[Dialogue] Spong on Limbo and Culture of Life

[KroegerD@aol.com]

January 25, 2006 
To Hell with  Limbo
The Newest Act of an Irrelevant Christianity 
Perhaps the second silliest thing that religious institutions and its leaders 
 can do is to pretend that they know what will happen after one dies and then 
to  be delusional enough to think that they can actually describe it. This 
ranks as  number two on the silliness list only because the one thing sillier 
than that  absurdity is to announce that perhaps you did not get it right the 
first time,  so you offer an amendment to previous thinking. Yet that is exactly 
what we have  witnessed from the Ratzinger Vatican in recent days. Limbo, as 
they say, is now  in Limbo!  
This teaching about Limbo, a top commission of Roman Catholic scholars now  
assures us, has never been an official part of the doctrine of the church. That 
 will come as a great surprise, I will wager, to those parents who have over 
the  centuries, been frightened out of their wits by the threats emanating 
from that  church about what will befall their unbaptized children if they did 
not rush to  baptism. The existence of a place called Limbo has had a very long 
history.  Since at least the 4th Century of this Common Era it has been a part 
of the  package of the afterlife doctrines of western Catholic Christianity. 
This  package was not designed primarily to inform the faithful about what 
waited for  them when they died but rather to aid in the task of controlling with 
the  weapons of fear and guilt every aspect of life from birth to death. 
While Limbo  never had real credibility among thinking people, it nonetheless 
possessed  enormous power and was indelibly planted into the consciences of many.  
Tracing the history of the concept of Limbo is itself a fascinating study. It 
 appears to have emerged in Catholic teaching near the end of the 4th century 
 through the work of Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, a man of enormous 
intellect  but whose theology was significantly driven by the concept of original 
sin. So  deeply was Augustine convinced that all human life had been permanently 
stained  by the sin of Adam’s disobedience, that for a child to die 
unbaptized was to be  doomed to hell. Baptism, in Augustine’s mind, was thus the 
necessary act that  broke the power of that original sin and therefore was the 
essential step in the  drama of salvation. Heaven was reserved only for the saved, 
for whom baptism was  the visible symbol of their redemption. The unbaptized 
were inevitably, to put  it bluntly, bound for hell. It was a harsh argument in 
which grieving parents,  who gave birth to stillborn fetuses or whose babies 
had died in childbirth, were  left without consolation. Sometimes, 
circumstances over which parents had no  control would require the postponement of a 
baptism and, in a day of rampant  infant mortality, it meant that some children 
died unbaptized. The specter of a  burning hell for those regarded as not yet at 
the age of reason seemed harsh and  unfeeling. Even Augustine felt this 
incongruity and he sought to address it by  postulating that some regions of hell 
might contain a special room where the  temperature was not as hot as it was in 
the other regions. It was an ingenious  suggestion. In that ‘special room,’ 
we now believe, Limbo made its entry into  Christian thinking.  
In the 13th century, primarily under the influence of another brilliant  
theologian, Thomas Aquinas, this ‘special room’ got the name ‘Limbus,’ which  
means a boundary, as it took another step in doctrinal development. Aquinas also 
 felt the need for a concept that was more palatable and sensitive and not 
quite  as grotesque as the image advanced by Augustine. Children, innocent at 
least in  the sense that they were too young to choose to do evil deeds, were 
nonetheless  stained by that universal human corruption. He declared, however, 
if they died  without baptism they were assigned forever to live in this 
bounded place, this  Limbus, which Aquinas called, a state of ‘natural happiness.’ 
While not  ultimately fulfilling like the ‘Beatific vision,” it was not 
unpleasant. A  conscience-healing act of compromise thus brought modern Limbo into 
being.  
In time, this Limbo of natural happiness was expanded from being simply the  
abode of unbaptized babies into a place where good pagans might also go. It 
was  thought to house ancient people who had lived before the saving grace of 
Christ  had become available to them. This meant that Limbo counted among its 
residents  such people as Moses, Virgil and Socrates. Later, in the centuries 
that came  after Christ, there were some other obviously holy lives who had died 
without  becoming Christian and thus without being baptized, but exemplary in 
all other  ways. One thinks of holy Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Jews and, 
most  spectacularly, one thinks of Mahatma Gandhi. It just violated too much 
to  consign these good people to the eternal punishment of hell. Limbo was once 
 again a convenient compromise between Christian judgment and Christian  
sensitivity. The church could not, however, become so loose and sentimental that  
it lost its power to control people’s lives. That required an ultimate threat 
to  keep order in the ranks of believers. Limbo served both needs. It was  
unfulfilling enough to be punishment. It was kind enough to allow the church’s  
judgment to be tolerated.  
The Church of the Middle Ages filled its rhetoric with such phrases as ‘there 
 is no salvation outside the Church’ and ‘baptism is necessary to salvation.’
  Later this stark religious division between the saved and the unsaved 
spurred  the great missionary fervor of the 19th century that was historically the  
century of the fastest growth of the Christian faith in all of western 
history.  Few people stopped to notice that it was also the century of the western 
empires  and colonial domination of the third world. If a Christian nation’s 
aggression  against and conquest of primitive societies could be justified on 
the basis of  ‘bringing salvation to the heathen,’ then it became a sacred 
duty, rather than  religious imperialism, effectively perfuming the evil of war. 
If one was  convinced that salvation for all people was accomplished only in 
Christ and that  baptism was the only sure sign of that salvation, then the 
horror of a God who  would condemn unbaptized children to an eternity of 
second-class citizenship was  a small price to pay to keep the institutional power of 
the Church intact. The  enhancement of the idea of Limbo continued in 1905, 
when Pope Pius 10th stated  clearly, and I’m sure he thought pastorally, that “
children, who die without  baptism, go into Limbo where they do not enjoy God 
but they do not suffer  either.” One wonders why Pius 10th thought he was 
competent to know. However,  that was where Limbo was in the teaching of the 
Catholic Church when the 20th  century dawned.  
In the 1960s at the II Vatican Council, the modern spirit of Pope John 23rd  
brought fresh air into this musty institution. That Council stated that  “
everyone, baptized Christian or not, could be eligible for salvation through  the 
mystery of Christ’s redemptive power.” With that understanding beginning to  
emerge, Limbo began its slow but inevitable decline.  
The final blow to this presumptuous teaching occurred when the Vatican raised 
 the issue of abortion to a new level of intensity. In the abortion battle 
they  desired to portray abortion as murder, so their assertion that life begins 
at  conception was crucial to their argument. There had been a time when the 
Church  taught that life began at the moment of “quickening” that occurs 
normally in the  second trimester. With this new definition, necessary to keeping 
the debate  emotional, the aborted fetuses began to be counted as unbaptized 
babies destined  for an eternity in Limbo, however Limbo was defined. That was 
even more than the  hierarchy itself could swallow. The justice of God 
collided with the tactics of  control. The justice of God won and when it did Limbo 
was doomed. Now the  Vatican Commission has begun the process of removing Limbo 
from the  consciousness of believers. It will take a while, perhaps a century 
or two, but  Limbo will finally disappear.  
Two insights need to be understood here. One is that most of the church’s  
talk about life after death is not about life after death at all. It is about  
controlling the behavior of human beings in the here and now. Fear, combined  
with the power of guilt, is the ultimate ecclesiastical weapon of control. If  
you are afraid that violating the Church’s teaching or its practice will 
result  in an eternity of punishment in the after life, you are likely to be 
motivated  to be a good little boy or girl. If you are made to feel so guilty about 
your  own shortcomings that you seek to expiate that guilt with confession and 
 attendance at services of worship, you are more likely to be faithful. 
Salvation  thus rests more on what you believe than it does on how you act. The 
quality of  your life, living for others, serving the needs of the poor and 
dispossessed  counts for little without proper believing and the act of being 
baptized is what  separates you from Limbo and assures you of heaven. That is a 
great motivator.  
The second observation is that whatever occurs after death is not something  
that any of us can know. We can dream or fantasize but there is no way that  
human knowledge can penetrate this ultimate mystery. Only religious arrogance,  
buttressed by claims to possess revealed truth, could suggest otherwise. What 
 the Church has never understood is that if a person’s primary motivation in 
life  is to win an eternal reward of bliss, then each act of that person, 
including  acts of kindness and generosity, is an act of egocentricity. If the 
ultimate  task of the Christian Church is to help to create whole, 
non-self-centered lives  then all control tactics, including heaven as a place of reward and 
hell as a  place of punishment to say nothing of limbo and purgatory will 
have to be  jettisoned. At that point the Church might finally be ready to talk 
about the  meaning of our hope of life after death with integrity. That would 
be a welcome  new point of departure.  
— John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Niklas from Kulturhuset, Sweden, asks:  
Why are Americans so preoccupied with the abortion issue when other ways of  
protecting human life are ignored? For instance, the infant mortality rate is  
more than twice as high in the US compared to my country (Sweden). It’s even  
higher than Cuba’s. How embarrassing that should be for one of the wealthiest 
 countries in the world! (I guess it must be related to poverty and the 
social  model that the U.S. has embarked upon). Secondly, when you point this out 
to  Americans, they just won’t believe it; they think it’s some kind of 
propaganda.  Where does all this misdirected patriotism come from? Is it Christian 
to believe  that God has a special relation to the United States?  
Dear Niklas,  
America is a religiously schizophrenic nation. We have in our history been  
able to combine religion with the practices of slavery, segregation, lynching  
and violent racism. We have in the name of the God we claim to worship 
oppressed  women, Jews and homosexuals. The public negativity about abortion, to 
which you  have referred, is acted out against the background of an unwillingness 
to  embrace the fact that millions of poor children in this land do not have 
access  to health care. That is surely one more illustration of this 
schizophrenia.  Religion is the way some of our citizens seek personal security. That 
kind of  religion always demands conformity to stated religious values no matter 
how  contradictory they might be in practice. This kind of religion always 
seeks to  impose narrow definitions on the whole society. Although history 
reveals that  this practice never works, whenever the levels of fear become high 
enough this  nation seems to walk down this same old road again and again. Once 
the society  discovers itself under this kind of pressure and feels close to 
being  overwhelmed by this kind of religious mentality, there is always a 
revolution to  restore balance. On three occasions, in 1896, 1900 and 1908, America 
turned back  the evangelical presidential bids of Democratic candidate 
William Jennings  Bryan. In 1988 this nation rebuked Pat Robertson’s bid for the 
Republican  nomination. There is also still present in the American psyche a deep 
reservoir  of the ancient Puritanism out of which so many found their way to 
these shores.  The puritan work ethic does proclaim that if you are poor, it 
is because you  deserve it. This means that in this nation we are always 
engaged politically in  a class warfare struggle. Class warfare is visible when 
conservative  administrations like the present Bush presidency, lower taxes on the 
wealthy and  simultaneously cut welfare and medical care for the poor. That 
is nothing but  class warfare and the wealthy are winning. At the same time, 
when this nation  passed legislation calling for a graduated income tax and 
created the Social  Security Program, that represented victories in the class 
warfare struggle for  the poor. While in the political propaganda that both sides 
mount in this  struggle declares that everyone seeks ‘fairness,’ the fact is 
that the way we  tolerate unfairness in America is by denying its existence. 
Then something like  the hurricane in New Orleans rips of the facade of that 
untruth and makes us  face anew that this is a class oriented society. Your 
letter, for which I thank  you, will also raise consciousness, for most Americans 
do not travel outside  this country frequently enough to have any sense of how 
we are viewed by the  other nations of the world, so I appreciate your letter 
as one that holds up a  mirror so that we can look at ourselves through your 
eyes. History reveals that  these attitudes that you describe will pass away 
in time. It will take an  aroused electorate, however. My sense is that there 
is at this moment a growing  negativity about the road this nation is presently 
walking. It is being fueled  by an increasingly unpopular and perhaps an 
unwinnable war in Iraq, the bulging  national deficit, the issue of corruption 
with lobbyists in the Republican  controlled congress and the administrative 
disasters in handling both the crisis  in New Orleans and the introduction of the 
Medicare prescription drug plan. An  aroused public is growing. The 
beneficiary of this dis-ease may not be the  minority party; it might be a more moderate 
part of the present majority party.  We will have to wait and see.  
John Shelby Spong   
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