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
re: 336
excellent post
look forward to your comments...have a safe flight....
Thanks. I've gone through periods of intensely inquisitive research into 'the argument from evil' and have determined that although there are minds far more powerful than mine similarly striving they are still just the minds of men, and by definition, no more capable of discerning the Truth than mine.
They're still alive; therefore they still have the opportunity to repent. Let us pray that God grants them the Grace of repentance, and that they accept and cooperate with it, and that they thereby turn from their evil ways.
Sin is separation from God.
This is well-stated. I'd add this: It's my experience that anything self-indulgant seperates me from my Higher Power, who I call God. Even things that might not normally be considered a sin seperate me from God -- the common theme is always acting out in Ego, or Self.
One of the quickest ways for me to get out of Self is to commit to, and be of service to others. If I ask myself "How can I best serve the person who is in front of me", I quickly get out of selfishness and self-centeredness. I quickly regain my conscious contact with the God of my understanding.
Is it hellfire and brimstone? Who knows - perhaps that's the way to describe the very terribleness of hell.
The aftermath of my very last 'using episode' was hell for me. I was disconnected from the girl I was dating at the time, I couldn't get my sponsor or anyone on my network, and my connection to God was shot-out. I was, utterly, alone -- and in great despair. That was sheer hell, but I am grateful for it, because it is what finally got me to live differently.
If there's no Free Republic it must be a pretty boring place!
"This news won't go over well in the bathhouses."
Bathhouses?! This won't even go over very well in many American church congregations!!
A bump to that Laz and if I may, an observation of my own...
How do I know hell exists?
Because, if it does not, then man would surely create it.
Peace,
jw
Sounds like most men should be cutting off their penis's.
"How do I know hell exists? Because, if it does not, then man would surely create it."
You got it, hell is a creation of man.
Christians could bring a lot more souls to God talking about how their faith has made their lives better than preaching fire and damnation.
Depends on the person, doesn't it?
Proverbs 1:7The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom
Proverbs 3:7
Fear the Lord and turn away from evil.
"Depends on the person, doesn't it?"
Yes, children or adults.
There, fixed it.
On the one hand, it's prudent to use evangelical techniques that are tailored to the audience, without watering down the Gospel message.
On the other hand, Christianity isn't about making friends and influencing people.
Luke 12:50-52In the end, the truth must be proclaimed."Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three."
Do Jews go to Hell forever? What about Hindus?
The Khmer Rouge followed a harsh brand of communism, killing nearly two million people in their bid to return Cambodia to Year Zero. Now they have a new faith: evangelical Christianity. Hundreds of former fighters have been baptised in the past year.
Many new converts were involved in the bloody battles, massacres and forced labour programmes that led to the Killing Fields.
According to one pastor, 70 per cent of the converts in Pailin are Khmer Rouge. For many, it offers a hope of salvation.
-end excerpt-
So do the Khmer butchers, IF their repentance is sincere, get an eternity in paradise, but their victims suffer in eternal torment? Seems the biblical answer is "yes". Do you agree?
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