Monthly Archives: April 2007

Bidding farewell to limbo

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The Catholic Church has finally got its act in gear and published a document burying limbo. While never a formal part of the Church’s doctrine, it was taught for generations; in medieval Christian theology it was where the unbaptised dead went, even the good people who lived before Jesus.

But what got the Church moving on the issue was the spiritual destination for unbaptised babies, who were, according to the theory, sent to limbo. This is because of the Church’s doctrine of original sin; i.e. the sin of Adam and Eve in giving into temptation. Baptism is said to wash this sin away, leaving one’s soul squeaky clean.

That’s fine if you’re an adult or otherwise have some understanding of sin, confession, forgiveness, etc. But if you were unfortunate enough to be born and die shortly afterward without the requisite trickle of cold water over your forehead, off you went to that great waiting room in the sky.

Although it wasn’t necessarily a bad place to be. Thomas Aquinas considered it a state of natural happiness, although lacking the presence of God. Which is certainly a better fate for unbaptised infants than that espoused by Augustine of Hippo, who believed they went to hell.

I have never understood the logic in excluding infants from heaven. What could be more innocent than a newborn baby? I thought God was benevolent, loving and forgiving? And He would send babies to limbo because they couldn’t ask to be baptised? It all clashed horribly with the Christian teaching of salvation. Now the Catholic Church has come to its senses in this regard with a document called The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised.

The report by the International Theological Commission, authorised by Pope Benedict (who himself cast doubt on limbo before he was elevated the papacy), decided that limbo represents “an unduly restrictive view of salvation”.

“The conclusion of this study is that there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness even if there is not an explicit teaching on this question found in revelation,” it reads.

“There are reasons to hope that God will save these infants precisely because it was not possible (to baptize them).

“People find it increasingly difficult to accept that God is just and merciful if he excludes infants, who have no personal sins, from eternal happiness, whether they are Christian or non-Christian.”

The reference to non-Christian infants is particularly interesting. I look at it as a recognition of universal innocence; after all, babies have no understanding of the world and its foibles, and in that respect they’re all the same.

Of course, it is possible to argue that this is the Catholic Church staking a claim to the soul of every child born on the face of the Earth (and there’s no getting around its doctrine that salvation is only possible through Christianity, and the report stresses it is not challenging the concept of original sin). I am unsure if what the report says is intended to also be applied to non-Christian adults, although Rev Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center, seems to think so.

So there we have it. While the document lacks the weight of a papal bull, Benedict has nonetheless backed it. And while the report only expresses the “hope” that the non-baptised can go to heaven, hope is better than limbo.

The report can be read online at www.originsonline.com (log-in required).

Up in smoke

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AFP have a story of an Australian scientist with an unusual idea to help tackle global warming — ending the practice of cremation.

The guy, Professor Roger Short, is a reproductive biologist at the University of Melbourne.

“What a shame to be cremated when you go up in a big bubble of carbon dioxide,” he says. “Why waste all that carbon dioxide on your death?”

And he even has a suggestion for a ‘greener’ death: be buried under a tree in a cardboard box (as ’tis biodegradable). The body would nourish the plant which would in turn convert evil CO2 into gorgeous, sexy oxygen, keeping us all going that little bit longer.

Not that cremation is a leading cause of climate change (as even the man himself admits, hastily adding that he did not want to prevent people disposing of their bodies according to their beliefs).

But it does raise the issue of how little things can make a difference, whether it be washing clothes at a lower temperature, turning off the lights when you leave a room or being buried under a tree. And that’s something which will always fascinate me: how the most insignificant or run of the mill events can make a huge impact further down the line.

The best exploration of this notion I can think of would be ‘virtual’ history. This is perhaps better known as ‘what if?’ history.

For instance, William H McNeill, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, wrote an intriguing article focusing on disease, “one of the wildcards of history”.

He looked at the siegeof Jerusalem by the Assyrians in 701 BCE. The siege was lifted because a disease swept through the army of the Assyrian king Sennacherib. As Judah was a minor kingdom in the region, poorer and weaker than its neighbours, the Assyrian force moved on. McNeill points out that Sennacherib’s forces had already dominated the tiny kingdom anyway; what was one more city? The larger, wealthier part of David’s kingdom, Israel, had been extinguished some 21 years earlier.

McNeill notes that “common sense” in the region was “that the gods worshipped by different peoples protected their worshippers as best they could. Victory and defeat therefore registered the power of rival deities as well as the strength of merely human armies”. The departure of the Assyrian force was a propaganda victory for Hezekiah and the refomers.

“Thus, according to the Bible (e.g., the Book of Isaiah), God saved his people and destroyed the impious Assyrians by spreading lethal pestilence among them. Such a miraculous deliverance showed that both King Hezekiah and the prophet of Isaiah (whom Hezekiah consulted with) were right to rely on God’s power and protection.

More than that: it proved God’s power over the mightiest ruler of the age. Who then could doubt that the prophets and priests of Judah, who so boldly proclaimed God’s universal power, were telling the truth?”

The result was that a religious reformation the king of Judah, Hezekiah, had supported was able to sink roots. And it meant that when Jerusalem was finally conquered by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE, and its inhabitants brought into exile in Babylon, their faith was strong enough to endure. The idea of an omnipotent God was so ingrained in the people that even the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem was not enough to encourage them to abandon His worship.

The people of Israel had lost their identity following their conquest; “by accepting commonsense views about the limits of divine power, they abandoned the worship of Jahweh, who had failed to protect them”. Not so for the citizens of Jerusalem, who interpreted their defeat as punishment for Judah’s failure to obey God’s commandments as well as they ought. Ultimately, these exiles “reorganised their scriptures to create an unambiguously monotheistic, congregational religion, independent of place and emancipation from the rites of Solomon’s destroyed temple in Jerusalem”.

So, one little plague outside the walls of a city in a minor kingdom some 2,700 years ago ultimately led to the rise of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What would the world be like without them? Would we have a world full of gods? A world without any?

And now it is time to sleep.