Chubby Checker and the Harrowing of Hell
How low can you go?
“Upper Italy” snipes frequently at the Catholic Church and its Doctrines. We regret the need, but too much of what the Church does – preferring AIDs deaths to the use of condoms for what amount to doctrinal reasons is absolutely typical – is simply not forgivable. Were it a hole in the corner operation, a handful of faith-crazed wowsers in a strip mall tabernacle, we could just let it all go. Instead, something like a billion Catholics in the world make at least a vague attempt to believe in the things Rome and the Pope tell them, so it matters too much to ignore.
However that is, regular readers will know that we have been casting around for something positive to say about the Holy Monopoly. We have found it, and there is no irony whatsoever in our words: The Church tries desperately to ensure that the Faith it propagates makes sense and is internally consistent.
In Italian, the word meaning “church” in the institutional sense – “chiesa” – is reserved for the Catholic Church. Things like the Presbyterian Church, the Baptist Church, the Methodist Church and so on are spoken of as “cults,” entirely on par with the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s “Unification Church,” as well as with other lesser and weirder objects. Where the competition is gaining ground, like the Baptists and the Pentecostals in South America, the Church of Rome refers to them as “sects” – “sette.”
This is the official Vatican nomenclature and is no doubt offensive to Protestants at large and to anyone else who is not a card-carrying adherent of the One True Faith. But it is inescapable. Seen from Rome, the theologies of the non-Catholic-but-sort-of-Christian churches appear to have been built in garage workshops with used parts from old lawnmowers and mis-understood chunks of comic-book versions of the Bible.
Catholic theologians on the whole feel about Protestant religious thought precisely the way IBM mainframe engineers once felt about the first Personal Computers – that they are looking at worthless toys built by ill-prepared amateurs in imitation of greater and better things they are incapable of understanding.
That is the preamble. The news is that the Vatican, the Pope in person actually, yesterday finally and officially abolished the ancient doctrine of Limbo: the concept of a kind of intermediate state of existence between Heaven and Hell destined to collect the souls of those free from sin who for one reason or another somehow managed to die without first being baptized.
This will be handled by journalists as applying essentially to unbaptized children and, in non-Catholic countries, will be dealt with without much sympathy. Indeed, when it became known that the Vatican was planning such a move, about a year ago, the Times of London – (here) – titled its piece “Pope tries to win hearts and minds by saving souls of unbaptised babies”.
Protestants, Orthodox Christians and so on have never needed such a doctrine. They assume, without much thinking about it, that the souls of unbaptized children, who have presumably not had time to commit any real sins, will somehow or other automatically wind up in Heaven. It hardly seems fair they’d go straight to Hell just for a kind of procedural oversight like not having been baptized.
But this has been seen up to now as just another example of non-Catholic sloppy thinking. Salvation must be explicitly accepted and original sin “washed away” – and with water, see John 3:5, though blood may do in some cases – which is what baptism is all about. Otherwise the whole business of being saved would be automatic and you’d hardly need a priest or a church in the middle – or even need to bother to believe, if it comes to that.
Martin Luther, the original Protestant but a Catholic by training, at least saw the problem and taught that the dead are unconscious (or perhaps do not even exist) until they will be called to answer for their behavior in life on Judgement Day. Western protestantism has mostly let this grim view fall by the wayside, though it survives in the thinking of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
At any rate, the official Vatican take on the matter is now essentially that of the mainstream Protestants – that is, God will probably sort things out somehow…
“As regards children who have died without baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God, who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children, which caused him to say, ‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them’ [Mark 10:14, cf. 1 Tim. 2:4], allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without baptism.”
So that’s done. It’s all OK for the kids. And Limbo is out of the way too. It always was an embarrassing work-around, especially since the Bible itself had failed to mention its existence.
But that is one of two Limbos. The other is the so-called “Limbo of the Fathers” or of the “Patriarchs” – technically “limbus patrum” – reserved to people who died before Jesus’ Resurrection and did not go to Heaven because they were not around when Christ opened Heaven’s gates. In other words, on close reading it appears necessary to suppose – just for instance – that Moses, Abraham, Adam and Eve and so on are in Hell because there is no way for them to have got into Heaven.
You can do two things with that problem if you feel you need to keep the Faith internally consistent: either invent a better place for these people to wait out the end of time, that is, another Limbo – see “Abraham’s bosom” (here) – or come up with a better plot line.
In either case, God forgot to inspire the authors of the Bible to actually provide any solid documentation, but we much prefer the second of these two solutions, the one formally known as the “Harrowing of Hell.” This holds that Jesus spent part of the interesting three-day gap between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection (a busy Saturday, if you need to know, the one before Easter Sunday) raiding Hell and carrying away those who, ah, would have been His followers had they known He existed, and in any event did not deserve eternal torment.
The Eastern Churches take this quite literally even though no version of the Bible actually mentions it, at least in any direct way. The typical Orthodox icon of the Resurrection of Jesus shows Him standing on the smashed gates of Hell, pulling Adam and Eve up out of their prison while surrounded by various righteous figures from the Old Testament.
As St. Thomas Aquinas explained the Catholic doctrine: “when Christ descended into Hell, by the power of his Passion he delivered the saints from this penalty whereby they were excluded from the life of glory….” An ancient homily on the subject, of unknown authorship, but usually called “The Lord’s Descent into Hell,” is traditionally the second reading at Matins on Holy Saturday in the Roman Catholic Church.
Once again, the Protestants have pretty much got out of it by not asking themselves the tricky question, though John Calvin did consider that: “Christ’s descent into Hell was necessary for Christians’ atonement, because Christ did in fact endure the penalty for the sins of the redeemed.” And, as long as He was down there, He probably could have straightened out the biblical plot line as well….
In closing, the insertion of Chubby Checker and his “Limbo Rock” into all of this is obviously a cheap shot and one we tried hard (if briefly) to resist. The tune is from 1962 and belongs to the period when Mr. Checker was attempting to hold on to the incredible success that the Twist craze gave him (“The Twist” is the only record to hit #1 twice: in 1960 and then in 1962). The song’s key limbo lyric is: “How looow can you go!”
21.04.07
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