This question lies between us and the papists who (the more easily to defend their hypothesis concerning the imperfection of the Old Testament) maintain that the fathers who lived under it were not immediately admitted into heaven, but were detained in limbo until the coming of Christ. Now by the term limbus, they mean the upper part of hell and as it were the extremity; the metaphor being taken from a garment whose extremity or border (which runs along the extreme part) is called limbus, according to Virgil: “Clad in a Sidonian robe with embroidered border” (Aeneid 4.137 [Loeb, 1:404–5]).
II. The papists make a fourfold hell. They assign the first to the eternal punishment of sense and loss of the wicked, which is called by them hell by way of eminence (kat’ exochēn). They make the second of temporal punishment of sense and loss, which they call purgatory. To the other two they give the common name of limbo. They hold the one to be eternal for the mere punishment of loss (for infants dying before baptism), which they call the “limbus of infants” (Limbus Infantum). The other is assigned to the temporal punishment of loss (for the fathers who died before the death of Christ), called by them the “limbus of the fathers” (Limbus Patrum). Thus Altenstaig says on this word: “Limbus according to Gerson, is the upper part of hell, in which they were kept to be saved as far as the debt of the first parent should be paid by the death of Christ” (Lexicon theologicum [1619/1974], p. 498; cf. Gerson, “De Articulis Fidei,” Exp. 5 Opera Omnia [1987, repr.], 1:238; Thomas Aquinas, cf. Innocentii Quinti … in IV Libros Sententiarum Commentaria ex Manuscriptis … Thomae Aquinatis, Dist. 45, Q. 1*, Art. 2 [1652/1964], 4:432–33; and Bellarmine, “De Purgatorio,” 2.6* Opera [1857], 2:396–97).
III. On the contrary, the orthodox assert that the souls of the fathers were immediately received into heaven after death, where they enjoy happiness and are free from both kinds of punishment, both that of loss and that of sense.
* Corrected citation
Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 12.11.1–3, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George Musgrave Giger, vol. 2 (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1992–97), 257.
Turretin Contra The Limbus Patrum
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