So What About Purgatory?

One thousand years. That’s about how long it took for the teaching of “purgatory” to develop in the Roman Catholic Church as it strayed away from faith in Christ’s shed blood alone for the forgiveness of sins. Apparently Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross wasn’t enough, so in the 11th century it was decided that the additional punishment of the soul in an intermediate state called purgatory was needed.

Fast forward another one thousand years or so, and that’s how long it took for this teaching about purgatory-as-punishment to morph into the modern view that purgatory is a final “purification” before we can enter the holiness of heaven.

In the meantime, this teaching led to the many abuses and false teachings around the selling of “indulgences” to get loved ones out of purgatory. It also led to Martin Luther’s 95 theses and the Protestant Reformation that emphasized the sufficiency of scripture alone, not church tradition and dogma, to teach the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.

So what does the Bible say? 1 John 2:2 tells us that “He (Jesus) is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” This “propitiation” refers to God being appeased, or satisfied, that an appropriate payment has been made on our behalf for our sins. God demands this payment so that sin doesn’t go unpunished, and his perfect justice is observed.

But what about the modern view of purgatory as “purification”? This view would say that Jesus paid the legal penalty for our sin, but that our character still needs to be made pure before we can be a part of the Kingdom of Heaven.

I was trying to figure out just how that might work as I talked with a man named Larry during an outreach conversation. Larry is a Catholic who only recently has been exploring his faith, as well as the beliefs of other religions. I asked how purgatory actually works and Larry offered a few theories, but really wasn’t sure.

My understanding based on the Bible rather than church dogma is that when we have been “born again” as Jesus described, we are adopted into God’s family and become children of our heavenly Father. Naturally, a father disciplines His children, and we learn and grow in godliness. That discipline may include suffering, and through it we better realize the suffering Jesus went through on our behalf. We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus, not through the moral perfection of our character, and we are then “sanctified”, or set apart, through a lifelong process as God begins His work in and through us. But nobody can claim to have arrived at perfection. We all need the forgiveness found in Jesus.

There is much biblical support for this process of sanctification as Christians, such as Colossians 1:9-11 - “And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.”

But where is the biblical support for something so important as purgatory, if indeed it exists? One would think that someone like Paul would have written long passages about it. And how is it that moral and character development occurs through something that sounds a lot like torture?

I know there are biblical truths, such as the doctrine of the trinity, that don’t require us to understand them for them to be true. But knowing its history, together with its lack of a biblical foundation, and I have to be honest and say this just looks a lot like a medieval moneymaking scheme by a corrupt church, which could no longer be maintained once the invention of the printing press allowed people to read the Bible for themselves, so it had to change into something slightly less heretical.

I believe Martin Luther was on to something when he called the Catholic Church to get back to its biblical roots and its faith in Christ alone for both our salvation and our sanctification. I just wish they had listened.