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Religion

2010-02-01 08:42:00

Why can’t it be a simple “yes” or “no?”

Question: So often Pastors, Ministers and Clergy seemingly “dance” around the answers to two questions: “If one lives a good and moral life, helping others, yet never accepts our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son, as his or her personal Savior, and that He came down from Heaven to suffer and die for each of us, to purchase our salvation…will he be saved?” I would think with the billions of people that have been born into this life, the answer should be either a simple “yes” or “no.” The second question, “If there are only two possibilities (Heaven or Hell), will an all-merciful and all-just God condemn a person like this to Hell?”

Answer: God, by definition, is all-merciful and all-just! Since you want a simple answer, I say to your first question: YES. And to your second question: NO. If you wish some explanation, as we are dealing with a very important matter, namely the final judgment and destination of each individual human being, I shall write a bit further. But you already have my conclusion to your questions. A person, who lives a good moral life, helping others, implicitly recognizes and honors God, whether he/she knows and accepts God and Jesus as his personal Savior. Indeed through his/her good works a person is pleasing to God, and can be saved. Without realizing it, he/she belongs to Jesus and is saved by him. Every authentic good work is ultimately inspired by God’s Holy Spirit. This being said, Faith and Baptism are still necessary for salvation. However, the person who is unaware of that truth but intends to honor God, can be considered to have Faith in God (as did Abraham before he was circumcised), and to have Baptism of Desire, as do those good persons who do not know Jesus (the case with many good-willed persons on this earth, who have never even heard of Jesus and salvation through Him). Only if a naturally-good person knows God’s will about the necessity of Faith and Baptism, and then freely rejects it and rejects Jesus Christ, is he/she deprived of salvation. Their good works are natural virtues, which may merit some kind of reward from God but, lacking any kind of Faith and Baptism, they cannot see God. St. Thomas Aquinas explains that God, in his mercy, assigns such persons to a kind of natural paradise, where they enjoy natural happiness, but are deprived of the much greater supernatural happiness with the blessed Vision of God and his saints in heaven. Of course, those unfortunate persons, who have deliberately and knowingly rejected God and the salvation wrought by Jesus, go to hell. Only God knows their whole life, from birth to death, and only He is able to judge each person. Perhaps some person, whose life is a compendium of evil, will be so ignorant and badly-taught, and their will trained in perversity: that their sins cry out to heaven for vengeance, might be excused by God in virtue of some good work they may have performed unselfishly or through the prayers of someone else who loved them. Only God knows who can and will be saved through some kind of Faith and Baptism. I believe, with Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, that unborn infants, who die in their mother’s womb or are aborted, are saved through the Faith of good parents, or the Faith of holy mother the Church, who desires such persons, whether a fetus or an infant, to be saved. The Catholic Church believes in Purgatory. God, in his kindness, has provided a kind of intermediate state or situation, wherein those persons who die in God’s friendship, but were only imperfectly purified of some sins on their soul, at their particular judgment are assigned by God to a final cleansing of human imperfection. Every sin, even small or venial, entails an unhealthy attachment to creatures, and must be purified either here on earth or after death. This purification is called Purgatory (from the Latin word “purgare” -- to cleanse, to purify). Those sins will be purged (cleansed) through appropriate punishment before they are able to enter the joy of heaven. This is because only those souls, which are free from any attachment to sin, are in heaven. This punishment should not be conceived as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin. Repentance or conversion, which proceeds from a fervent charity, can attain the complete purification of the sinner in such a way that no punishment would remain to delay their entering into heaven. The consolation of Purgatory is that it is temporary. The souls detained there know they are saved, and that sooner or later they will go to heaven.