I’m going to be late to Sunday School, fooling around with y’all.
Interesting thing (speaking of Great Debates)in the papers last Monday. Seems that His Holiness John Paul has been saying over the past few weeks that we Christians need to stop worrying about heaven and hell as clouds, mansions, and pits of fire but that we should think of heaven as fully appreciating the spiritual dimension in which God dwells; of being allied with the generative, creative forces of Good; and of making life better here on earth for ourselves and our fellow men. Hell, he is reported to have said, is about choosing to turn your back on those creative, loving expressions of will and actively opposing love, creation, mercy and truth. Predictably, this got the major Protestant leaders (read: Southern Baptists) in an uproar because they argue for a literal interpretation of Hell/sheol/garbage heap/flaming lake of fire rather than the more poetic interpretation the Pope takes of the text.
Now I’m not Catholic, so I don’t know. a) IS that what he’s been teaching recently? and b) What do you all think of that? I, for one, think he’s hit the nail dead on the head: like whoever said it above, I can’t picture a loving God making a torture chamber but I can sure see the results of some of our freely-willed choices tormenting us when we come into a full realization of how badly we’ve messed up.
Also, on the “faith as small as a mustard seed” part: a mustard seed is about half the size of a sesame seed but it grows into a HUGE leafy bush. Similarly, our tiny faith, our actions for the Good, no matter how small, have the potential to become hugely important helps to the world. I’m sure all of us have had the experience of doing something for someone that meant little to us but which made a great deal of difference in their lives. (Ex: teaching people to read, holding them when they’re hurting, lending money we could afford to lose to get someone out of a jam, a smile or kind word offered when needed.) That’s sort of my interpretation of the two or more gathered in His name: when we do those good things we are working on the side of Good and He, in person (for the faithful) and by example (at a more concrete level), is there with us.
Okay, if I can do all things thru Christ who strengthens me, you’d think I could get to church on time! Y’all have a great day!
DianneCar, I’m not sure what prompted JP II’s comments (did he really make a recent speech on the subject?), but that is fully in keeping with RCC teachings.
I learned that heaven was a “spiritual state” in grade school before Vatican II. The on-line Catholic Encyclopedia (the 1913 edition!) says (among a lot of other things):
I was always taught that “earth” in the above quote meant “physical universe” rather than our planet.
Similarly, Hell has always been defined to me as simply being eternally separated from God. God does not condemn people to fire; people who reject God discover that they have made a permanent commitment and joy is the presence of God while torture is His absence.
Forgive me if this is going over ground already covered in the Great God Debate, but even if hell is merely the absence of God, I don’t see that that completely lets God off the hook for the suffering of the damned. Suppose that, when I was born, my parents had put me in an orphanage. At a certain point, they send me a messenger who says, “I come on behalf of your parents. If you believe me and come with me, they’ll accept you with open arms and give you everything you want, but if you don’t believe me, you’ll live and die parentless. They want you to make a free-will decision whether or not to believe in them.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but my first response would be, “Either this guy is conning me, or my parents are nuts.” My real parents didn’t do this to me because they don’t CARE whether I make a free-will decision whether to believe in them or not. From the time I was born, I had no choice about believing that they exist. Why God should have made us in such a way that we can only be happy in his presence, yet make his presence dependent upon our believing in him in spite of scanty evidence, is beyond me. Why people claiming to be God’s messengers should say that, however, is abundantly clear.
Well, again, the question was specifically regarding the RCC beliefs and those beliefs do not include damning people for not being Catholic or for not being Christian or for not believing in God in some specific way. There is more info on the subject on page 3 of the “Let ARG220 Live?” thread in the BBQ pit.
You’re right, Tom, I was being mentally led astray by the fact that some Evangelicals also have the Catholic view of hell but have a different view of how you get there, and not long ago I was having an argument with an Evangelical on this very subject.
The RCC teaching, frankly, I don’t understand well enough to comment on. Your explanation of it was interesting but left me with unanswered questions. However, we’ve already dragged this thread too far away from its subject so maybe another time.
Sorry for the delay in answering, you can well see why analogies using life on earth to explain Godly things don’t completely hold up.
I understand you counter-analogy of never having known the parents and also the orphanage. But God is not a person here on earth, yes I believe that Jesus was God on earth, but he was only here for a short time.
Let’s say God did reveal himself, what would he have to do to get you to believe it was him? If you did believe and he told you to read the bible that he left, would you want more?
There is a joke.
A town begins to flood and a local believer proclaims that God will save him. The water rises to the level of his porch, a boat comes along and he is invited in. The man says, “No God will save me from this flood.” The water continues to rise and he climbs to the roof of the porch, another boat comes along and again he refuses to go proclaiming God will save him. The water continues to rise and he climbs to the second story on his house, a helicopter comes and he still proclaims, “God will save me, I have faith.” Eventually, he dies in the flood. When he gets to Heaven, he asks God, “Why did you not save me from the flood?” God’s reply, “I sent two boats and a helicopter, what more did you want?”
The point is God sent us the Bible, by communicating with others in the past, He sent his son Jesus to be the ultimate sacrifice, he gave humans a nature to seek something more than themselves and he still communicates with people today. We are the messengers of God, we are to show all people what a loving God he truely is. If you choose not to believe the bible and the followers, then what more do you want God to do?
