the source.
>>It is disingenuous to say that Christ's Sacrifice is all-sufficient<<
Then you clearly don't accept the Bible as truth:
"But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. - 2 Cor 12:9
To suggest that Christ's sacrifice onthe cross wasn't sufficient, and that we somehow have to meet him half-way in order to earn our salvation is an outright lie that has no basis in scripture.
Salvation is appointed from before the foundation of the world, a gift to God's elect (read Ephesians). Not everyone will go to heaven, in fact few will (Mt. 7:14)
>>even our own faith is moot<<
Faith is the product of salvation, not the cause of it. God calls, and we respond - not the other way around.
Yes, he is.
St. Aquinas. A giant in the histroy of Christianity.
Your sources, the MSM, misinformed you. He said he was sorry that Muslims chose to become violent over his remarks but he never backed down on his words and his purpose.
Nope that's different.
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God is omniscient or He isn't.
I think the bumper-sticker has a good idea: "Some people are here to be examples to the rest...".
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.
You are so wrong on a couple of things...You think living on earth in the US is Hell??? It's a pretty nice Hell if you live in parts of India, Cambodia or Africa...
None of the things you mentioned will send you to Hell...There's only one thing that will send you to Hell...That's the refusal to accept Jesus as your Savior...
The Bible doesn't say that.
In every Biblical instance, Baptism always follows professed belief, and belief always comes after the Word.
No, there are examples in Acts where entire households are baptized. In Acts 2, St. Peter tells a Jewish audience used to circumcizing babies at 8 days of age, "The promise is to you and to your children".
The fathers say that infant baptism was a practice received from the apostles.
You ought to stick with what the Bible says, and not what the Catholic church says.
You ought to stick with what the Bible actually says, and not how your Baptist tradition understands it.
Colossians 1:24: Now I can find joy amid my sufferings for you, and I fill up in my own person whatever is lacking in Christ's afflictions on behalf of His Body, the Church.
Nonsense. Only those who are saved even get to purgatory, so nobody can "work their way into salvation" there.
People like child-murderers are one of the reason why Hell makes perfect sense. For certain crimes, there is simply no suitable punishment this side of the grave.
Amen and BTTT
Ironically, someone rather noteworthy once said, "except ye be as children you shall never see the Kingdom of Heaven," but you probably already knew that.
The debating society have arrived.
Hell is right here in the US in LA on a bad smog day. It gets so bad they send a lot of smog here to the Grand Canyon area. Ahnold is going to stop smog, he says.
Limbo is not Purgatory. Limbo is/was thought to be a place where the souls of unbaptized children would rest until the Final Judgment occurs.
Purgatory is the location where the souls of those who are not filled with sanctifying grace are "purged" until they can finally behold the Beatific Vision of God. Those in Purgatory know that they will see God at some point which is a cause of hope, but cannot behold Him now with their imperfections which is a cause for their misery.
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