Tag Archives: Purgatory

Revisiting purgatory

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in Bible, Faith, Pope, Salvation

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Jesus mentions Heaven about 65 times, and hell about 45; he does not mention Purgatory once; so one of my objections to it is that the Lord Himself nowhere mentions it. It  is true that in Matthew (Mt. 18:32-34) and Luke (Lk. 12:59) there are passages where Jesus says that those who have sinned will be jailed and not let out until they have paid their debt in full. The Catholic Church has read these, and 1 Cor. 3:11-15 as referring to what happens after death and has concluded there must be some place between here and Heaven in which, despite the explicit promise of Jesus, we will not be condemned. On the one side clear statements about our being saved, on the other rather tortuous explanations of how this is not as easy as Jesus makes it look in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Jesus says that to believe in HIm is to be saved, but men, unable to believe the greatness of the Grace offered to those who repent and believe, have constructed something which looks very like a debtors’ prison. We are asked to believe that Christ died on the Cross in expiation for our sins, and God loves us that much that He makes the sacrifice that we cannot make; His Grace overflows and breaks the bounds of sin. Then, when we die, we get put into debtors’ prison until we are pure enough to be with Him. But where is this dirt? The Blood of the Lamb has washed it away. By all means, if you must, carry over the old Jewish ‘kaddish’ belief that prayers hastened the process of purification – but remember when you do that the Jews do not believe as we do; they do not have Christ crucified and risen to save them, because they refuse to believe; we do. Where is this conditional salvation? Dives looks up to Lazarus, but there is a great gulf between them, and he can in no wise cross it; no purgatory here, and yet Dives does not appear to have been a very wicked fellow.

All of this leads to a system where one can gain ‘merit’, like merit marks at school; and one presumes there are ‘demerits’. So what happens in this place the Bible never mentions? Do we work off our debt? How? Do we hang around in the Marshalsea until the end of time, or do we get let out early in some way? It would seem odd to keep everyone in there for the same length of time. We can. we are told, help souls there by praying for them. So they do get out early do they – what is the release process, and why are we told nothing of this vast system? Grace is not a substance which can be gathered up and doled out in indulgences, or in the prayers of faithful. The Pope and his Church cannot give ‘extra Grace’ to ease a person’s passage through Purgatory.  Grace is freely given to the Pope as a sinner, he has no extra powers to get more Grace. God gives it to us if we believe. Yes, that little word gives. You can’t buy it, you can’t store it up and give it out to those who are nice and deprive those who are naughty, or make those who are a bit of both wait longer in the spunging house.

As He hung in the final agonies of crucifixion, the Lord Jesus did not comfort the thief by saying: ‘You will only have a short amount of time in Purgatory’; neither did He say: ‘Your baptism of desire means you don’t need to serve time in Purgatory’ – He did that simple thing which sinful men need to complicate because otherwise they cannot understand its simplicity:

And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

The thief was a bad man, he admitted the justice of his punishment. Now, one either believes that if one waits long enough and makes a full confession, one can be spared Purgatory (which seems a Catholic variant of once saved always saved), or one believes that if we have faith and follow Him faithfully, the saving Grace we received at Baptism will overflow the bounds of our sins and that, washed clean in the blood of the Lamb, we shall at the last stand before Him – with no period in clink in between. As one with a lively fear of hell, I need no temptation to think that it could be OK after all – better do the Lord’s work now – and the dead can bury the dead.

The Good News is we’ve been saved. The awesome news is that Jesus died for you. Embrace Him and be saved. It is that simple. There’s no great series of exams to pass, no elaborate theology to master, you’re not going to need a doctorate to get into Heaven, and you’re not doing to need to do time in a very nasty place of torture first. Jesus died to redeem us – believe and be saved!

Romans 6:6 and Romans 8:38-9 are true – rejoice!

 

 

Hell

22 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by in Bible, Early Church, Faith, St. Isaac

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purgatory_r1_c1Fr Aidan Kimel’s thought-provoking series on St Isaac prompt me to a post. Francis Phillips commented, correctly, that the Catholic Church has not held, dogmatically, that Purgatory is a place, and Fr Aidan responded:

This is accurate, if we restrict ourselves to the magisterial teaching of the Latin Church. But it also the case that over the centuries plenty of Latin theologians have understood purgatory, as well as hell, as a place. It’s not clear to me when Catholic theologians stopped thinking of Purgatory in this way.

The distinction drawn between the Magisterial teaching of the Church and the views of individual theologians is critical here. One often reads that the Church teaches x or y, when a more accurate rendering would be that theologians x and y have given that as their opinion.  Because of the sheer mass of writing in the Latin tradition, the number of theological opinions expressed is nearly infinite. If the Church has not commented adversey upon those views, they can be held by the faithful; if the Church has definitively said that such a view cannot be held, then they cannot. Thus, on Universalism, there is some doubt as to whether the views condemned at the fifth Council were accurate representations of what Origen wrote, but none that we cannot hold dogmatically the belief that all will be saved. However, were one to express (as Jess often does) the hope that this might be so, then, as long as she does not insist it is so, she expresses what the church calls a pious opinion.

It is natural enough to wish to see hell as St Isaac does, which is that it is the same place as Heaven, but when experienced by those who reject God’s love, it is terrible for them, but that, I am afraid, requires us to read Scripture as allegory too much for the taste of Catholic theologians. Whilst they acknowledge (as they might well, for it is so) that we are told little about hell, they do know what we are told, and it is always that it is another place, and that God is active in sending people there, as in Matthew 22:11-14. If we take Matthew 25 seriously, those who do not prepare for the coming of God will find themselves locked out of Heaven. Lest we missed it, Matthew 13 tells us that:

Son of Man will send out His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness, 42 and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

WHen He comes, the Son of Man will divide the sheep from the goats, the one will go into everlasting life, the other to eternal punishment. And, as the story of Dives and Lazarus informs us, there is an unbridgeable gulf between Hades and Abraham’s bosom, and it is plain that there are people in Hades and that they are suffering.

It would be pleasant and much more in keeping with modern theological trends, to hold what St Isaac holds, but in order to hold it, I am afraid one has to discount far too much scripture.

The Latin Church has never stated dogmatically that Purgatory is a place, but it has stated that hell is. Fr. Aidan offers a fascinating Patristic florilegium here, but, of course, as he himself says, such things are never wholly satisfactory, although this one is superb.  The Orthodox, of course, have no one bishop who may speak with authority for all, the Roman Church does, and so, for me and for many, rather than pitch our learning against that of the voice of the ages, we accept what the Church says.

Merit

22 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Bible, Faith

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redeemed-and-forgivenOne of the merits of this blog is that one encounters some very able Roman Catholic apologists; Servus Fidelis, is one such, as is Jessica’s friend, Joseph, and they are both well worth reading, not least for those who come to Catholicism with the Protestant view of what it teaches.  Our recent discussions on Purgatory and Indulgences have prompted some interesting responses, but I remain unconvinced that Christ’s saving blood was not the once and for all intercession needed to save us.

One of the many false charges levelled at the Catholic Church is that it teaches a works-based salvation. It does not, but it is not too hard to see whence the charge comes. In response to a comment of mine on his blog (and do read the whole series, it taught me much I did not know), Joseph wrote:

The Church eventually comes to speak of a “treasury of merit” from which the pope dispenses satisfaction to apply it to your penance and remit it by means of an indulgence — but what that really means is that somebody — or even everybody, all the righteous people of all the Church — offered up the satisfaction they performed so that united with Christ, they could bear the sufferings of those of us who hurt.

Now then, language matters, and at the words ‘a treasury of merit’, my old Protestant hackles rose.  We have no ‘merit’, I am afraid. What we ‘merit’ is damnation for our sins. Nice though the thought is, I do not see how we can cooperate with Christ to bear the sufferings of others, Christ bore that for us all, we are not coeval with him here; he does it alone.  The very idea that all the good deeds and prayers somehow add up to a great treasury from which anyone can dispense anything is, in my eyes, a clear invention of man and designed to preserve the privileges and powers of a priestly caste. After all, if you really do believe that Pope has the power to remit aeons of time out of purgatory, what would you not offer the fellow in return?

One of the first acts of the Reformers was to close down chantry chapels. These were non-monastic houses of Religious who were paid (often by endowment) to says masses which would reduce the time of the benefactor in Purgatory. The Reformers, rightly, rejected such an idea: a poor man as much as a great was saved by the blood of the Lamb, and anyone who thought their wealth would get them time off was not reading their Gospel of Luke.

Yes, one can, if one wants, call in aid passages from Maccabees and decide to interpret a passage from Paul as verifying Purgatory and what follows from that belief. But the Orthodox do not so hold, nor does the Reformed Faith.  There is no Treasury of ‘merits’, and there is no need to go to the Mother of the Son of Man, or one of his chief courtiers for justice. Those things were products of medieval society, and it was natural for such people to think in such ways. But to do this one needs to catch fragments and to build upon them elaborate superstructures. How much simpler to hold that Christ is the sole intercessor we need (although if one wants to pray to others, fair enough, but why?), and that the Blood of the Lamb saves us all.

Filling in the gaps

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in Bible, Early Church, Faith

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ProdigalIt is a common enough trait of atheists to talk about the ‘God of the gaps’.  As my God fills only the gap left by my need to address my sin and repent, I didn’t give any time to the concept, but I do wonder how far some of the things which divide Christians are the result of our trying to fill in the ‘gaps’?

The idea of the Trinity is to be found in Scripture and the traditions of the early church, but not stated thus, and not elaborated in the form Trinitarians have long accepted, as a series of posts here has helped to describe.

Binitarians will deny the validity of those ancient insights, but most of us do not; however, it is hard to argue that the ideas expressed by Gregory Nazianzus are there, in that form in Scripture. Men have needed, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to dwell on many of the things we have in Scripture in order the better to understand it.  That leaves, as it left the Arians, those who cannot take the majority view to maintain their position or reconsider it; men being what they are there are few examples of the latter.

If such dogmatic concepts are difficult to grasp, they do lead us into territory where one might say that it seems like you need a PhD in theology to be saved – which surely cannot be at all right, as what one needs is the faith of a child and a heart touched by grace. I don’t suppose the thief on the Cross to whom Christ offered a place in paradise that day, had the foggiest grasp of the Trinity. Indeed, he hadn’t been baptised, or made a good confession – and so, by the standards that came to obtain in the church, there’s no way he could have been saved – except of course He was.

Such passages cause pastoral concern. Matthew 20:1-16 is, by our standards, blatantly unjust. No one imagines that it is fair to pay a fellow who has worked an hour or two the same as one who has put in a full day; yet we are told that the kingdom of Heaven is like the householder who did just that. The parable of the unjust steward in Luke has caused many pastors sleepless nights. As for the parable of the Prodigal Son, well, if ever there were a pastoral nightmare, there it is.

Most of us, if we are honest, tend to react like the older brother – that is crossly and with uncomprehending irritation at the unfairness of it all. The little tyke insists on his share of the money, gets it, wastes it on wine, women and song (though perhaps he thought it wasn’t wasting it whilst the win and women were in plentiful supply), gets into a mess, goes back intending to wash the dishes, so to say, and dad welcome shim with open arms, kills the fatted calf and generally acts like something special has happened. You can see why the Older brother gets miffed.

You can also see why priests needed to emphasise that despite being offered eternal salvation in return for repentance, folk needed to mind their ps and qs and not assume they were saved.  I really can’t help thinking that was where Purgatory came in – don’t think it’s over in this life.  It is interesting that the Orthodox didn’t develop the idea, but their theology seems less jurisprudence based than that of Rome.  The Biblical verses in favour are vanishingly small and by no means pellucid. The RCC may be right, but it is the only Church which has taken this view – which is, again, interesting.

Indulged

18 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by in Faith

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harrowing-of-hadesI do hope the story about the Pope offering indulgences to people to follow him on Twitter is untrue. It really does remind me of why I object to the whole concept of Purgatory. We had a big session on this back in May, and I don’t want to rehearse it again, as clearly folk have positions which they hold and which aren’t going to change; but stories like this seem, at least to me, to show an undue laxness about the idea.

If there really is a place where we have a chance to work off our sins when we die (and I can’t see why one would be needed when Christ has paid the price for all our sins), then the idea you can get time of for tweeting seems plain silly; it seems to devalue the idea.  Now it may be, as appears to be the case, that this Pope is one of those excitable conversationalists who speaks first and thinks later (if at all), but has the man no one to help him out?

If there is a Purgatory, I can’t see why God would let you off some time in the jug because you were fortunate enough to live in a country where you had access to one of the biggest wastes of time imaginable. Indeed, I dislike the whole idea that if you do x and y you get time off in advance – what on earth is that about when push comes to shove?

I’d have thought that if you need to do serious time after death, that’s what you need to do, not pay it off in advance like a discount for early booking.  To my Protestant frame of mind there is something fundamentally wrong with such a way of thinking.  It’s like the old idea that if you built a chantry chapel and paid for clerks to say masses for your soul, you could make it out of the jug sooner. The God I know is not a respecter of earthly rank and privilege. I can’t see St Peter checking his notes and going: ‘Yes, you are Sir Geoffrey de Sales, and we have a note here that chantry priests are putting in a mass a day for you, so, in place of the 200 years we had you down for, with the discount, and the indulgences you already have, that’ll be fifty, thanks very much.’  And then: ‘Ah, you are Geoff Sales, the poor ploughman. Yes, I can see that was a pretty nasty life, but unfortunately you didn’t pay for any masses and indulgences, so you get no discount whatsoever.’  If that is parodying it, then I apologise, but I need someone to explain why it is a parody.

I prefer the God I have been brought up with and known all my days – the one who paid the price for our sin and requires of us love and repentance, who counts not the cost, and who desireth not the death of the sinner, but that all might live. I can understand how men came to another view – that really seems far too generous. BUt our God told us the parable of the Prodigal. The Prodigal was prepared to pay a heavy price for merely being fed – his father remitted all; as ours does.

So, I don’t have to go on Twitter 🙂

The decline of hell

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by in Bible, Faith

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dangerousjourneyThe idea that we can believe what we like is deeply rooted in our society as part of our fundamental freedom. I doubt many of us wish to return to the time when uttering a word of sedition against the monarch or the Established Church could land you in chokey. In that sense the answer to the question of whether it matters what we believe is that it does not.  On the other hand, it clearly does matter – were it not so, politicians and advertisers would not spend fortunes trying to win our support. Belief has consequences.

One of the things we used to hear from the pulpit was that one of the consequences of sin was hell-fire. If I were ever tempted to write about the last fifty years, I’d call it ‘the decline of hell’. I recall being told many years ago by a priest in the Church of England that he thought the whole idea of such preaching was a bad thing. It was, he argued, better to stress God’s love than to dwell on hell. I agreed with him about God’s love, but didn’t about hell.

The emphasis on God’s love has often led, as it did with Origen, toward a form of universalism – that is the belief that all shall be saved.  The discussion we had earlier this week about predestination was, in part, a debate about whether a merciful and loving God can make folk who are bound for hell. It was, in part, the old Calvinistic idea of predestination which made some reluctant to preach about hell-fire, but if we reject the notion that it is God who condemns us to hell in favour of the idea that it is we who do so by rejecting Him and His love, then it becomes incumbent upon us to mention hell occasionally.

There is a consequence to rejecting God and His love.  Christ Himself tells us about hell and that those who reject Him will be consigned there. Of course, if we want to advance the argument (not often heard in mainstream Christian circles now) that only members of our own communion will go Heaven, then we are bound to expect a back-lash from the rest of Christianity. But what if we take the view that those who confess Christ are in with a chance?  If we were to do that, we’d open a space to talk about what happens to those who reject Him.

Note that this is not about those who do not know or who have not had a chance of knowing Him. In the beginning and the end everything is, as Jess implied this morning, Grace. But I do wonder whether we have not gone far too far in the direction of stressing God’s love and not done enough to warn of the consequences? That is not to argue we should believe because we are frightened of hell, but it is to say that if we believe it exists, we are under an obligation to say something about it.

Guest Post: Purgatory, a meditation

10 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Faith

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MequiteThis lovely reflection is from a long-standing and dear friend of this blog, David Monier-Williams, and I want to thank him for allowing me to share it:

While I was meditating on the Rosary this morning, I looked out my kitchen/family room widow and noticed all the blossoms floating in the pool from the nearby . It reminded me of Purgatory.

The tree is the Tree of Life, we are the blossoms that live but briefly and then fall to the ground only to be carried away by the Landscaper who’ll put us in the landfill and be covered with the other refuse for eternity. Or for some few, carried by the wind, The Holy Spirit directly to Heaven. For the rest of us, a gust blows us into the purging pool of Purgatory. Here we will spend a certain time shedding our venial sins by going around and around this pool of purification in the ever changing water fed of The Holy Spirit and the prayers of the Church Triumphant and Militant. The lees are to be vacuumed up and disposed of. As you can see those souls who have completed this process await the Divine Presence at the doorway/flap which frequently opens for them. This while the rest of us flow in circles sometimes eddying in one spot a little longer to finally let go of maybe arrogance or maybe the need to be right. The pool empties awaiting the next gust of wind.

There is the monotonous droning sound of purification, though it lessens as we become even more desirous of our God, as we bust into a song of desire and love.

Note: I have added a link to a video from David.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B02xDGtkNcjqcXJ3aDBvUjZvb0E/edit?usp=drive_web

Out of Purgatory?

10 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Bible, Early Church, Faith, Salvation

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risenIt seems to me that there are doctrinal reasons for not finding the idea of Purgatory at all plausible. So why is it there? Chalcedon is right to say it has been there for a good long time, if by purgatory he means, as he does, the notion that when we are dead we need purging. There’s a handy list here of the Fathers whose words go in that direction. Much depends on what one thinks the Last Judgement will be.

St Paul tells us ‘… we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.’ There are those who say that there is a judgement before the final one, in which case Purgatory has its place. This is not sustained by Scripture, neither is it compatible with the idea of Christ paying the price for us once and for all. It implies, if it does not state, that by suffering we can be fit for Heaven; that being so, why the Incarnation or Resurrection? Just put us on medium bake in Purgatory for however long the recipe says.

I think we are here in the presence of something which every tradition picks up – the tares along with the wheat. Popular piety is a marvellous thing, but it is apt to err – which is why what is believed needs testing against the word of Scripture.

Now it will be said, and rightly, that there were Christians before there was a Canon of Scripture, but we are hardly going to return to that state. The Canon has long been part of our tradition, and we are charged with reading it and surely, where necessary, correcting popular or even clerical misconceptions?

Not everything which found a place in Christian thought has been found worthy; most of that we call heresy. We can, and must, expect to suffer in this life, and as we have no idea what happens at the Last Judgement, it might be wise to suppose that it isn’t going to be pleasant to have all one’s sins exposed; it would be prudential to commit as few as possible. But the idea that we will be thrown into God spunging-house until we’ve paid off our debts is a popular misconception; there’s no amount of compensation we can pay God – had there been there would have been no need for the Incarnation and the Crucifixion.

Some traditions – the Trinity and the Creeds for two – have been shared by all orthodox Christians. Purgatory does not fall into this class. One intelligent Catholic apologist writes that the Orthodox do not deny the ‘orthodoxy of the dogma of Purgatory WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE LATIN THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE.’ True, but irrelevant in so far as, obviously it is up to the Catholic Church to define its own beliefs, but the Orthodox, like the Protestants, do not accept that the Latin theological perspective is grounded firmly in Scripture on this one.

The Catholic Church has no problem believing that the Orthodox tradition on the Pope is wrong, or that some of the Protestant traditions are wrong, and I have none believing that here the Orthodox are right and the Catholic tradition is simply mistaken. God has paid the price for us. ‘It is finished’ meant what it said.

Back in Purgatory

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Bible, Early Church, Faith, Salvation

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harrowing-of-hadesOnce I’d said my bit, it seemed sensible to let Chalcedon have his before jumping in; apart from anything else, this is Jessica’s place and whilst she’s kind enough to let a bit of polemic in, it isn’t what she wants her blog to be about. Now C has expounded his case, let me add to the discussion.

First, I’m impressed. It would be easy enough to say that he’s really saying that in the past the church has said things about Purgatory we find uncomfortable and therefore it has to be redefined to make us comfortable; but as I read him he’s making a deeper point and one which we should all pause to consider: the effect of historicism on tradition. In itself, that’s a topic I’d like to discuss in future, so here I shall deal with it as it applies to Purgatory.

C says it is the way the Church explains some ancient customs, and that I accept, but if, as we both hold, doctrine matters, then we have to go there to see how far customs can be justified.

So, in keeping with his method, I shall set out what I believe our faith teaches and then ask whether Purgatory is consistent with those doctrines.

The basic foundation of the doctrine of Atonement and Redemption is that human beings are totally incapable of satisfying the Divine Justice of God and thus God who is alone unlimited was Incarnate and provided us with unlimited atonement and forgiveness through Our Lord Jesus Christ. So, my first proposition is that the existence of a place of purifying sufferings for believers implies that the blood of our Saviour was not enough to purify us in the first place. How does one justify it in the light of the following clear statements”

7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.

8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. [1 John 1:7-9]

25 Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.

and also:
“He is able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him…” [Heb 7:25]

As if that were not clear enough, St Paul tells us:

23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

24 Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus [Rom 3:24]

We were bought with a price, once for all, not purchased in instalments. As He ceased His earthly existence, Jesus said ‘it is finished’. St Paul made it clear enough what had finished when he told the Colossians:

And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses;

14 Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross

Neither can I see how it goes with what we are told in Luke 7:36-42.

All of these are, of course, compatible with the idea that there is a purifying of us at the Last Judgement – which would explain 1 Corinthians 3:15 much better than the invention of Purgatory. So, how are we to read this in the light of tradition?

Inventing Purgatory: Part 4 The use of tradition

09 Thursday May 2013

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christ_wisdomLet us remind ourselves what the Church teaches about Purgatory:

1) There is a place of transition/transformation for those en-route to Heaven, and 2) prayer is efficacious for the dead who are in this state.

Where do these ideas come from?  They were not invented in the Middle Ages, even if some particularly (and typical) grisly detail was painted on to the original idea; nor were they invented in the Renaissance, where again, in typical fashion, much embellishment was added. It is, I want to suggest, the embellishments to which Geoffrey and others object. It was characteristic of both those eras to dwell on human suffering and grisly detail about pain and suffering, and yes, let me say straight away, Geoffrey is right to argue that the concept was adapted to the uses of the times; that is what happens across several thousand years; it does not negate the concept when one era finds the way it was portrayed by another wrong, any more than it invalidates the house as a concept because we no long live in wattle and daub huts.

The concept of praying for the dead and that we do not go straight to heaven when we die (although not that we do not go to hell) has been around for as long as the faith itself. Those Catholics who cite various verses to ‘prove’ it are, in many ways, playing the cherry pick a verse game so beloved of Protestants. You can make any verse ‘mean’ what you want if you try, as Arius did, hard enough; indeed, like him, you can ‘prove’ Christ was not divine.  What defeated Arius was not the logical coherence of the position of Athanasius, but rather that he was basing himself in what most Christians had taken for granted,

As my short series on these matters showed, Arius’ views were not without coherence, neither were they without support from Scripture; but they were without support from what most Christians had assumed was meant by the Resurrection. Arius, in short, disregarded the voice of the ancesors because he knew better. In that he set a grim example. Christians have prayed for their dead and they have believed that that which is sinful at death needs cleansing. These ideas have been there from the beginning.

They are there in the Orthodox tradition, although the Orthodox tend to be a bit cagey about detail (in which they have my sympathy). They hold that praying for the dead is a pious act; why so if the dead are already with Christ?  They hold that nothing unclean comes into God’s presence and therefore some cleansing needs to happen; on the detail they are vague. That was never the Latin tradition. The Roman way, bless it, was to worry away at a problem and then come up with a concrete answer. The Roman tradition sought to make sense of these ancient traditions and insights and came up with the idea of Purgatory. It was a way of making sense of what had been received from earliest times.

Certainly there are those, myself among them, who would argue that it is time to do what our ancestors did, and that it to adapt the insights to our own times. That we be largely a matter of two things: positively stressing the opening lines of this post; and negatively, cleaning away the rich layers of accretions on the original picture.

That would be in line with the living tradition we inherit from the catacombs. We could, alternatively, take the Luther line, which leads us straight to modern relativism. I know which I prefer.