Posted on 03/08/2006 7:22:57 PM PST by churchillbuff
Howard Storm, a former atheist whose brush with death turned him into a Protestant minister, says that he now believes in purgatory.
"It only makes sense," he says, "but I have trouble discussing this with my fellow ministers."
Featured here a couple months ago and also on MSNBC during Easter Week -- where he told his incredible story to a national audience -- Reverend Storm, considered by experts as one of the most convincing near-death cases, recounted his "dying" in Paris in 1985 from a perforated duodenum and after leaving his body finding himself with a group of hideous beings who attacked him as they led him to a foggy zone that descended toward "hell."
Storm says he was saved by Jesus after desperately pleading to God. After an extensive hospitalization he recovered -- and learned that a nun who had once been a student of his had been praying for him for years.
Storm credits that with saving him; after the episode he left his job as an professor at Northern Kentucky University and entered a seminary, becoming a minister.
He is now with the Zion United Church of Christ in Norwood, Ohio (near Cincinnati), and while some churches in that denomination can be ultra-liberal, he openly preaches against abortion and the New Age.
Still, we try to be careful with these cases, and we always issue the disclaimer that we can't endorse every view of such experiencers -- some of whom tend at times to put their own (and sometimes a nearly New Age) spin on what occurred. Like any form of mysticism, it is to be carefully discerned.
This is true in the case of Reverend Storm -- who himself acknowledges that some of his views have shifted since he became an active Christian ( including a few expressed in a book which was written before his faith was fully formed). These episodes are told through the filter of a person's framework.
But he is a man who exudes love (the single most important element of Christianity); many believe his experience was real; and he says he now believes not only in heaven and hell but also a state in-between where souls are "purged."
After his horrifying brush with death the concept of purgation was explained to him by a priest, says Reverend Storm, and "just rang so clear to me in my experience."
He says that when he "died" he was taken through a "foggy" region strikingly similar to what has been described in mystical literature [see An Unpublished Manuscript on Purgatory] -- and also similar to descriptions by modern visionaries who have told of a great "gray" area between hell and heaven.
Although a devout Protestant, Storm says that he considers Catholicism "the Mother Church" and is even interested in the Catholic apparition site of Medjugorje. He says God doesn't want division and that the main reason why he was on the road to hell was lack of love, pride, and disbelief.
...John Rocker
I have no interest in the conjuring's of the minds of men.
Purgatory is for all those for whom the death of Christ was not enough to pay for all their sins. Thanks but I'll go with the Word of God and go straight to God's presence having been totally cleansed by the finished work of Christ on the cross.
This is waht happens when the Word of God is replaced with the ideas of men.
Interestingly this is also being debated/discussed for the last few days at http://www.freedominion.ca which is down at the moment but is under the topic of "Quebec Bishops.........."
To which I shall respond this weekend, but can't right now.
Certainly God has made no statement regarding this.
He made no direct statement about human cloning, embryonic stem cell research, or abortion either.
Christian thought on these issues is, indeed, derived.
But that love is also quite nicely summarized during the wedding ceremony with the simple phrase ... "I do."
The love may be summarized by this proclamation, but it by no means defines it. Plenty of people say "I do" and yet get divorced. True love is more than a simple proclamation or a feeling.
I think that you would agree that the vows taken in the wedding ceremony represent a statement of commitment, ... rather than feeling.
Those that are fainthful to that statement of commitment ... will see their marriages through.
Let's refocus on the basics.
Death in Scripture doesn't mean a state of nonexistence, nor does it only refer to the body separated from the soul.
Death is a state of existence involving separation. In man that might be a separation of body from soul, soul from Spirit, body from spirit.
Faith without works is indeed dead. This doesn't mean faith without works is a separation of the soul and spirit or the soul or spirit from God. Faith without works merely discerns an action of the soul from an action of the body and possibly in some contexts, an action of the soul separate from the activity of the spirit.
Recall Christ commenting about those at a family funeral, to leave them and allow the dead bury the dead.
In the example you provide or Mother Theresa type discerned with an Adolph Hitler type and posit the Hutler type exercising a little more faith than absolutely no faith, still constituting a saving faith. Then you provide an exclamation if one really believes both could go to heaven.
This misses the entire perspective of salvation. Heaven is not a reward for being good or not being bad. We all have been born condemned to everlasting torment prior to any human's salvation (except for Adam and Christ). With respect to disobedience to God, i.e. sin, we are all condemned prior to salvation. This included Mother Theresa as well as Hitler. When we exercise faith in Him, God the Father is free in His perfect holiness (comprised of His pefect righteousness and His perfect justice) to bestow by His grace, a regenerated spirit in us. He also doesn't look at us when we approach Him, rather He looks upon our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus, whom was judged for the sins of the world, past, present and future, at one time having them all propitiated and judged by the Father. From Romans 3:22 we see that the faith of our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus is unto all and upon all that believe in Him. Accordingly, if even Adolph Hitler in his early childhood or in his bunker sometime before he committed suicide, decided to exercise just a little bit of faith more than absolutely no faith, then he still would have exercised a saving faith that would have set up a situation where God may have bestowed His grace upon him with a regenerated spirit, hence an eternal life, predestined for heaven.
We do not know if this occurred, that is between God and the believer.
If one continues to sin, or procrastenate a saving faith, he isn't getting away with anything. Instead, there are rewards predestined for us in heaven with our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus as somewhat of an escrow officer, awaiting to reward us with crowns in heaven. Those who fail to abide in Him, by faith, merely remove themselves from being in the right place at the right time to perform works, perhaps, mental, perhaps physical, that may be judged as divinely righteous and worthy the predestined reward. When we fail to remain faithful, we merely 'leave rewards on the table' so to speak, somewhat like an eternal memorial to our stupidity and consequence of good and evil independent of God.
There are many obvious sinners devoted to evil or lasciviousness. That is a form of immoral degeneracy for Christian who fall away or lapse into reversionism, some also called carnal Christians. There are also a very large number of moral degenerate Christians, who have also fallen out of fellowship with God, but instead focus on self and legalism or possibly asceticism. Their activity is frequently confused and labeled as 'good' but hardly qualifies for divine good or divine righteousness, wherever that person has stepped out of line with God's plan and hasn't returned to God on His terms, through faith in Christ.
Do-Gooders, legalists, moralists, Crusaders, all fall into this category of persons who perform works that will be burnt up as good for nothingness.
Quite truthfully, if somebody like Mother Theresa, happened to have sinned slightly, then instead of confessing her sin and repenting or turning away from an independent thinking, and failed to return to God through faith in Christ ONLY, on God's terms, then that person might very well attempt to overcompensate by becoming very, very moral, but nevertheless, good for nothingness in any conseuent soulish behavior.
The Word of God is not replaced by the word of men when Purgatory is at issue. Purgatory is indirectly mentioned in Scripture and rather bluntly alluded to by more than a few of the early Fathers, as several posters on this thread have demonstrated already.
You and several other non-Catholics act like people whistling past a graveyard on this topic. You won't address it head-on, you merely make an assertion that Purgatory is un-Christian and walk away from it.
Tell me, my friend, is Scripture itself the Word of God or the word of men? The correct answer is that it's the Word of God written by men under divine inspiration. In other words, it's a bit of both. So you are already on shaky ground when making bold sounding pronouncements about adhering only to the Word of God.
But why should you do even that? How do you *really* know that Scripture is the Word of God? Who said so? It didn't fall out of the sky ready-made. Indeed, the 27 books of the New Testament had many contemporary claimants around them for canonical status; the issue was by no means universally clear to early Christians.
It took several councils of the Church, from 382 to 419 AD, to truly ratify the canon we know today. Yet this in itself was the teaching of men was it not?
"No," you might say, if you were given to acknowledging plain history to this extent, "they were led by the Holy Spirit to arrive at their conclusions." Just so! These men, bishops of the Church, had therefore the authority to determine doctrine, which the contents of Scripture would be: a doctrinal teaching. If this be not so, then we are back to asking why we believe the Scriptures to be inspired over many other salutary, contemporary works, and we will not find a satisfactory answer. Blind faith, disconnected from any reason or historical context, would have to suffice as the only guide.
In a negative way, the same thing applies to this discussion of Purgatory. You cannot or will not acknowledge the Deposit of Faith contained oral Tradition which has been handed down from the Apostolic Era. Therfore, you dismiss Purgatory out-of-hand, even in the face of some Scriptural warrant and lots of early Christian practice and testimony. You deny the role of the bishops to determine doctrine from the Deposit of Faith, so their teaching means nothing to you. But, again, why does their teaching mean something to you, by default at least, when you acknowledge, wittingly or otherwise, their determnation of the canon of Scripture?
What's at issue here, in the final analysis, is authority. You don't seem to really acknowledge any. Therefore, your faith has a very shaky foundation, since it can have no real explanation to it.
The faith of the Church of the Apostolic Era and its immediate aftermath is quite well laid out in the collection of the writings of the Fathers of the Church, available for your perusal at any library. You will find that it dovetails with that of the Catholic Church today. It is your job to discern that, if the Faith has been wrong from virtually the beginning, it is a "false religion." Divine providence, and the explicit promises of Jesus Christ in Matthew 28:20, have failed, and we might as well give up our current folly as Christian believers. But if the faith of the early Church was not wrong back then, and is traceable through time without break down to our own day, and found to reside in the Catholic Faith, then you must accept the implications. Among them, Purgatory, despite your current protestations, is quite real. The same authority that gave you the Scriptures declares it so.
Moral degeneracy is a category of backsliding possible to believers when they fall out of fellowship with God. In Matt 6:3-4 which you provided, let's refocus on a different portion of the Scripture.
"But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you. When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you."
These passages are addressing post-salvation actions and thinking. The same might be said of any person not in fellowship with God, but working out of a scarred soulish perspective.
When I use the terms, 'do-gooders', legalists, moralists, Crusaders, I'm referring to those who think independently of faith in God, who focus on what they identify to be evil and work to overcome on their own, still independent of faith of Christ. There are many Christians who identify their thinking with a Judeo-Christian culture, rather than the faith of Christ. Those same Christians, if they fail to return to God on His terms are no better than those who are immorally degenerate from His perspective, but may be considerably better from a worldly or cosmic perspective, but still good for nothingness in those actions and thoughts committed while out of fellowship with Him.
I agree, while in fellowship with Him, it is wise to not let the left hand know what the right hand does, but this is while we are in fellowship with Him.
You've posted good questions, so I'll attempt to properly answer them on several posts,..not to argue but to try to communicate the best I'm able to different issues.
The Matt 6:3-4 passage as I understand it offers insight to the spirit. The thinking reflected in those who seek publicity of their thinking and behavior is indicative of those who are not in fellowship with God. Their rewards, therefore, are only contained in whatever they preoccupied themselves with at the time of working outside of faith in Him. They aren't receiving a spiritual reward, but instead a temporal soulish possibly physical reward from a worldly system.
The Father though will repay those who remain faithful to Him even in secret, without any anticipation of being repaid.
I do not classify these actions of faith as the same as those of 'do-gooders', crusaders, legalists, or moralists. Those categories of actors are those only focusing on the soulish perspective, void of spiritual growth where they focus on religion indepepndent of faith in Christ.
Jesus says that our Father will repay us for what we do for Him. Are you denying this? Is Jesus mistaken?
No, our Lord and Savior is not mistaken. Our Father who sees what is hidden will repay us.
For those who fast soulishly, his perfect justice and perfect righteousness will not require Him to repay us any more than what we have done even in secret. If we fast, by remaining in faith with Christ, then the reward is even greater.
In the last passage quoted from Matt 25: 31, it is apparant that the sheep separated were not cognizant they had fed, clothed or cared for His brethren, they acted in faith.
Similarily, Christ Himself states Amen.. or he believes it again an article of righteous faith. (Ref Romans 3:22,23)
You have raised some good points and I also need to review them further. Thanks for your response.
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