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Pastimes : Neocon's Seminar Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cAPSLOCK who wrote (412)	4/23/2001 3:38:52 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1112

The signals are a bit confused, aren't they? The Lutheran doctrine, of course, is that faith is the sole "justification". The Roman Catholic doctrine is that faith, hope, and love go together, and that if one has faith, one will have "caritas", and therefore perform good works. If one sins gravely enough, one loses grace, and needs to do penance in order to be reinstated into grace. Thus, one does not earn Heaven through works, since grace precedes and motivates the works, but one can lose Heaven through sin. According to the (non- binding) tradition, as, for example, shown in Dante, Hell has levels. At the highest level, those who were virtuous, but without grace, reside, like Socrates, lit by the light of Reason, but unable to stand in the presence of God. A little lower, in Limbo, are the souls of unbaptized babies who had died, without pain, but without God, and so on down the line. Some of this complexity fits with the various passages you cite, some merely add new complexities, but I thought it worth mentioning. Purgatory is, of course, not Biblical, but is widely (not universally) accepted among the Eastern Orthodox, and is solid doctrine in Roman Catholicism. They claim it is part of the Oral Tradition. Anyway, you might find interesting a book by C.S. Lewis called "The Great Divorce", which is a sort of theological novel about these issues........