OK, but you may need to restate your main points, as I use ForumRunner on my phone, and the navigation is not that great. Plus, the posts aren't numbered.
At any rate, I just reviewed those paragraphs of the Encyclical.
I understand the problem. I have copied my first post for you here and hope that you can get all of it on your phone. If not, I will delete the text of the paragraph.
There are some pertinent sections from Spe Salvi. Because they are lengthy, I am dividing my post into sections with each addressing a particular paragraph in numerical order from 44 through 48. I have highlighted particular portions in
blue.
44. To protest against God in the name of justice is not helpful. A world without God is a world without hope (cf.
Eph 2:12). Only God can create justice. And faith gives us the certainty that he does so. The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope. Is it not also a frightening image? I would say: it is an image that evokes responsibility, an image, therefore, of that fear of which Saint Hilary spoke when he said that all our fear has its place in love. God is justice and creates justice. This is our consolation and our hope. And in his justice there is also grace. This we know by turning our gaze to the crucified and risen Christ. Both these thingsjustice and gracemust be seen in their correct inner relationship. Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not make wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything away, so that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of equal value. Dostoevsky, for example, was right to protest against this kind of Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel
The Brothers Karamazov. Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal banquet beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing had happened. Here I would like to quote a passage from Plato which expresses a premonition of just judgement that in many respects remains true and salutary for Christians too. Albeit using mythological images, he expresses the truth with an unambiguous clarity, saying that in the end souls will stand naked before the judge. It no longer matters what they once were in history, but only what they are in truth: Often, when it is the king or some other monarch or potentate that he (the judge) has to deal with, he finds that there is no soundness in the soul whatever; he finds it scourged and scarred by the various acts of perjury and wrong-doing ...; it is twisted and warped by lies and vanity, and nothing is straight because truth has had no part in its development. Power, luxury, pride, and debauchery have left it so full of disproportion and ugliness that when he has inspected it (he) sends it straight to prison, where on its arrival it will undergo the appropriate punishment ... Sometimes, though, the eye of the judge lights on a different soul which has lived in purity and truth ... then he is struck with admiration and sends him to the isles of the blessed.
In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (cf. Lk 16:19-31), Jesus admonishes us through the image of a soul destroyed by arrogance and opulence, who has created an impassable chasm between himself and the poor man; the chasm of being trapped within material pleasures; the chasm of forgetting the other, of incapacity to love, which then becomes a burning and unquenchable thirst. We must note that in this parable Jesus is not referring to the final destiny after the Last Judgement, but is taking up a notion found, inter alia, in early Judaism, namely that of an intermediate state between death and resurrection, a state in which the final sentence is yet to be pronounced.
Please note that the narrative about Lazarus and the rich man is described as being a parable - a distinction which neither Jesus nor the gospel writers make. The narrative is not presented in typical parabolic form and I submit that it was not a parable.
Note also, that the narrative is given a historicist spin by alleging that Jesus actually meant that this was describing an intermediate existence and not a permanent state - even though the narrative itself does not do so in any such form. One must read this into the narrative in order to reach this conclusion.
In actual fact, the narrative states explicitly that the rich man was in a torment of fire from which he could never escape nor from which he could ever hope for any relief - not even a drop of water from Lazarus.
