Posted on 10/10/2004 4:38:20 PM PDT by Stubborn
The Second Vatican Council's reforms and the new theological challenges it posed placed the question of unbaptized babies on the back burner for most theologians, but many bishops around the world have asked the doctrinal congregation for guidance on the question.
Mat. 5:17 Do not think that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.
5:18 For amen I say unto you, till heaven and pass, one jot, or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled.
Until the Ascension of Our Lord into Heaven, the state for those just departed souls was known as "Hell" or "the Limbo of the Just." This Limbo was for those who, antecedent to the coming of Our Lord, believed He was coming, and believed He was to be the Saviour and the Redeemer of the world. Well, we no longer believe He is coming, we believe He came and established His Kingdom here on earth, i.e. His Church, of which we must all belong to if we wish to get into His kingdom in heaven.
The reason the saints of the OT were there in hell, i.e., Limbo, and not in heaven, is original sin, which they had contracted from Adam, and from which, as members of the human race, they could not be delivered except by Christ.
Also, note that the only reason we even needed a Redeemer at all is strictly on account of the sin of Adam, i.e. Original Sin. Were it not for Original Sin, there would be no Limbo or middle place, only Heaven (for us) and Hell (only for the fallen angels).
Many folks seem to think that Baptism has always been - but thats simply not so. It is a Sacrament of the New Law - one of the Seven Sacraments established by God before He ascended into Heaven.
Baptism is so necessary that thats why the Precursor, the one who readied the world for Christ was, St. John the Baptist. All St. John the Baptist did was preach the importance of and perform Baptisms. Also interesting to note is that unlike most other martyrs, although he was beheaded, he is not known as St. John the Martyr.
I already like this thread but I know it can get better! :-)
I think the question is very simple. If someone is joined to God, they are sanctified with his grace and filled with the divine life.
If they are not, then they are seperated from God.
When people come into this world, their souls can either be filled with grace, or devoid of grace. There isn't a middle ground here, and it has nothing to do with St. Augustine and his theories.
The fundemental reason for Baptism is to join us to Christ. To be joined to Christ is to be sanctified.
If little children are already born sanctified, then Baptism is nothing but an empty formality (what many Protestants preach).
If little children are born seperated from God, what we then term "the remission of sins" or "the remission of original sin" is the filling of their infant souls with grace, and the infusion of faith, hope, and charity, through the instrumentality of the Sacrament.
To have a sould devoid of grace, and to be living apart from God is to be living in a state of sin. This is what the Roman Church teaches regarding the state of humanity before Baptism. Mortal sins comitted later in life compound this state of sin by adding the guilt of actual sin and the meriting of the divine wrath to the already existant state of not being united to God in grace.
Basically, original sin is a state of existence, not an action for which anyone is formally guilty besides Adam and Eve. Trent says that Adam "transfused ... into the whole human race ... the death of the soul", because the deprivation of grace for the soul also deprives it of union with Christ. Thus, "by reason of this rule of faith, from a tradition of the apostles, even infants, who could not as yet commit any sin of themselves, are for this cause truly baptized for the remission of sins, that in them that may be cleansed away by regeneration, which they have contracted by generation."
Basically, infants contract by generation the absence of grace, "the death of the soul", and this is cleansed away by Baptism which infuses grace and creates life in the soul where none previously existed.
Simple question, perhaps, but the answer, doubtless is not. I have observed that children, from birth, exhibit different personalities.
I do not pretend to be anywhere near as theologically learned as many of the posters here seem, but are there varying degrees of grace? Might some children be born, regardless of earthly circumstance, to be more happy and cheerful than others, reflecting greater peace with the Lord?
No, don't keep Kosher anymore. I can see your point and can agree with your reasoning - but as He said, He did not destroy the old law, he came to fulfill it.
Did Adam and Eve believe the Lord was coming? Are they in this "Limbo of the Just"? Is Limbo mentioned in the Bible at all? Is this just a concept once again made up by lawyers to rationalize beliefs? If this hell, this limbo of the just, is where those who believed god was coming went to after they died, where did those who did not believe in the coming of the lord, perhaps those who were on the other side of the planet, go?
Eph 4:9, Mat 12:40 are a few references. Those who did not believe in a Redeemer to come and died in sin went to Hell for all eternity.
A contract typically requires the agreement between at least two parties. How did the saints of the OT, or anyone for that matter, agree to be burdened by the sins of Adam? How did Adam contract with God that any sin of his would be passed down to future generations? Using the language of contract is not appropriate here. It is, in actuality, a "curse" that is passed on from one generation to the next, just like in those old witch stories.
Original Sin is no contract, it is a sin we inhereted from our first parents.
There you go. You said it. There is a new law, different from the old. The law changed.
I see what you are saying and can agree with you. No matter though, the New Law was fortold of in the OT, but baptism was not the requirement until the NT. Same as circumcision was required in the OT, but not in the NT.
Protestants believe that baptism is a proclamation that one has made a decision to accept Jesus Christ as one's Lord and Savior. Jesus Himself was baptised, and since He was without sin, His baptism could not take away any sin.
I have personally never been able to find, nor have I ever heard of any comandment in the Scriptures that infants be baptised. Since baptism is basically a public announcement of a decision to accept Christ, and infants are incapable of making that decision, there is no justification in Christianity for baptising infants. It can actually be harmful in the sense that it can give individuals who were baptized as infants the (in the absence of an actual salvation decision and experience) false belief that their sins are forgiven in God's eyes based on their infant baptism.
The saints of the OT who were in Limbo may well have been there not only because they could not get into heaven yet, but also because of there own sins - no one knows. The thing is, is that as long as they made it to Limbo, heaven was a sure thing - just a matter of time.
No one knows for positive what the fate of the unbaptised baby is. All we know for sure is that no one gets into heaven with any trace of sin on their souls. Since we are all conceived and born with sin on our souls and since Baptism is the remedy Christ left us for original sin, conventional reasoning tells us the only way an unbaptised infant can enter heaven if it were to be conceived without sin.
Now, we know that, aside from Our Lord, only Our Lady was conceived without sin. We know that in order to be free from original sin, we must be baptised. If an infant dies before it is baptised, it dies in original sin, only guilty of the sin of Adam. To you and I and probably all people everywhere, that baby is innocent and should go straight to heaven with sin on its soul. But if we hold to that thinking, we will no longer believe Christ's words "Unless a man be born of water and the Holy Ghost he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven."
"But if we hold to that thinking, we will no longer believe Christ's words "Unless a man be born of water and the Holy Ghost he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven."
Yes, there are a few problems when one holds to a literal interpretation when a symbolic interpretation is demanded by the context. For example, the Good Thief- was he baptized? Now, if you look at the scripture you quoted in the context of the entirety of scripture, it becomes quite clear that the water in baptism is symbolic of true, inner repentence from sin and a true faith in Jesus as God. Water doesn't save- the resurrection of Jesus saves: "And this water SYMBOLIZES baptism that now saves you also-not the removal of dirt from the body but the PLEDGE of a good conscience toward God. IT SAVES YOU BY THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST" 1 Peter 3-21 (emphasis mine)
Regarding infants and children before the age of accountability, they are saved by the same thing everyone else is saved by- the resurrection of Jesus.
As far as a literal interpretation goes, Trent (among other councils) has already declared its interpretation as being literal. CANON II.-If any one saith, that true and natural water is not of necessity for baptism, and, on that account, wrests, to some sort of metaphor, those words of our Lord Jesus Christ; Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost; let him be anathema.
What about the baptism of desire? Or the "baptism by fire" of a battlefield conversion shortly before death and before the a baptism could be preformed?
Many years ago, my sister mis-carried in her 7th or 8th month, as soon as that baby's skin started to show, before it (he) was even fully out of the womb, the nurse, anxiously waiting, instantly baptised that infant because ya just never know. Well, perhaps these days they *would* know if and for how long the baby had been dead - but we never knew for sure if that baby made it to heaven or not - we never believed for sure that he made it but under the circumstances, to this day we hope God saw fit to allow him to be baptized before taking his soul.
If God saw fit to wait for that baby to be baptised before taking him, that baby is without one doubt, happy for all eternity in heaven, hopefully with my sister - if God however did not wait but instead took him hours or days? prior to the actual baptism, then we never believed that the baby went to heaven because no one makes it there with original sin - thats why baptism is so important. Its black or white, I fail to see that there can be another answer. We are all conceived with sin, no way around that, if God chooses to grant those infants with original sin into heaven, he never made mention of it and the Church has been cautiously quiet about it for a long time.
We simply cannot know why God would take a helpless baby out of this world at all, with or (God forbid) without Baptism. He has His own reasons - and we have hope, beyond that, we can only surmize our thoughts that perhaps in His mercy, He knew it was better to take that child out of this life than to allow him to be baptised then sin his whole life and end up suffering in Hell. That too would be mercifull. We will never know that till the next world.
>>Some Protestants challenged infant baptism, at the time of the Reformation, saying that it ought to be a choice taken by an adult (as it seems to have been in Gospel accounts.) <<
There is no such assertion in the bible that baptism was an adult choice. Naturally, since the key characters in the New Testament are all adults, the stories about baptism revolve around adults. But when the leader of a household was baptized, his entire household was baptised with him. It would be inconceivable that an entire household would include no children, for a household included not only the nuclear family, but also in-laws, kinfolk, slaves, and all their children! There is no chance that there were no children baptized.
Been doing a little reading myself and found the following to be really interesting and comforting. Hope it interests others too.
Following is the first creed that an ecumenical council decreed. It was the Creed of the 318 Fathers of Nicaea in 325:
We believe in one God, Father, All-ruler, maker of everything visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God, begotten unique out of the Father, that is out of the being of the Father; God out of God, light out of light, genuine God out of genuine God; begotten, not made; identical in being with the Father; the one through whom the universe was made, the things in heaven as well as the things on earth; for us human beings and for our salvation come down and incarnated, become man, executed, risen on the third day, gone up into heaven, and coming to judge the living and the dead.
And in the Holy Spirit.
The Catholic (and apostolic) church condemns those who say that there was 'then' when there was no son of God, and that he was not before he was begotten, and that he was made out of the things that are not, or who allege that he is out of a different hypostasis or being [from that of the Father] or that he is a creature or mutable or subject to change.
And here's the Second Creed, Creed of the 150 Fathers of Constantinople. Attributed to the second ecumenical Council.
We believe in one God, Father, All-ruler, maker of heaven and earth, of everything visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the unique son of God, begotten out of his Father before all ages; light out of light, genuine God out of genuine God; begotten, not made; identical in being with the Father; the one through whom the universe was made; for us human beings and for our salvation come down from heaven and endowed with flesh out of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and made a human being; crucified on our behalf under Pontius Pilate and executed and buried, and risen the third day according to the Scriptures, and gone up into heaven; and seated at the right hand of the Father, and coming again with glory to judge both the living and the dead; of whose kingly rule there shall be no end.
And in the Holy Spirit, the lordly and life-giving one; proceeding out of the Father; jointly adored and jointly glorified along with the Father and the Son; the one that spoke through the prophets.
In a single holy catholic and apostolic church.
We confess a single baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We await the resurrection of the dead and the life of the coming age. Amen.
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