Transcript

Protestants sometimes imagine purgatory as a dreary prison where believers have to pay for sins before they can get into heaven, and they say that Catholics ignore this allegedly traditional teaching on the matter to make purgatory more palatable to potential converts.

So, in today's episode, we're gonna talk about what the church does and does not teach about the nature of purgatory and why this is a doctrine every Christian should embrace.

So, when it comes to official church teaching, a good place to start is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which says this about purgatory.

All who die in God's grace and friendship but still imperfectly purified are indeed assured of their eternal salvation, but after death they undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.

The Church gives the name purgatory to this final purification of the elect which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.

Purgatory is not an alternate fate to heaven or hell and it's also not a second chance at salvation.

Purgatory is just the final process of our sanctification.

Revelation 21:27 says, Nothing unclean will enter heaven, which means that if a person dies in a state of friendship with God but with an attachment to certain sins, then those sinful attachments will be purged and removed from their soul before he enters into heaven, and everyone who undergoes this process of purification will go to heaven.

One of the worst misunderstandings about purgatory I've ever encountered is in the documentary American Gospel which said this.

And if in the end if they have enough people praying for them and if they do enough time in purgatory, they might possibly get to heaven.

But once again, purgatory is not a place where you get a second chance at salvation or you might get to heaven.

Those in purgatory know they are saved because they've already undergone the particular judgment for their sins.

Anyone who undergoes purification after death will eventually enter into eternal bliss because their souls, like those in heaven, are locked into an orientation of God as their ultimate good so they cannot sin anymore.

What there is a question about is what the experience of purgatory is like because God hasn't revealed what it's like in the Deposit of Faith.

The Catechism's description of purgatory shows that the church does not have an official teaching on how long the saints undergo purification after death, what this temporal experience feels like, or what happens during the process when the soul undergoes its final purification before entering heaven.

In response, some Protestants say that this is a bait and switch.

They'll point to mystical visions of the saints that portray purgatory as a medieval torture chamber in the center of the earth.

They'll also cite church documents that speak of purgatory being the means for sinners to pay the temporal debts of their sins through nasty punishments.

They say reducing purgatory to final purification papers over these important elements of the doctrine that they reject.

So, let's go through them.

First, we have to distinguish pious speculation about purgatory from official church teaching about it because they are not the same thing.

Catholics are only bound to believe what the church officially teaches, not anything that happened to be a popular belief among Catholics in church history.

The Catechism puts it this way.

Throughout the ages there have been so-called private revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church.

They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith.

It is not their role to improve or complete Christ's definitive revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history.

Guided by the magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.

Throughout Church history, people have claimed to have visions of the damned in hell or the departed in purgatory, both of which could be fairly gruesome.

One 12th century account of purgatory comes from a knight named Owen who said that he saw iron hooks dragging people across fire, people baked in ovens and fried in frying pans, and fiery dragons along with other animals eating people.

Historical descriptions of a literal purgatorial fire makes sense given that 1 Corinthians 3:15 says the following of some believers at the final judgment who committed evil works in their life that, quote, If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved but only as through fire.

Fire imagery appears in many popular descriptions of purgatory, but the Catholic Church has never taught that the punishment of purgatory involves literal fire.

Pope Benedict XVI even said this.

St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians gives us an idea of the differing impact of God's judgment according to each person's particular circumstances.

He does this using images which in some way try to express the invisible without it being possible for us to conceptualize these images simply because we can neither see into the world beyond death nor do we have any experience of it.

This is similar to how fire and other torments appear in popular descriptions of hell, but the Catholic Church doesn't teach that hell contains literal fire.

Pope St. John Paul II said this.

The images of hell that sacred scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted.

They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God.

Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.

In fact, many modern Protestants make this same distinction between speculation and divine revelation when it comes to the doctrine of hell.

In his book The Case for Faith, Protestant author Lee Strobel interviewed Protestant philosopher J.P.

Moreland about hell where Moreland says things like, God doesn't torture people in hell.

In the Bible, hell is separation or banishment from the most beautiful being in the world, God Himself, and the flames are a figure of speech.

I put up my hand.

'Okay, wait a minute,' I protested.

'I thought you were a conservative scholar.

Are you going to try to soften the idea of hell to make it more palatable?' 'Absolutely not,' came Moreland's reply.

'I just want to be biblically accurate.

We know that the reference to flames is figurative because if you try to take it literally it makes no sense.

For example, hell is described as a place of utter darkness and yet there are flames too.'How can that be?

Flames would light things up.

When Protestant philosopher, William Lane Craig, debated Raymond Bradley on the nature of hell, Bradley quoted from the 19th century author, Father Joseph Furniss, who described children's blood boiling in hell.

Craig then said this in response.

Now, Dr. Bradley made a good deal of, uh, uh, quoting the, the fiery images from The Bible, which are one image among many others.

Uh, and these images are generally taken to be metaphors.

I don't have to defend such ridiculous things as what Father Furniss, uh, had to say.

Images of hell as a fiery torture chamber have a long history among the pious faithful, including famous Protestants like Jonathan Edwards, who certainly thought the flames of hell were literal when he said of them, The pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them.

The flames do now rage and glow.

But many modern Protestants view hell as a separation from God where sinners punish themselves, as can be seen in C.S.

Lewis's book The Great Divorce.

This is similar to what the church teaches in the catechism which says, The teaching of the church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity.

Immediately after death, the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell where they suffer the punishments of hell, 'eternal fire' quote, unquote.

The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.

In the English translation, the words eternal fire are in quotation marks because while this is a common description of hell, the church only affirms that hell's primary punishment is separation from God.

Likewise, the proceeding paragraphs in the catechism on purgatory talk about, The tradition of the church, by reference to certain texts of scripture, speak of a cleansing fire, but it does not affirm that purgatory contains literal fire.

So if Protestants can understand that there is a difference between common depictions of hell and the limits of what God has formally revealed about hell, then they should be able to understand the same distinction among Catholics when it comes to the doctrine of purgatory.

This also answers common Eastern Orthodox objections to purgatory, which tend to be semantic because the Orthodox also believe in souls being purified from sin after death and that we can pray for those souls and help them, even though Orthodox don't use the word purgatory to describe this process.

The objections also tend to be against common popular speculations about purgatory in the West that are not shared in the East.

Here's Orthodox priest, Father Josiah Trenham, discussing this as referenced in the Eastern 14th century author, Mark of Ephesus.

The Roman Catholic teaching is that persons who, who have truly repented in this life, but have died before being able to give satisfaction by means of worthy fruits for their sins, have their souls cleansed after death by means of this purgatorial suffering or punishment, and these people's souls are eased by prayers and sacrifices and offerings that the living faithful make for them.

Saint Mark says, Yes, people are helped by the prayers and almsgiving for the departed.

This is true.

This is the universal and ancient belief and practice of the church without question.

But souls are saved by that, that souls are saved by a certain purgatorial suffering and temporary purgatorial fire is neither found in scripture nor in the writings of the Holy Fathers.

When it comes to what the church fathers said about purgatory, see my response to Gavin Ortlund on the subject, link in the description below, because the fathers repeatedly use fire imagery.

But this is not an obstacle to Catholic-Orthodox relations because once again, the Catholic Church does not teach that purgatory involves literal fire.

The Catholic Encyclopedia says, At the 15th century Council of Florence, Bessarion argued against the existence of real purgatorial fire, and the Greeks were assured that the Roman Church had never issued any dogmatic decree on this subject.

A century later in 1596, the Orthodox Ruthenian Church came back into communion with the Catholic Church.

Article five of the treaty governing this reunion simply says, We shall not debate about purgatory, but we entrust ourselves to the teaching of the holy church.

So to summarize, private revelations given to saints of either hell or purgatory are not binding upon the faithful.

If they help you avoid sin, meditate on them.

If they aren't helpful for your spiritual life, meditate on something else.

These visions may not be universal descriptions of the afterlife, or they may be something God gave as an accommodation to people whose understanding was culturally conditioned.

This is similar to the anthropomorphic language in scripture that describes God the Father as having body parts or changing His mind, the different ethnicities the Virgin Mary manifests in apparitions, or in saints whose stigmata appears on either their wrists or their hands.

Likewise, private revelations of hell and purgatory might use physical imagery to reveal internal spiritual kinds of punishment that a believer feels.

In his history of the early Orthodox Church, Stephen Morris said, In his response to the Latins about purgatory, Mark of Ephesus wrote that the punishment of the dead was internal, not external.

The dead suffered from sadness, conscious shame and remorse, as well as their uncertainty about their future.

According to Mark, even the biblical descriptions of eternal fire and worms in hell were to be taken as allegories rather than as descriptions of external punishments and suffering.

But many Catholic theologians also endorse this view, and it coheres with magisterial teaching that hasn't answered this question.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his book Eschatology that he wrote before his pontificate that, quote, Purgatory is not, as Tertullian thought, some kind of supra-worldly concentration camp where one is forced to undergo punishments in a more or less arbitrary fashion.

Rather, it is the inwardly necessary process of transformation.

Pope Benedict also wrote the following in his encyclical Spe Salvi: Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ Himself, the Judge and Savior.

The encounter with Him is the decisive act of judgment.

Before His gaze, all falsehood melts away.

His gaze, the touch of His heart, heals us through an undeniably painful transformation .

as through fire.

But it is a blessed pain in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God.

We don't know with certainty what is involved in the pain of purgatory.

We know it isn't debilitating pain because the Catechism says in paragraph 958, of the souls in purgatory that, quote, Prayer for them is capable not only of helping them, but also of making their intercession for us effective.

We can pray for the souls in purgatory and they can pray for us, just as we can pray for someone on earth who is going through a trial that God is using to sanctify that person.

Some saints describe the suffering of purgatory as the pain of longing for heaven and having to wait for this great reward.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

And to understand this kind of unique pain, here's a story from my childhood.

When I was a kid, I used to go to Disneyland with my parents when we lived in Southern California.

Back in the early 90s, you could park your car in a huge parking lot right at the front entrance of Disneyland.

One time I was misbehaving in the car, so my dad made me wait an extra five minutes at the car before we could go inside the park.

It was pure agony for me, but it was ultimately good for me to stop and get out of myself for a minute and reset.

This parallels what some of the saints saw of purgatory in their mystical visions.

For example, Saint Catherine of Genoa said, The soul perceives the grievousness of being held back from seeing the divine light.

The soul's instinct to being drawn by that uniting look craves to be unhindered.

Saint Thomas Aquinas believed purgatory involved fire, but he also said its primary pain was delay of the beatific vision.

He wrote, After this life, the holy souls desire the sovereign good with the most intense longing, both because their longing is not held back by the weight of the body and because had there been no obstacle, they would already have gained the goal of enjoying the sovereign good.

It follows that they grieve exceedingly for their delay.

But how long is this delay?

Pope Benedict XVI said, It is clear that we cannot calculate the duration of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world.

This means we can't say how long the experience of purgatory lasts or what time is like in purgatory.

For example, describing indulgences as sparing someone a certain number of days of penance is no longer done because it was confusing to people.

Here's how my colleague Jimmy Akin explains it.

The number of days that were attached to indulgences were not understood as shortening time in purgatory, but as easing the purification after death by an amount analogous to the shortening of an earthly penitential period by the number of days indicated.

But because some people were confused by thinking purgatory was shortened by a set number of days with an indulgence, the church abolished the day figures attached to indulgences specifically to eliminate this confusion.

End quote.

Of course, people still speculated about how long the process of purgatory took, but those speculations, along with speculations about what the pain in purgatory is exactly like, neither of these were considered a part of official church teaching.

But what about the temporal debt of punishment that is paid in purgatory?

Many Protestants say that Christ paid for all of our debts on the cross when he said, It is finished, which some try to translate as, It is paid in full.

I show why that argument fails in an episode link below, but the process of purification is also in some sense punitive, and Catholics should acknowledge this.

The magisterium has moved away from punitive language to describe purgatory, but there's no getting around the fact that purgatory is an undesired consequence inflicted by a rightful authority in response to wrongdoing, which is the essence of punishment.

In 1439, Pope Eugene IV said in the bull Laetentur Coeli that concerning those in purgatory, Their souls are cleansed after death by purgatorial punishments.

But we have to define our terms carefully.

In my debate with James White on the doctrine of purgatory, I gave two complementary arguments to defend this doctrine.

First, I gave an argument from God purifying us from sinful desires before and after death.

This is something many Protestants agree with, and the Protestant author Jerry Walls, the author of the book Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, was in attendance at our debate, and he later told me he agreed with most of what I said.

However, some Protestants said that I only made a seemingly compelling case for purgatory because I misrepresented the doctrine, that I misrepresented it as being only a means for God to purify us from sin, and that I ignored the punishment aspect of purgatory.

James White himself made this reply in one of his rebuttals.

I'm a little surprised, I'll be perfectly honest, that in making this presentation, Trent hasn't used, uh, the language that Rome has used in defining her own dogma, that this is a place of purification, not just from attachment to sin, but the remission of temporal punishments for sins, and that this takes place by our suffering, satispassio.

Are we standing before God in a robe that includes our own suffering, our own satispassio in this life or in the next?

Or do we stand before God robed in the seamless righteousness of Jesus Christ?

And I'll be perfectly honest.

I couldn't believe White said that when I defended the church's doctrine on purgatory by quoting the Catechism, i.e.

the language of Rome.

I also made a distinct argument for purgatory based on God temporarily punishing believers for their sins after death.

White also throws out the term satispassio to make it seem like believers must do something after death to make satisfaction for their sins in order to work their way out of purgatory.

But in my rebuttal, I noted that White simply doesn't understand what satispassio is.

When you're going to be critiquing another view,

You ought to represent the official teachings of that view, not just private thoughts and articulations of it.

And you should get the view right.

For example, what is satispassio?

Satispassio is not us working in purgatory to cleanse ourselves to get out of it.

The Catholic Encyclopedia says satispassio, quote, Is often spoken of in a loose sense as satisfaction.

Spoken of in a loose sense of satisfaction.

Satispassio is a completely passive process where God cleanses us, and I quoted from Pope Benedict XVI in an encyclical, where he reflects upon theologians who say that this purifying process is just the encounter with Christ where all falsehood melts away.

We don't do anything.

The souls that are in purgatory rest from their labors, as Hebrews 4:10 says.

They know that they're saved.

They know that they will not sin anymore.

So if anything, they have joy that they're going to enter into heaven and there's no magisterial teaching that the joy of purgatory is outweighed by the suffering there.

To make it clear, the Catholic Church does not teach that those in purgatory do anything to become fit to enter heaven.

This is a completely passive process, where we receive God's final application of sanctification in a way that is punitive, because it is a just consequence for wrongdoing in this life that did not forsake our salvation.

Far from obscuring the doctrine of purgatory as being only a medicinal remedy, I gave an argument for temporary post-mortem punishment for sin that used the biblical language from Hebrews 12.

This was my argument: When Christians sin, God unpleasantly disciplines them to morally perfect them.

Some sins are not unpleasantly disciplined in this life, therefore God unpleasantly disciplines some Christians after death to morally perfect them.

Hebrews Chapter 12 says, My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished by him, for the Lord disciplines him whom he loves and chastises every son whom he receives.

The word translated chastises is mastigoi, which in every other use in the New Testament is rendered scourging.

The verse literally says God flogs every son with a whip whom he receives.

The text goes on to say that God, Disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness.

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant.

Later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Even though Christ saved us from the eternal consequences of our sins, God still allows us to suffer the temporary consequences of our sins, such as a disordered will that is attached to sin, a lack of full fellowship with God, and even suffering in this life.

For example, God forgave King David's sins of adultery and murder, but God still punished David in his own earthly life through the death of David's infant son.

God doesn't punish us arbitrarily, but to reorder our will so we can be morally perfected in him.

Hebrews says that earthly fathers do this imperfectly with their children, but God does this perfectly with us.

Now, other critics have said that if my arguments were distinct, then I was being redundant in the debate.

Why even bother with the argument from purification unless my true motive was to obscure the doctrine of purgatory?

Now, I could have made the full case for purgatory with just my second argument from post-mortem punishment for sin, but the first argument from post-mortem purification from sin makes the second argument more intelligible.

This is a fair move, as Protestants often use cumulative case arguments that make successive arguments in their case more understandable to skeptical audiences.

For example, in a debate where I'm trying to prove Christianity is true, I could make my whole case just from Christ's resurrection from the dead.

However, using a preliminary argument that shows the existence of a supernatural cause of miracles, like one of the classic arguments for God's existence, well this makes the second argument from Christ's resurrection more intelligible and accessible, because a miracle is easier to believe in if you think a God that intervenes miraculously exists.

And when it comes to this temporary punishment for sin after death, that's not guaranteed.

Paragraph 1472 of the catechism, which I quoted in the debate with James White, says the following: A conversion which proceeds from a fervent charity can attain the complete purification of the sinner in such a way that no punishment would remain.

We can choose to receive God's correction in this life and no longer suffer the temporary consequences of our sins.

This is wise because some people will say, Well, why worry about being holy in this life if you're just gonna go to purgatory anyways?

The answer is, as I noted in the debate, that the Bible says of the saved who die that, Whoever enters God's rest also ceases from his labors.

The church has recognized that this means souls in purgatory cannot merit greater rewards in heaven like people on earth can do.

Also, just as some people have greater joy in heaven because they prepared their soul to better receive God's grace in this life, some souls in purgatory suffer more because they failed to prepare their souls to receive the grace of God in this life.

While Protestants deny this truth about purgatory, they do usually admit that unique rewards await believers in heaven.

Like many Protestants, James White claims that the loss that believers suffer in 1 Corinthians 3:15 is merely a disciplinary loss of rewards, and he says that's not a punishment that purifies us from anything.

But this is a distinction without a difference.

As a parent, I punish my children all the time by taking away a reward they were promised.

White even says in his book, The Roman Catholic Controversy, that it is, quote, Terrifying to be in this position before God.

But why?

We can only be terrified of God because of the unpleasant things he might do to us.

Now, God doesn't arbitrarily cause us pain,He only causes us pain for our good.

The Protestant author Randy Alcorn even summarizes First Corinthian three's loss of rewards in a way that perfectly corresponds with the Catholic view on purgatory.

He writes this: Maybe one way to say it is that the loss of rewards is in some sense permanent, but the suffering of that loss will be temporary.

God will do away with the suffering, but that is after the judgment, after our giving account to the Lord.

The suffering of regret will be there at the judgment.

How could it not be?

Before entrance to the eternal state.

But then there is the learning and purifying and eternal rejoicing.

The temporal or temporary debt of punishment that is paid in purgatory is just the unpleasantness that is naturally due to us as part of the process of reordering our sinful wills to fully love God.

God created the world in a natural order where doing good leads to pleasure and doing evil leads to pain.

So when we derive pleasure from evil instead of pain, suffering represents a restoration of God's order for the world.

That is the debt being talked about.

It's not some kind of legal fine that must be paid in order to get out of purgatory.

Even a Protestant like C.S.

Lewis described a kind of painful purifying punishment in his own defense of purgatory when he wrote the following: Our souls demand purgatory, don't they?

Would it not break the heart if God said to us, 'It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drop with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things nor draw away from you.

Enter into the joy.' Should we not reply, 'With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleaned first.' It may hurt, you know.

Even so, sir, I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering, partly from tradition, partly because most real good that has been done me in this life has involved it.' Lewis also compared purgatory to a visit to the dentist, and not a very pleasant one, but unlike a dentist, God can painlessly heal us of any affliction because God is omnipotent.

The only reason God would make healing from sin painful would be because such a consequence is fitting for us as we grow in holiness and restore God's created order.

This punishment isn't meted out to satisfy some standard of justice even God must adhere to, but it comes out as a natural consequence of God's fatherly love for us.

That's why ideally we should strive for holiness in this life so that our souls are fully prepared to receive the joys of heaven.

If you'd like to learn more about this subject, I'd recommend my colleague Carlo Broussard's book, Purgatory is For Real, as well as my debate with James White on purgatory linked in the description below.

Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.