Podcast
Here begins a sweeping overview of salvation history.
God created man because of love. God wants a relation with man, and man gropes after God. Prov 8:17 says that those who seek God diligently find Him, and Hebrews says something very similar. Sin clouds our minds, but even in Genesis 3, God promises an end to this state. In the very next chapter, the sin of eating the fruit has become murder.
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From the Rochester NY Chesterton Society’s 8th Annual Conference, Dale Ahlquist (President, American Chesterton Society) talks about the end of the world and how it factors into the world that God has created, a world of justice and peace, and a world that will undergo a revolution to conform it to God’s plan. We must use our free will to be a part of this plan. Whether or not you agree with every point touched on here, you will find this talk timely, provocative, and stimulating.
Visit the Rochester NY Chesterton Society’s website at www.rochesterton.com.
See more from the American Chesterton Society at www.chesterton.org.
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In this recording from the 2011 Rochester NY Chesterton Conference, Hilaire Belloc (played by Kevin O’Brien) takes a sweeping overview of Christian history with a look at what he conceptualized as the five major heresies.
Arianism, one of the earliest great heresies, claims that Jesus was not God but a creature. St. Athanasius and some military victories dealt a blow to the heresy, but so did the rise of Islam.
Mohammedanism began as a heresy, as an oversimplified version of Catholicism, which denied the incarnation. It grew because of its promise of freedom from slavery and usury, and as recently as the 17th century, the Ottoman empire was trying to overrun Vienna.
Albigensianism is a heresy that claims that evil is as much a force as good, that all matter is of evil, and therefore that all matter and anything pleasurable must be eschewed.
Protestantism began as a reaction to correct abuses of the Church, but quickly added in ideas of John Calvin, who claimed that there was evil as part of the divine nature. This allowed people to accept evil in the world as part of divine will.
Modernism is a heresy that denies the supernatural and attacks truth, beauty and goodness. The result of this is the rise of slavery in other forms, as well as cruelty.
While the way in which these ideas are presented may at points seem dated (Belloc died in 1953), they remain thought-provoking. And more importantly, Kevin O’Brien’s masterful performance of Belloc and his comments that follow illustrate the great potential of ”evangelization through drama,” the mission of O’Brien’s Theater of the Word.
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The Church can be divided into three parts: the Church Militant on Earth, the Church Triumphant in Heaven, and the Church Suffering in Purgatory. All parts of the Church are ceaselessly praying for each other, and it is through this prayer that God has chosen to place the vitality of the Church.
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Through the saving power of Jesus Christ, death has been turned from a curse into a blessing. It is important to emphasize that this is indeed a blessing and not simply a lack of curse. In Christ, we will have communion with all others who are in Christ. We must therefore pray for our brethren and pray for those who are in Purgatory. Never fear to pray for a lost cause, as no prayer is ever wasted. Likewise, we must share the gifts that God has given us one with another, for what charity we give benefits the whole Church, and what sin we commit harms the whole Church.
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The majority of the church fathers are of the opinion that more people, indeed more people claiming to be Christian, will be damned than saved. There is a minority who hold an opposing opinion. As overly-optimistic visions of Hell are not particularly helpful, so too are hellfire speeches which luridly describe the punishments of Hell are not useful. Prayer, however, is never wasted.
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There was a theory expounded by Origen, among others, that all would be saved, in some theories extending even to the Devil. While the Church has never officially ruled out the more moderate versions of this theory, the clear language of the Bible is very difficult to square with this belief.
Still, we do not know what God knows, and there is no reason not to pray that we might have hope for salvation for any particular soul, or for souls in general.
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Hell is not a pleasant subject, and some religions try to explain it away or ignore it entirely. How could a loving God commit any of his creation to unquenchable fire? The answer is that we choose it ourselves.
The damned have physical bodies, because the body helped commit the sins that damned the soul, so should the body participate in the punishment. Thus, we must take care to instruct our bodies to be virtuous, not corrupted by sin.
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God cannot be seen as He is unless He allows Himself to be seen, which is termed the beatific vision. This is an unapproachable light (1 Tim 6:16), but we expect to see face to face in Heaven (1 Cor 13:12, Ps 17:15).
The Catechism also tells us that we will reign in heaven, though obviously not over God, and this implies that Heaven is not a static place. Rev 22, even taken literally, tells us that Heaven will be an immense place, a place that cannot be on Earth as it is, and Rev 21 tells us that it will be a new place with no more sadness. Paul, in Rom 8, tells us that we are groaning to be part of this new creation. Jesus tells us that we must lay up treasure in Heaven. We also know that there will be gender in Heaven, as we are repeatedly told that there will be people of both specific sexes there.
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Despite the physicality of Heaven, we cannot expect carnality or a fleshliness there. 1 Cor 13:12 tells us that we will be face to face with God, and there cannot be any attachment to anything else when we are. Rev 22 tells us that we will have His name inscribed on our foreheads, such will be the communion with the Trinity in Heaven.
Section 1024f of the Catechism tells us that there will be many in Heaven, but it will not be to lose our identity to a corporate body. This does not means that there is no corporate body of the Church Triumphant, as Heaven is the community of all who are perfectly united in Christ, and Jn 15 speaks of us all as branches of Him, the true vine.
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