Limbering Limbo
“Pope tries to win hearts and minds by saving souls of unbaptised babies”
In perhaps one of the best headlines of the year, the UK Times announced to its readers what has been circulating in clandestine Catholic circles for some time: The traditional teaching of limbo will be officially declared dead by Bene later this month. Some have speculated that this announcement comes all-too-quickly on the heels of the Pontiff’s recent “Islam is a religion of peace” flop, but whisper of this development reached even me in the modest Archdiocese of Indianapolis earlier this year.
As the International Theological Commission noted earlier this week, the Church’s teaching on limbo (as well as Eastern Rite Catholics’) is a matter de fide, and has never been dogmatically defined by the ordinary or extraordinary magisterium.
While I believe that St. Augustine made the first case for something similar to limbo, it was not until the time of the Angelic Doctor that limbo took a more definite form. Yet, interestingly, both Augustine and Aquinas held that anything like the limbo we think we know is dangerous theologically: Augustine was battling the Pelagian view that there was some “intermediate” station for unbaptized “good” folk, and persuaded the Council of Carthage (418) that without baptism the Beatific Vision is impossible (John 3:5). Aquinas departed from an Augustinian conception of original sin rooted in concupiscence, emphasizing just punishment. Thus, for Aquinas (and Anselm), “limbo” is a state of enternal happiness, but not the full Beatific Vision of heaven.
Popular piety has a way of developing into a theology of its own, sometime to the detriment of Faith. Sometimes we get a little Dante and Milton along the way.
Interesting post. Not being Catholic, I had to look up what “limbo” is.
We Protestants consider baptism to be something that happens *after* salvation, as an act of obedience and public testimony. Therefore, the issue is not whether an infant has been baptised, but whether she/he has accepted Christ as her/his savior. And most Protestant churches teach that infants & children are covered by God’s grace until they are mature enough to know right from wrong.
It is interesting how the practice of infant baptism has fallen on hard times in Protestantism. I was Presby (USA) for the first 11 years of my life, yet was never baptized - I was “dedicated,” which I hold against my mother to this day (sort of). This was even more odd, since Calvin makes clear in his Institutes (Bk. 2, I think) that infant baptism should be observed always. It was not until I joined the Missouri Synod that I was formally baptized.
Since most evangelicals trace their theological heritage to the anabaptist movement, it is natural enough that baptism is postponed, but for those churches that have historically baptized infants, reasons for abandoning the practice?? Yet for our Baptist and non-denom brethren reading: How do we make sense of claims to be of a “Calvinist” heritage and yet reject the view that is particularly Calvinist (again, Institutes) that baptism is an infusion of grace? I have asked Baptist members of my family to no avail…
I know that the LC-MS and the Wisconsin Synod still baptize infants, as do Episcopals (I’m thinking only of our orthodox brethren in the Network).
Now if only the Pope would abolish Rush Limbaugh!
When an official change in theological doctrine takes place in the Catholic Church, does that render all those who believed in the doctrine in centuries past heretical?
Chuck:
As limbo was never dogmatically defined by the magisterium, but rather a matter de fide, this move does not constitute a change in doctine, at least as doctrine is defined as something that the Church has held as necessary to believe in order to be “orthodox.”
Before I came into communion with Rome I was challenged a number of times to find some doctrine that the Church held to binding on one’s conscience that she later changed. While there have been a number of issues de fide - not dogmatically defined but believed by many (including some apt theologians) - I could not find one. The closest issue would be Boneface’s infamous Unam Sanctam, but there is considerable fuzziness over how the magisterium understood the encyclical at the time…
Ah, thank you for your reply. I’ve long been curious about it.