Is purgatory biblical?

Question 10115.

The doctrine of purgatory teaches that those who die in a state of grace but with unforgiven venial sins, or with temporal punishment still owing, undergo a purifying process after death before entering heaven. It is not biblical. It rests on a text outside the canon, on inferences from passages that will not bear the weight, and above all on a view of justification that I believe the New Testament excludes.

I want to state the doctrine fairly before disagreeing with it, because caricatures help nobody, and because a great many sincere people find real comfort in it. But comfort that rests on a false foundation is a cruelty in the long run, and this one has cost the church dearly.

What the doctrine of purgatory actually claims

Roman Catholic teaching is more careful than most Protestants assume. Purgatory is not a second chance and it is not hell with parole. Everyone in purgatory is definitely going to heaven. The Catechism describes it as a purification for those who die in God’s grace and friendship but are still imperfectly purified.

The distinction underneath it is between mortal sin, which destroys grace in the soul, and venial sin, which wounds without destroying. It also distinguishes between the guilt of sin, forgiven at absolution, and the temporal punishment due to sin, which may remain and must be satisfied either in this life or afterwards.

So the doctrine of purgatory is a doctrine about leftover consequences rather than leftover condemnation. That is a real distinction, and I want to grant it before I dispute it.

It is also worth saying that the Church of Rome has never taught that purgatory is a place of probation where the outcome is uncertain. Nobody there is in danger. On its own terms the doctrine is meant to be reassuring, and Catholics who hold it will often tell you that Protestants have misunderstood it as a sort of temporary hell. Sometimes we have. The objection I am about to make is not that the doctrine is cruel but that it is not taught anywhere in the Bible.

Where the doctrine came from

The seeds are early. Prayers for the dead appear in Christian inscriptions from the second and third centuries, and Augustine prayed for his mother Monica. Augustine also speculated, tentatively, about a purifying fire, though he was careful to mark it as speculation.

Gregory the Great, around the year 600, gave the idea a firmer shape, and the mediaeval schoolmen developed it into a full system. It was defined dogmatically at the Councils of Florence and Trent, largely in response to the Reformation.

The point worth noticing is the direction of travel. The practice of praying for the dead came first, and the doctrine of purgatory was constructed afterwards to explain why the practice made sense. Doctrine built backwards from custom is always worth examining carefully.

The text that is not in the Bible

The main proof text is 2 Maccabees 12, where Judas Maccabeus takes up a collection and sends it to Jerusalem for a sin offering on behalf of dead soldiers who had died wearing pagan amulets. The writer commends the act as holy and pious.

The difficulty is straightforward. 2 Maccabees is not part of the Hebrew canon, was not received as Scripture by the Jews who preserved the Old Testament, and Jesus and the apostles never quote it. I do not accept it as authoritative, so it cannot establish the doctrine of purgatory for me.

There is a further problem inside the text itself. The soldiers had died in idolatry, which in Catholic terms is mortal sin, and mortal sin excludes a person from purgatory altogether. The passage proves rather more than its users want.

The New Testament texts that are offered

1 Corinthians 3 is the strongest candidate. Each man’s work is tested by fire, and the man whose work is burnt suffers loss but is himself saved, as through fire. Read quickly, it sounds like a purifying ordeal.

But read it slowly. What passes through the fire is the work, not the man. The subject of the testing is what has been built on the foundation, and the builder is saved regardless. There is no suggestion of cleansing the person, and the passage is about assessment at the judgement seat of Christ. I have set that out in my answer on the Bema seat.

Matthew 12:32, on the sin that will not be forgiven in this age or the age to come, is also cited. But saying that a particular sin is never forgiven, in either age, does not imply that other sins are being forgiven in the age to come. That is a straightforward logical over-reach, and Matthew 5:26 about the last penny is a parable about reconciliation before court, not a map of the afterlife.

What Scripture says instead

Hebrews 9:27 says it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement. Death, then judgement, with no third item inserted between them.

Paul says to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord. Not on the way to being at home. At home. Jesus told the thief he would be in paradise that same day, and that man had a life’s worth of temporal punishment outstanding by any reckoning. I have written on where believers go when they die.

And John says the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. The Greek is katharismos language, purification language, and the New Testament consistently attaches it to the cross rather than to a process afterwards.

The real issue is justification

Underneath the exegetical arguments lies a difference about what happens when God declares a sinner righteous. If justification is a process of being made progressively righteous, with grace infused and cooperation required, then it is entirely reasonable to suppose the process might be unfinished at death and need completing.

If justification is a declaration, made once, on the basis of a righteousness that is not ours but Christ’s, received by faith alone, then there is nothing left to complete. The verdict has been given. Romans 8:1 says there is now no condemnation, and Romans 5:1 says we have peace with God.

That is why the doctrine of purgatory cannot be treated as a secondary matter of furniture in the afterlife. It follows from a different gospel arithmetic, and it is at that level that the disagreement has to be conducted.

Temporal punishment and the fatherly discipline of God

There is a genuine biblical truth in the neighbourhood, and I do not want to trample it. God does discipline his children, and sin does have consequences that forgiveness does not always remove. David was forgiven and the child still died. That is real, and it is in the text.

But every instance of it in Scripture happens in this life, as fatherly training, and Hebrews 12 says it is for our good that we may share his holiness. It is never presented as satisfaction owed to justice, and it never extends beyond death.

The doctrine of purgatory takes something true about discipline in this life and projects it into the next as a debt to be paid. That is where it goes wrong, and it goes wrong at the point where it starts to compete with the sufficiency of the cross.

Indulgences and why this mattered so much

If souls in purgatory can be helped by the prayers and merits of the living, then the church holds a treasury it can apply on their behalf, and by the late Middle Ages that treasury was being sold. Tetzel’s jingle about the coin in the coffer and the soul springing from purgatory is famous for a reason.

Luther’s ninety-five theses were about indulgences, not directly about the doctrine of purgatory, but the two could not be separated for long. Pull the thread and the whole garment comes away.

Rome has long since suppressed the sale of indulgences, and modern Catholic teaching is a great deal more restrained than the mediaeval practice. The underlying structure, however, remains, and the structure is the problem rather than the abuses it once produced.

It is worth pausing on how a doctrine of the afterlife came to reshape the economy of half a continent. Chantry chapels were endowed, masses were purchased in bulk, and whole institutions existed to shorten the sentences of the dead. Money follows belief, and when the belief concerns the eternal welfare of the people we love, it follows very obediently indeed. That is not an argument against the doctrine of purgatory by itself, since a true doctrine can be abused. But it does explain why the Reformers regarded it as urgent rather than academic, and why they were not willing to leave it as a difference of opinion among friends.

What about praying for the dead?

There is no example of it in the New Testament, no command to do it, and no promise attached to it. Given how much the apostles say about death and grief, the silence is loud.

I understand the impulse. When someone dies we want to go on doing something for them, and prayer feels like the last available service. But the kindest thing I can tell a grieving Christian is that their loved one needs nothing further from them, because Christ has already done everything necessary.

The place for prayer is before the funeral, not after it, and the place for the gospel is now, while people can hear it.

There is a further difficulty that is rarely raised. If prayers help souls in purgatory, then the well-connected dead do better than the forgotten ones. The person with a large family and a wealthy parish is at an advantage over the person who died alone. Whatever else the doctrine of purgatory may be, that consequence is hard to square with a God who shows no partiality, and mediaeval practice made the inequality explicit by attaching prices to it.

How to talk about this with Catholic friends

Not by scoring points. Many Catholics hold the doctrine of purgatory sincerely and are genuinely trusting Christ, and I would rather begin where we agree, which is a great deal more than the internet suggests.

I would start with 1 John 1:7 and Hebrews 9 rather than with Maccabees, and I would ask a simple question: has the blood of Jesus dealt with all my sin, or most of it? That question has a way of going straight to the heart of the matter without an argument breaking out.

And I would take seriously the fear that often sits underneath. The doctrine of purgatory persists partly because people cannot believe they could be accepted just as they are. The answer to that is not debate. It is the gospel.

Two further arguments that are sometimes made

The first is an appeal to consensus. The doctrine of purgatory, it is said, has been believed by most Christians in most centuries, and it is arrogant for a Baptist pastor in a small English town to set himself against that. I feel the force of it, and I am genuinely wary of novelty in theology.

But the East has never accepted the Western formulation, the practice preceded the doctrine by centuries, and the dogmatic definitions came late. More importantly, consensus is not the rule of faith. Scripture is, and the appeal to what most people have believed is exactly the argument that was made against every reform the church has ever needed.

The second argument is experiential, and it is harder. People report a sense that their dead relatives are being helped by their prayers. I would say gently that a feeling of usefulness is not evidence of usefulness, and that grief is a poor instrument for measuring the state of another soul.

Does anything survive of the concern, and what replaces it?

Something does survive, and this is worth saying, because a purely negative answer would leave a hole. The doctrine of purgatory exists because people took seriously two things that Scripture also takes seriously: that God is holy and that we are not yet.

Both of those are true. The mistake is in the remedy, not in the diagnosis. Where Rome says we must be purified after death, Scripture says we are declared righteous now and made perfect instantaneously at the resurrection. Both accounts insist that nothing unclean enters. They differ entirely on who does the cleaning and when it was paid for.

So I would rather not respond to the doctrine of purgatory by becoming casual about holiness, which is the direction Protestants often drift. Take the concern seriously. Reject the solution.

What replaces it is not a lower view of holiness. Scripture is emphatic that nothing unclean enters the city and that without holiness no one will see the Lord. The question is not whether we must be perfect to enter but how we are made so, and the doctrine of purgatory answers that question in a way the New Testament never does.

The New Testament answer is glorification, and it is instantaneous rather than gradual. We shall all be changed, Paul says at 1 Corinthians 15:51, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. Whatever remains of sin in the believer is dealt with at once, by God, as a gift.

That is a better doctrine than the doctrine of purgatory in every respect. It takes holiness more seriously, it takes the cross more seriously, and it leaves the dying Christian with nothing to dread. See also my answer on the intermediate state.

So, now what?

If you have been taught the doctrine of purgatory and it has given you a low-grade dread about dying, weigh Hebrews 9:27 and 1 John 1:7 for yourself. Ask whether the cross finished the job or started it.

If you are grieving and have been praying for someone who has died, be gentle with yourself. The instinct came from love. But turn that energy towards the living, who can still hear the gospel and still respond to it.

And if you are a believer who half expects a rough reception at the end, hear this plainly. You will be welcomed. Not tolerated, not processed, not detained. Welcomed. Does your picture of that moment look anything like that?

And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.

Hebrews 9:27, ESV

For Further Study

For the Roman position stated at first hand, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is the place to start, and Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma sets out the older scholastic case. On the Protestant side, Millard Erickson handles the doctrine within Christian Theology, Anthony Hoekema treats it in The Bible and the Future, and Lewis Sperry Chafer and Charles Ryrie both deal with the sufficiency of justification in their systematic works. For the historical development, any good account of Luther and the indulgence controversy repays the effort.