Heaven, Hell, Limbo, General Thoughts

A great essay by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski has been posted at OnePeterFive.  However, just a note: Dr. Kwasniewski didn't mention Limbo. For a review of that, see this old Catholic Encyclopedia article for a discussion of Limbus patrum and Limbus infantium. Regarding the latter, after reviewing it, I was once again struck by the severity of the disagreement between the most eminent theologians in the Church's history.

Being followers of the Lord Christ isn't easy, on many levels, as all here know and have often attested. Even Dr. Kwasniewski has discussed how difficult his life has been -- has been made to have been -- for following the Traditional Faith. And in general, for a Christian, the question of Hell and who goes there is one of the difficulties. We can read Holy Writ that makes it plain those without Our Blessed Lord are Hell-bound, and He Himself plainly says the road to Hell is wide and easy. (Matt 7:13, for example.) But he also tells the Pharisees "not to judge" -- meaning not to judge specific individuals' final destination. (He clearly teaches us to judge immoral behavior and shun those who insist on practicing it: see Matt 18 about the brother who sins.) And what of all those of the human race who never heard of Him at all?

Also, if we stress Hell too much, we turn off people. Now, mind me, I don't mean the modern Vatican II Church's pablum about that; I mean in the old-time preachin' down in the hills, or among the Calvinist Orangemen: the endless focus on Hell produced serious neurosis. I've heard a number of first-hand accounts of individuals who either went mad or certainly got as far away from "religion" as they could because of it. Ironically, a successful revival, like The Great Awakening, too often left what wags called a "Burnt out" or "Burnt over" district. As in most things, I suppose, there's a Golden Mean in preaching Hell. Clearly, though, we've gone far, far, way too far into the "Don't worry, there, there" school of religion as therapy. The Christian Faith is Faith first, the Transformation in Christ, the infusion of Grace; and if there's anything "therapeutic" about that, it comes of Our Lord's boundless Grace.

But perhaps the real problem is that while it is clearly necessary to preach Hell, we can't judge individuals as to whether they go there or not. (So many of us SO want to say that of people we know, but it is as much the sin of presumption as saying a recently deceased went to Heaven!)

Oh, certain cases are plain: Hitler, for example. If Adolph went to the Pearly Gates and St. Pete threw them wide open and said, "Adolph! Come on in!" Hitler would look in and see countless Jews -- Ancient Jews, Jews at the time of Our Lord on Earth, and Jews in plenty thereafter because we non-Jews become descendants of Abraham and members of the Covenant via Baptism and especially the Most Holy Eucharist. Hitler wouldn't enter Heaven because it is full of Jews! Or take a pornographer (various names come to mind): they'd look in through the Pearly Gates and see the most beautiful, attractive people imaginable, beyond their imagination, indeed! But they'd see NO lust! "To Hell with this!" they would say and go look deep past the Gates of Hell. There they'd see infinite ugliness, but lust the likes of which they never dreamed of. Guess where they'd go. In a real way, one can say, each individual chooses Heaven or Hell for themselves, with Our Lord God on Judgment Day reflecting them back to themselves in perfect clarity, such that each of us will know upon that instant whether we really wanted to do God's will in our lives, or thwart it. (In that moment, we'll be like the angels were on their Day of Judgment, knowing what they knew in absolutely perfect clarity.)

[Note that Matt 25, starting at verse 31, would suggest everyone is surprised by their sentence of Bliss or Damnation, the opposite of this idea I mention, or seemingly so. One must remember that the dead are outside of time, in what Boethius called "the Boundless Now", so all moments are eternally "present". No one will celebrate their millionth year in Heaven or lament their millionth year in Hell: time there doesn't exist as we experience it on Earth.]
Finally, there's the question of justice. Justice is giving something its due. Rejection of God is due Hell, as a matter of justice. Without Hell -- which as Dr. K shows the Vat2 Church really isn't "into" ("We're just so NOT into Hell, peeps!" say the hip Vat2 prelates), there's no justice for those who reject Our Lord, and they deserve justice just as much as anyone else; in other words, without Hell, there'd be no justice for those who obeyed Him, either, those who entered into the Covenants He established for our salvation, and who, despite temptations, and by God's bountiful Grace that enabled us to stay in the Covenants, stayed fast. The "there's no Hell/no one in Hell" crowd have simply no answer to this argument.

Ultimately, there's one thing I certainly believe about this matter, one sure and certain thing. All the Damned and all the Saved and all the (I suspect, just an opinion, quite a host) in Limbo, will all aver with the strictest conviction what ol' Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural, when he quoted the Psalmist, in the second half of verse 9 of Psalm 19, "...The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Amen to that!

An Préachán

Christ the King: A Catholic Essay on Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism, and How Salvation Works, Part II Original Sin

Now, a bit about Original Sin on this Holy Feast Day, a Feast Day Pius XI instituted as a counter to the Protestants' Reformation Sunday. Protestants believed historically in Original Sin, and many still do, but definitely not in the way Catholicism does.

Original Sin: G.K. Chesterton wrote that Original Sin was the only Church doctrine one could prove by merely opening the daily newspaper. This recent horror in Pittsburgh is an example of opening the daily paper (or accessing the Web) and seeing Original Sin.


Jews famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) don't believe in Original Sin. Classical Protestantism embraced it, but not in the Catholic way. Protestantism insisted that Original Sin meant people were worthless rags, utter failures, or "Totally Depraved" as Jean Calvin taught it in the famous Reformed Church acronym of "T.U.L.I.P". Thus, we're all miserable rats, fiends, selfish and savage. (And all too often, many people seem to want to be precisely so horrible as all that! Hell is their choice, and God always gives you what you want.) But through an act of faith, i.e., personal and then public acceptance of Jesus as Lord, God would then "cover" their sins -- and sinful nature -- with the snow of His Son's Righteousness. We would be made "right with God" even though sinners. Luther called this Justified but a Sinner. "Simul Justus et Peccator." This is defined as "imputed righteousness." Luther said we were thus like manure piles covered with snow. (I grew up on a dairy farm and this is quite a clever metaphor.)


Most traditional Protestants still believe this, though the more Modernist or Progressive ones don't (they don't believe in sin very much at all, unless being non-Politically Correct is a sin to them). In any event, such fallen wretches can not possible make good subjects for Christ as King of the Here and Now, so Protestants teach His kingship comes at the end of the ages. 


Contra this, the Orthodoxies (Catholicism, etc.) teach that Original Sin means we're not "plugged in" to God as we were when first made. We can thus go either way in life, in terms of being good people or bad, although usually we go the downward way. However, we're all far, far, far from worthless, and some can achieve profoundly all on their own (think of Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle, etc., or the local "good atheist" who does great charity work and so on). However, no matter how good (or of course, bad) an individual may be, he or she cannot be "saved", made right with God; or to put it another way, a less Protestant way: our current, fallen, nature is such that as to prevent us from ever "seeing God" in the Beatific Vision.


Our natures, our very essence, thus must be remade, and this is what the Incarnation is all about. Eastern Orthodoxies -- whether in Communion with Rome, as many of the small ones are -- or not, all stress the Incarnation aspect of Salvation. They dwell on the mystery of the Incarnate God, ruling all history and creation as He is now, today, and as revealed in the Book of Revelation. Catholicism on the other hand, because of St. Augustine, tends to contemplate Christ as Crucified, hanging on the Cross, beaten, bloody, redeeming our sins through His sacrifice. These are two sides of the same Salvation coin, of course.


That is why when you walk into a traditional Catholics church, you're sure to see a large Crucifix. But when you walk into an Eastern liturgy church, you see Christ as Pantokrator, Ruler of All, on high (usually on its central dome).


Now, both Catholicism and the Orthodoxies are "orthodox" in that they teach the full Gospel, i.e., that the Incarnation and the Crucifixion go together. The difference is one of stress. But Catholicism's stress on the Crucifixion resulted in Protestantism, which is all about "Jesus died for my sins!" Protestantism focuses on the Cross to the point they can't really appreciate the Incarnation. The Incarnation is about the change in OUR natures ultimately. Protestants deny, however, as Luther went to great pains to deny, that there is any "change of nature." We're manure piles under beautiful robes. C.S. Lewis, in his 10th Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, refutes (very politely) this central Protestant teaching.


The question is: why the Incarnation? Why did God have to become Man? What is all that about, anyway? And the answer is that by the Incarnation, God elevated our natures so that we could then participate in the Divine Nature. That is what Salvation ultimately is. "We are new creations in Christ Jesus," as St. Paul says at least once in most of his letters, one way or another, "the old nature is gone; the new is here!" And this is the idea of Jesus' comments on to Nicodemus in St John about being "born again", i.e., literally receiving a new nature, born of the water and the Spirit, which is the Catholic / Orthodox understanding of the Sacrament of Baptism, and we receive the spirit of sonship (as St. Paul put it in Romans).


To rephrase it and bring in the help of angelic friends, angels by their inherent nature shared God's nature as pure spirit, and once they chose for or against God, they were locked in -- or locked out -- of God's presence for all eternity. This is simple to understand: if you are in Eternity and you make a choice, that choice is -- surprise, surprise -- eternal. One doesn't celebrate one's millionth year in Heaven or lament one's millionth year in Hell. There are no years in Eternity. Only what Boethius called the "Bound Now". (Thus anyone trying to make the argument that a good God would not consign someone to Hell forever is ridiculous -- there's no "forever" in Heaven or Hell, only the Boundless Present.


Humans are made in the image and likeness of God, as well, not in that the Lord of Hosts looked like Adam or had a physical nature in any way, but that we have minds that can comprehend, sort, catalog, figure out, project, extrapolate, and in general, be rational. These minds are eternal, mirroring God and the angelic minds. We're thus both the highest animals and lowest (sorta) angels, in the mind/soul sense. Original Sin locked us out of full participation in God, but the Incarnation opened the door for us that way, and opened it in a new and higher level entirely, so that now, incredibly, the Lord of Hosts Himself (Christians believe) is not pure spirit any more, but the Second Person is both God and Man, two natures, one Person. And we can share in that through the Sacrament, changed in our own very natures.


So, thus, Original Sin only means that an individual, no matter how good, can not be with God as God intended until that person participates in God's long-running plan of Salvation. We're not totally depraved, though many seem to want to go that way. But we're not sinless either, in the sense we don't have the supernatural help and cleansing all the Sacraments give, especially Baptism, which removes the Original Sin issue.


One final note: The Easterners don't believe unbaptized babies go to Limbo, and certainly not Hell. The Westerners (again because of St. Augustine to some large extent) believe unbaptized children can at best go to Limbo (or the Celtic Otherworld or Native Americans' Happy Hunting Grounds, or the Elysian Fields, however you wish to see it). St. Thomas Aquinas argued for the latter against those who taught the Hell destination idea. St. Robert Bellarmine, 1542 to 1621, was about the last important theologian who taught they went to Hell, if I recall correctly. The question today is generally held in abeyance, or to coin a phrase, Limbo. I've had children who didn't make it to birth and should I be blessed with Heaven, and they're in Limbo, I'm going to go be with them. We are made for the Beatific Vision, but as their father, I'm responsible for them. There are no angel families or clans, but there are with us. And God works through us for the general Salvation, to the extreme and astounding extent He became one of us Himself. 

Certainly the Lord of All Creation, the King of All, and a Father Himself, would understand, and fix it up to fulfill His glory and our destiny.

An Préachám