PURGATORY
188or purging.” Although the doctrine that
purgatory is a place along with heaven
and hell was not officially affirmed by
the Roman Catholic Church until the
Second Council of Lyons in 1274, seeds of
the doctrine were evident much earlier.
Church Fathers of the East as well as the
West held that there would be a time of
cleansing for many believers after death
before they would be ready for heaven.
The early practice of praying for the dead,
which assumes the possibility of post-
mortem spiritual growth and progress,
played a significant role in the develop-
ment of the doctrine.
The basic logic of the doctrine of pur-
gatory is fairly straightforward. Nothing
unclean or impure can enter heaven. So
long as there is anything in our lives
that keeps us from loving God perfectly,
we cannot experience the full intimacy
with God that heaven promises. However,
many if not most believers die with vari-
ous sins and imperfections in their lives
and their characters. It is the need to make
sense of these realities that leads to the
basic concept of purgatory. Christians
who reject the doctrine must have some
alternative account of how these sins and
imperfections are removed.
As the doctrine of purgatory was for-
malized and systematized, theologians
generated more elaborate claims about
what living persons could do to speed the
release of their loved ones and help them
enter heaven. In addition to prayers, they
specified other acts of piety and service
such as the offering of mass and the
giving of alms. From this line of thinking,
they developed the notion of indulgences,
which in its crass form, held that souls
could be sprung from purgatory for the
right amount of money. This line of
thinking readily lent itself to the worst
sort of abuses that were easy targets for
the Protestant Reformers.
The fact that some of the most noto-
rious abuses of the time were associated
with purgatory has no doubt contributed
to the Protestant hostility to the doctrine
and general rejection of it. Among the
reasons Protestants have given for reject-
ing the doctrine, two have been persis-
tent. First, the idea that fellow believers
can do things (such as the purchase of
indulgences) to get souls out of purgatory
is alleged to be a form of salvation by
works that devalues the work of Christ to
save us and undermines the doctrine of
justification by faith. Second, the doctrine
is not clearly taught in scripture and has
slender biblical warrant at best.
Defenders of the doctrine often
concede that it lacks explicit scriptural
support, but they argue that it coheres
with things that are clearly taught in
scripture and makes theological sense of
how persons who die with character flaws
can be perfected before they enter heaven.
Likewise, the objection that purgatory is
incompatible with the doctrine of justifi-
cation by faith is dubious, for purgatory
may be construed as a matter of complet-
ing the sanctification process. Whereas
justification can be accepted by faith
in an instant, sanctification still requires