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
And they'll burn along with all the American aborigines who lived here prior to 1492, I suppose? And all the African natives prior to European colonialism. And the Japanese. And the Thais, Malays, and Eskimos.
And how about babies who aren't yet old enough to understand? Do they go to the Hot Place, too? What about aborted children? Miscarried babies? The mentally handicapped who can't understand the Gospel message? The comatose? That deaf, dumb, and blind kid that sure plays a mean pinball? They're all going to fry like taco meat because they never invited Jesus into their hearts as their personal Savior?
Post 123
old question, old answer
I agree, but he doesn't.
PREPOSTEROUS!!!!!!!!
He did not say that. He said they are a state of being; NOT of this world, but the next. You appear to think that Eternity is not real. Quite the contrary: Eternity is far more real than this life.
"Hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy”."
What could possibly be more horrible than eternal separation from God? Nothing, of course ...
sorry. He must have forgotten that he OWES us.
Forgive me if your explanation is lacking in humility and authenticity.
This is a big argument about what is "real," I think.
I was repeating something I thought I read...I'll do more research...
well, subsititute Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melancthon, Ridley, Latimer, Knox, and Chalmers for "Dreams of Polycarp" and you pretty much nailed it.
You leaving Free Republic or something?
"An abstraction" could legitimately be called "all in your head" ... but the Pope specifically denies that Heaven or Hell are mere abstractions. "A place in the clouds" would imply that one could theoretically get into a sufficiently powerful spaceship and fly there ... a spectacularly childish (not childlike) notion of Heaven or Hell, which again the Pope rejects.
In order to get to Heaven or Hell, one must die ... the Pope asserts that they are indeed real, but of an order of reality different from space and time. If one rejects the possibility of a reality different from space and time, then the Pope's words will make no sense. Neither will the Bible make any sense.
Ha Ha Ha... thanks. And what has personal interpretation given us? 30,000 or so denominations? What happened to the one Church that Christ promised He would build? Or did I misunderstand... He meant the 30,000 (and growing) denominations that men would build. Tell you what, you throw out what you have learned through your family and your pastor and then come back to me.
John 5:39 You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you possess eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
Christ is very clearly pointing out that understanding the Scriptures isn't as easy as reading it. We all learn from each other more about God's Word and its depth every day. Are we disregard these insights and only grasp what we can ourselves comprehend? If so, the Christian Bookstores are going to close tomorrow.
No. Fundamentally, it comes down to a question of authority. The Catholic Church believes in the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. However, Scripture is not complete unto itself. Just as the Disciples on the road to Emmaus had the Scriptures explained to them, the Holy Spirit has guided the Church through the centuries to understand what was written. God didn't stop speaking to us with Books that were written 2000 years ago. The Spirit is alive and moving in the Church revealing more as salvation history unfolds.
The Church recognizes the voice of the Holy Spirit in three ways:
- Scripture
- Tradition (primarily the Liturgy)
- Magisterium (the Church's teachings)
I will no more throw out my Catechism when discussing Christ than you would toss aside the Scriptures themselves... because the Catechism helps explain what is written.
Nope...But you tell us about it, o wise one...
It's a simile, Bob.
You folks need to realize that GOD is way way less concerned about protecting himself against arrogant stupidity like that than you are.
I disagree intensely with what the guy wrote (reroduced in my own post). However, I don't want to give people an excuse to think that God is as neurotic as we are.
Good answers I was praying and contemplating what to answer and you did it for me.
;-)
Not a Monster but Just.
Where God is sin cannot be so a person not cleansed is not allowed to be with God and will be seperated from him in Hell.
"We cannot go on as some churches do without converts. We cannot, we will not, we must not, we dare not. Souls must be converted here. And if there be not many born to Christ, may the Lord grant to me that I might sleep in the tomb and be heard no more. Better indeed for us to die than to live if souls be not saved. If sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies, and if they perish, let them perish with our arms around their knees imploring them to stay. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let no one go there unwarned or unprayed for."
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
My problem is that if there is a God, he's not the dude who his believers claim. He's got plenty of emotional issues and he's hardly perfect and he makes loads of mistakes-- which would make him more like a real, human father. Still, it's hard to get passed the sadistic streak he has in him.
No.
I'm a little rusty so this may not be technically exact..
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