Answering Protestant Objections to Purgatory

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to continue the theme of purgatory. At three weeks ago, I think it was, I did a video on the “Subject is purgatory biblical?” If you’re listening in podcasts, you can just scroll down three episodes. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you should be able to find it using … You just click on Shameless Popery. You’ll find it or Google the phrase is “Purgatory biblical?” Then maybe type in Shameless Popery. You’ll find it either way.

If you haven’t watched that, you might want to watch that one first. I don’t think it’s totally necessary. But I’m going to follow the basic format I had in that one, which was this. I laid out four major arguments for purgatory. First, that nothing in pure enters heaven. Second, the Jewish and Christian practice of praying for the dead. Third, this idea from 1 Corinthians of being saved as their fire. Fourth, what we might call purgatory first fruits.

Then I looked at four objections to purgatory. The idea of the good thief on the cross; this misquoted line that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord; and the objection, well, didn’t Christ do it all; and then finally, arguments from silence. I’ve tried to go through the comments and find good thoughtful objections related to each of those areas.

Let’s follow the pattern of the original video and see what were some of the good Protestant objections. First, the idea that nothing impure enters heaven. In the video I look at Jimmy Akin. Well, I get the argument from Matt Fradd, originally, it’s from Jimmy Akin, and the argument is very simple. First, there will be neither sin nor attachment to sin in heaven.

We know this from scripture. Revelation 21:27, speaking of the new heavens and the new earth says that nothing unclean will ever enter it nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. I think there’s plenty of other passages that point to the same conclusion. If you know anything about the holiness of God, then you understand why sin is not going to be in the presence of God in glory. It just is incompatible. That’s the first premise.

The second premise, we at least most of us are still sinning and are attached to sin at the end of this life. That leads to the conclusion. Therefore, there must be a period between death and heavenly glory in which the saved are cleansed of sin and of their attachment to sin.

Now, one of the objections that I read in the comments is someone could say, “Well, or you could just say all those people go to hell?” True. But neither Catholics or Protestants think that believing Christians who have some mild sins are going to hell. That’s the question, right?

In 1 John, John distinguishes between sin that leads to death and sin that doesn’t lead to death. Sin that leads to death, we call mortal, deadly and we’ve given the name venial to that other kind of sin. The question is, “If you are a Christian and you have not abandoned Christ, but you still have some sin in your life, what happens to you when you die?” You can trivialize sin and say, “It doesn’t matter that you can sin freely and still be in the presence of God.” That’s unbiblical.

Or you could say, “All sin leads to death.” Well, that’s directly contradicted by the Bible. Or something like this, there’s a purgative purifying process. Now we can debate what that looks like, how long it takes, where we did, all of that, fine. But the idea is everyone in the presence of God is clean and some faithful Christians die somewhat dirty. What do we do?

I was surprised to see the nature of the objections to this that I thought it was going to be on the second premise that if you’re a true Christian, then your sins don’t really count as sin. Something like that. I didn’t see one person make that objection. Instead, I saw a number of comments that suggested maybe sin could be in the presence of the glory of God.

I got to say I was surprised by this because this notion of God’s radical holiness being incompatible with sin is an idea I regularly heard from Protestants growing up. But I’ll look at a couple of the questions and then objections.

The first one really is just more of a question, Frank Medelow asks, “If nothing impure enters heaven, what was Satan doing in heaven before tormenting Job?” This is a hard question for a few reasons. One, the style of Job in terms of how literally and historically the different details are to be taken, different people read it in different ways. I really don’t want to going to stake out a position on that.

I think it’s enough to say that the passage doesn’t say anything about the devil being in heaven. It says there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan also came along with them. What does that mean? We’re not really told. That’s not the point of the passage. The point is just there’s some dialogue between God and Satan setting up the conflict that’s going to be facing Job.

I don’t think you need to read that to mean that the devil is enjoying the glory of heaven because he clearly isn’t. One thing we know is by the time Job takes place, the devil has been cast out of heaven. If you want to really get into this a little deeper, the angels prior to the rebellion don’t enjoy what’s called the beatific vision, the full experience of God’s glory.

The reason we know they don’t is if they did, it would’ve been literally impossible to sin. If your heart is completely satisfied and God has filled it to the brim, you can’t want anything else. Not because your free will is controlled or something like that, but because literally what more could you ask when you have everything?

Whatever the experience the angels have prior to the rebellion of the rebel angels, it’s not the full vision of heavenly glory. They have, in other words, enough to say yes to God, but they don’t have everything. There’s still a moment of test, a moment of choice, a moment of them deciding to be with or against God.

Then the angels that choose God are then glorified. When we call Saint Michael, Saint Michael, there is a real sense in which there’s a sanctification or a glorification that happens to him, although we don’t usually use saint to describe the angels. In contrast, the devil, because he doesn’t enjoy the full beatific vision, doesn’t really know God in his essence.

It explains things like why the devil would try to tempt Jesus in the desert. If he knew who Jesus was, he would realize how stupid that is. Obviously, you’re not going to tempt or trick Jesus, he’s God, He’s not going to sin against God. All that’s angelology.

All of that is much deeper theological waters, all that’s to say whatever is happening in Job 1, there is some dialogue between God and the devil, and we don’t have to assume that the devil is experiencing the beatific vision because we know he never did, because if he did, he wouldn’t be, A, in hell; or, B, capable of sinning. The rebellion would be over. Hopefully that’s clear.

In other words, if you’re using that as an argument against the notion that you can’t be sinning and in the presence of God, I wouldn’t build too much of an edifice on that one verse. A much sharper, we’ll say critique, came from Huntsman 528. He claims that the Jimmy Akin, Matt Fredd argument is a terrible argument. He says, “Yes. We do have sin. How fast is that sin taken care of?”

Well, I’m going to pause on this. The question isn’t how fast the sin is taken care of. As I repeatedly said in the original video, if you think you get purified very quickly or very slowly, that’s irrelevant because that’s just a question about the duration of purgation. The Catholic-Protestant debate is Catholics believe in purgatory, and Protestants say there is no such thing as purgatory.

But when you actually press the issue, a lot of Protestants say they think that there is a very quick purgatory, they just had never really thought about it. That’s exactly what I think happened here in the comments that Protestants realize like, “Oh, yeah. Well, I can’t actually just think I’m immediately glorified without my sin being handled in some way. Something has to happen with all my sinful attachments. I need to be purified. I need to be purged of these sinful connections, or I will not be in the presence of God.”

The question again is not how fast, because as I repeatedly said, you can believe it’s very fast or very slow, and that’s still a belief in purgatory. Nevertheless, he looks at Isaiah 6. He made a point of saying to the ESV. I’ve used the ESV for this part. I usually don’t use that one. I don’t have a big problem with it. This part is using the ESV. Isaiah 6:5, Isaiah says, “Woe is me. For I’m lost, for I’m a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

This is striking because Huntsman is looking to a passage where the prophet Isaiah is despairing because he knows nothing impure can be in the presence of God as an argument against the thing the prophet is saying is true. You’ll see that as he develops this idea. Just saying, Huntsman is not going to make one argument. Scripture is going to say the opposite.

Then verses 6 to 7, one of the seraphim flies to Isaiah having in his hands a burning coal that he’d taken with tongs from the altar and he touched Isaiah’s mouth and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” This is regularly depicted in Catholic artists, really beautiful and it speaks of a purgative process through fire.

Isaiah who has these attachments to sin, even though he’s a great prophet, has a purgation through fire at the hands of an angel. You might say, “Why would someone use this passage to oppose purgatory when it seems completely consistent with and even descriptive of a purgative process through fire?”

Well, here’s how Huntsman approaches it. He says, “A burning coal touched his lips and he was cleansed. Never left the divine council room, was originally in the divine council room and never went to a purgatory. You could call this a purging fire if you want.” Then he says, “It’s pretty freaking fast.” But we don’t actually know how long the process is. We don’t actually know where Isaiah is. But these are going to be the two critical parts.

For Huntsman to use this argument against purgatory. He has to make three major assumptions. First, that Isaiah is actually bodily in heaven. He’s actually in the presence of God in some way. Second, that he can be purged. But because this purgation isn’t in a place called purgatory that it disproved purgatory. Third, that because it’s fast, that’s somehow really important. But I’ll let him continue.

He then says, “I personally also believe that being touched by the Holy Spirit probably does this as well, but that is a lot scarier than a simple burning coal.” Yeah. I don’t think it’s a literal coal. I don’t think God actually is mining for coal up in heaven. I think the coal is describing something that’s indescribable. It may be experienced as coal.

But this fire, coal touching his lips is burning away sin. Yes. That is very much like what the Holy Spirit does. Yes. The idea of God himself in the fire of the Holy Spirit doing that to us is scarier. All of that sounds like really good arguments for purgatory. But Huntsman goes on. A little bit later, having said very much the same thing that I’m saying now, I said, “We both agree there’s some purgative process after death.”

Now he’s just said there was, the burning coal or the burning Holy Spirit purifying you after death is a purgative process after death. But he says, “No. Because a purgative process implies a purgatory location.” I would just say, “No. I don’t agree with that, that the wear of purgatory is not the crux of the argument.”

Strangely, to try to argue that we have to be committed to a certain location, he then quotes the Oxford English Dictionary definition, which says that purgatory in Roman Catholic doctrine is a place or state of suffering. Notice that even the OED definition distinguishes place and state. How you understand spiritual realities?

When we’re talking about heaven, hell, purgatory, do you literally think hell is in the middle of the earth? Do you literally think heaven is above the clouds? We always have to use visible language to describe this invisible reality. Language always falls somewhat short. Arguing about the geography of purgatory completely misses the actual Catholic argument.

I might just add here that if your argument turns on the Oxford English Dictionary definition, at least look at what the catechism says, because you’re saying this is what Catholics believe about purgatory. We have a book called The Catechism that explains what we believe as Catholics. In that book it just says, “After death, they, those who die in God’s grace and friendship but are still imperfectly purified and are indeed assure of their eternal salvation. After death, they undergo purification.” It doesn’t say where. It says, “To this process, we give the name purgatory.”

We are committed to the belief in a purgative process. Where and how that looks is not entirely revealed. I mean where and how heaven looks. If you look at the different biblical descriptions of heaven, they often don’t match up at a literal level because they’re using earthly language to describe something that eye has not seen, and ear has not heard. I think we’re getting too much caught in the weeds there.

Nevertheless, Huntsman says the touching of the burning coal, in Isaiah 6, happens inside of the divine council room. This is a really big argument. He says, Isaiah, who has not been reborn yet and he doesn’t explain why has his mouth touched by a burning coal and is instantly made clean. Instantly, is something he’s adding to the text.

He said he’s not taken to any other location. Then he claims it’s an almost trivial process and is instantaneous. When I say he’s trivializing scripture, I mean he is literally taking a major event in Isaiah 6 and saying, “Eh, it’s barely even a thing. It’s trivial.” He says, “No. We don’t both agree that purgatory exists and it’s only a matter of how long you were there.”

But again, if you think purgatory … Well, anyway, the first thing to notice, he’s really put all of his eggs in the basket that Isaiah is literally in heaven in the presence of God while still sinning or while still attached to the sin. That is a bad reading of the text.

If you go back to Isaiah 6:1, you’ll see that this is a vision of God in the temple. I’m using the ESV version, which she has and it’s labeled a vision of God in the temple. Why is it labeled that? Because that’s how Isaiah presents it. Not that he is physically transported into heaven. But he says, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up and his train filled the temple.” This is a prophetic vision of heaven, not him actually entering the beatific vision or entering heaven in some bodily way.

Here I would just point out in 2 Corinthians 12, St. Paul has a similar experience, or I know a man in Christ. It’s probably Paul, who 14 years ago was caught up to the third heaven, whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know, God knows. But Huntsman claims to know for Isaiah. He says, “Isaiah was in the divine counsel room. This is in heaven. This was before the burning coal.”

All of this is him arguing that you can be sinful and go into heaven, which is literally the opposite of what the Book of Revelation says. By presupposing, the nature of Isaiah 6 isn’t just a vision, but is actually Isaiah apparently ascending into heaven. Now, he can argue that Revelation is wrong and that you can be sinful and be in the presence of God.

This is a strange argument. If that’s your argument against purgatory, that Isaiah is wrong and that Revelation is wrong and that Isaiah isn’t just having a vision like he says he’s actually ascended, I don’t think that’s a strong biblical argument because it just presupposes that all of the biblical data points are incorrect.

Then he says, “Obviously, God didn’t think Isaiah needed the burning coal before Isaiah entered the courts.” The one who thought he needed cleansing was Isaiah and an angel obliged him. Then he says, “Did he actually need it?” Maybe, maybe not. Well, okay, if you’re going to say God didn’t think he needed it, then you can’t say maybe he did need it. That doesn’t make sense.

Then he says, “Isaiah was still alive and still connected to sin,” as he said, “although he was in spirit form here.” I guess it’s not a bodily assumption, it’s a spiritual assumption. That’s not what he says. He doesn’t say, my spirit went to heaven. He said he saw the Lord in heavenly glory. It’s a different thing. Hopefully that’s clear. You watching something or seeing something is different than you physically or spiritually being there. I hope that’s clear to anyone who’s ever watched TV or had a dream or a vision.

But in any way, is it really true that God didn’t think this was necessary and that the angel’s obliging him? Scripture says the opposite. When the angel touches him, he says, “Behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” Then the question is, “Well, do you need to have your guilt taken away and your sin atoned for? Does God think that’s necessary?”

Well, repeatedly he says, “Yes.” When Isaiah says, “Woe is me. For I’m lost. I’m a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.” He’s not just having some anxious experience out of nowhere. This is sound theology. He realizes that he can’t stand in the presence of God and be attached to sin, which is the exact point that Jimmy Aiken, Matt Frat and I are making.

The exact point that scripture repeatedly makes. It’s a very strange point to attack because it’s so clearly taught in scripture. Then Huntsman says, “We also know that Isaiah had not been baptized by the Holy Spirit yet.” Again, I don’t know where he’s getting this. Without the baptism and the Holy Spirit, all Isaiah needed or thought he needed was a simple touch of a burning coal from the ark. He means alter there. This does not justify purgatory.

That’s the conclusion of a very strange argument that just runs directly contrary to scripture, which says, “Nothing unclean will ever enter heaven.” If you say, “Yes. You can be unclean and enter heaven because of Isaiah. I think you’re misreading Isaiah and you’re certainly contradicting Revelation 21:27.” I think that’s enough on that point. I want to move on to some of the other objections.

Next on the issue of praying for the dead. I mentioned that both the Jews and Christians, including the early Christians, prayed for the dead, and this really only makes sense if there’s an intermediate purgative state because the souls in hell can’t use our prayers and the souls in heaven have no use for our prayers.

Straightforward enough, Anthony Marquetta says, “Logically speaking, one certainly can pray for the dead if one does not believe in purgatory” and then gives a threefold argument, “That because God’s outside of time, he can apply the fruits of my prayers to the deceased before death. Therefore, we should pray for the soul of the deceased.”

There are some logical, philosophical, spiritual difficulties with prayers retroactively applying, particularly for determined events. Asking God to change the past does seem to do an injustice to the nature of what the past is. But because that’s much deeper waters, I think it suffices to say that the Jews and early Christians who were praying for the dead were not doing so because of a belief of retroactive spiritual prayers.

We understand why because as we’re going to see with 2 Maccabees, why they were praying for the dead was very clearly very explicitly taught and it had nothing to do with spiritual time traveling with prayer. Again, not superhero there just because this is … I don’t think any Protestant is denying purgatory but praying for the dead based on a time travel theory. If they are, I don’t know, it’s cool. I’m not going to quibble with it. That’s fine. Whatever.

Next, under the notion of being saved as your fire, this is the argument from 1 Corinthians 3 that St. Paul discusses two categories of believers. One category has really good spiritual experiences and they’ve built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ in a really good way. The other is still a group of believers who’ve still built on the foundation of Jesus Christ, but they’ve done so in a really shoddy way. He describes him as being saved as through fire.

If you want more on that, read the original or watch the original video. Scotty 8365 asks, “Well, what’s the reward?” He’s talking on in 1 Corinthians 3:14. Because he says in that verse that if the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he’ll receive a reward. The first group is rewarded, the second group is saved as through fire. He says, “Heaven has already been guaranteed. Those going through the fire are already saved. Their heavenly reward has already been granted. What’s all that about?”

Well, this is a common area where Catholics and Protestants disagree. I don’t really know why. In my experience, a lot of evangelical Protestants have the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all heaven, that everybody gets the same heavenly glory. I don’t know what that’s based on because it’s not based on anything I’ve seen in scripture. Because scripture teaches the opposite. There clearly are degrees of glory.

St. Paul talks about passing from glory into glory even in this life. The idea, there’s just a one glorious state that you and the Virgin Mary and all the angels and saints are all perfectly equally sharing in is pretty clearly wrong. I’ll give you an example. In Matthew 19:28, Jesus says to the 12, “You who have followed me will also sit on 12 thrones,” judging the 12 tribes of Israel.

Well notice there’s only 12 thrones there. It’s not every Christian gets into co-equal throne. No. The 12 tribes are beneath the apostles who are judging the 12 tribes. There’s clearly distinctions of glory. You see those distinctions in the angelic levels, angels and archangels and cherubim, seraphim thrones and dominion, principality, powers, virtues, dominions. I didn’t do those in the right order, but those are the different angelic choirs. There’s clearly an angelic hierarchy.

Even the notion of an ark angel compared to an angel suggests one is higher than the other. Now, you might be wondering, well, if that’s true, how could you be happy in heaven? I like the example St. Therese of Lisieux’s sister gave her when she asked that question where she took a thimble and a bucket and she filled them both to overfilling, overflowing and pointed out they’re both totally satisfied. They’re both totally full, but one has a greater capacity to receive. That’s the nature of heavenly glory that in this life you are expanding or contracting your capacity to receive love.

How you do in this life really does determine how much you’re open to receiving the love of God for all eternity. I hope that’s clear. This is one of the reasons why you should be constantly engaged in the love of God and love of neighbor. God has got you on an 80 yearlong test to really better not screw it up or you’ll go to hell. No. That’s not the point at all. It’s how much can you expand your capacity to love so that you can love him more fully for all eternity.

That’s why the saints are the most joyful people on earth because they understand why they’re pursuing holiness and how tremendously rewarding it is both here and hereafter. Yeah. That’s Matthew 19:28. Jesus promises the 12 thrones to the 12 apostles. He does the same thing in Luke 22:28 to 30. In Revelation 12, we see the mother of Jesus enthroned in heaven with a crown on her head.

This notion that some people are enthroned, some people have a higher rank or degree of glory, it just seems pretty clearly taught in scripture. That’s the answer to the question. But I thought it might be helpful here to give Benedict XVI read the 1 Corinthians 3 because I think he does a really good job of analyzing the passage in Spe Salvi. He says, “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,” meaning Paul 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 gets back to the point I was making in regards to Huntsman’s argument, and frankly, it gets back to the argument about Job and the devil standing in the presence of God. We’re always falling short with language describing spiritual realities because it’s like explaining color to someone who’s blind. Eye is not seen these heavenly glories. All of our analogies are going to fall somewhat short.

I’m going back to Benedict here. Paul begins by saying that Christian life is built upon a common foundation, Jesus Christ. This foundation endures. If we’ve stood firm on this foundation and built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us even in death.

Then Paul continues. Then he quotes 1 Corinthians 3:12 to 15, that if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become manifest for the day, judgment day, will disclose it because it’ll be revealed with fire and the fire will test what work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he’ll receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.

Benedict says in this text, “It is in any case evident that our salvation can take different forms. Some of what is built may be burned down, that in order to be saved, we personally have to pass through fire so as to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at the table of the eternal marriage feast.”

Now, Benedict’s got fire in quotation marks because he wants to point out that if you’re conceptualizing this just as literal fire, I think you might be missing it. Remember if you watched the earlier video, Augustine talks about how purgation happens in this life and/or after death. You want the fire to do its work now. That means there may be attachments you have to burn down. Or may be attachments the Holy Spirit is going to burn down in your life if you let them.

There may be things you’ve maybe built too much of your life on you need to let go of. You need to burn those parts to the ground because they’ve been a bad edifice or a bad building built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ. That’s the notion. That can be painful. Take for instance, if you have unhealthy relationships and maybe you’ve got a friend group or even a romantic relationship or something where it’s just spiritually unhealthy and it’s not good for you and it’s not something you’re meant to remain in, fire is a good description for that process of just purification, of removing those people and those relationships and those habits and those everything else from your life.

Likewise, if you’ve ever broken off something that was compulsive or addictive, I think you’ll say fire is a really good explanation for what’s even sometimes a physical or physiological reaction. I’ve known plenty of people who are in recovery. I think they would speak to this notion of a purgative fire even here on earth. That’s the notion in 1 Corinthians 3 that there is a sense in which if you’ve built badly, if you’ve made these connections that aren’t the thing that are going to go with you to glory, they’re going to have to burn down.

You’ll be saved as through fire. There will be some loss, because it’s going to be the loss of things you don’t want for all eternity, a loss of the things God doesn’t want for you, because he loves you. That’s the notion that I think St. Paul’s talking about in 1 Corinthians 3.

Okay. Let’s turn then to the good thief on the cross. The good thief on the cross, Jesus says, “Today you’ll be with me in paradise.” A lot of Protestants go to this passage and say, “Here it is. Here’s the slam dunk verse. This proving purgatory.” As I explained in the earlier video, I was persuaded by that as a kid until I realized that it doesn’t make a lot of sense because Jesus doesn’t bodily or even in his human soul go to heaven on Good Friday.

There’s additional arguments. But that was the one that is as I was delving deeper on that, it was a light bulb of like, “Oh, yeah. I’d been persuaded by a bad argument. Ninja Jason, I like that name, 57, asked a question about this. Because remember the thing I just said about Augustine talking about having the purgatory here or hereafter? I make variations of that point.

But I also quote the catechism, which describes purgatory as being a thing that happens after death. He’s like, “Well, what is happening here? How can we say that the suffering the thief experienced fully purged him or is this a contradiction?”

Let me explain two things. First, purification happens in either place. Purgatory, that is the name we give to the location or process, the state of being purified after death. In the same way that you can have a washroom but you could actually wash somewhere else. It’s a little confusing. I admit. That you can have your purgation in purgatory, you can have your purgation before purgatory and not need to go to purgatory.

That, by the way, is what we should be aiming for. Aiming for purgatory is aiming for graduating with summer school. It’s not like don’t do that. You’re aiming way too low. Aim above purgatory. I’ll just say that. On the good thief, I want to make one further point. I’ll actually come back to this later in the video.

The good thief, the problem there is not this is a guy who had to go to purgatory. This is a guy who seems like he’s getting this purgation done here on earth. Hypothetically, if he went to heaven on Good Friday, that does not disprove purgatory at all. You’re going to need a lot more.

The fact that somebody doesn’t go to purgatory, doesn’t mean purgatory doesn’t exist. Just like, “Here’s this thief who did a lot of bad things. He didn’t go to hell. Therefore, hell doesn’t exist.” Well, no, you wouldn’t say that at all. You would say, “Well, he was saved from going to hell because he had this conversion. He was healed by Jesus.”

Well, likewise, you can be saved from going to purgatory for the exact same reason, because Jesus has this radical healing impact. Oh, there is an objection I didn’t put in here and I’m going to very unprofessionally just throw it out here. I couldn’t find it in the comments. I probably just wasn’t going far enough.

But someone accused me of denying that Jesus could instantaneously heal us. I don’t deny that at all. He absolutely can. Jesus can so radically free you from all of your attachment to sin that you are never tempted to sin again. But if you’ve lived more than, I don’t know, an hour of the Christian life, you know that isn’t just the norm. That the nature of the miraculous is almost by definition that it’s out of the ordinary. This is not just a normal way of doing things.

Likewise, St. Paul says, “If you don’t work, you shouldn’t eat.” Someone could say, “Oh, Paul. You don’t think Jesus can multiply loaves?” Of course, he believes Jesus can multiply loaves. But he also believes that’s not the ordinary way of things. Yes. Jesus can take away all of your work from you. He can take away all of your cross. He usually doesn’t. He instead says, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

If your objection is Jesus could get rid of the need for purgatory, then you’re just insisting that Jesus has to do the miraculous thing every time. That is a bad spiritual approach to Jesus. It would be like saying, “I’m not going to go to the doctor because Jesus could heal me. I’m not going to work to eat because Jesus can multiply loaves.” That is spiritually unhealthy. This is what’s called the sin of presumption where you’re trying to force God to do this divine action or you’re relying on him in a way where you’re not doing the thing he told you to do.

It’s not obedience to say, “I trust you God so much, I’m going to disobey you.” That is not how faith works. Okay. That was a bit of a digression. I acknowledge. I want to go onto the next objection, which is this line to be absent from the body is present with the Lord. That is a misquotation of scripture, as I pointed out last time. Huntsman, who we saw earlier, he tries to vindicate this passage. Again, he’s using Isaiah. He says, “Isaiah was in the presence of God before being cleansed.”

Remember, scripture says, “That’s not true.” He says, “My eyes have seen the King the Lord of hosts. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” First thing, notice, that doesn’t follow at all. If Isaiah went from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, you wouldn’t say to be absent from Jerusalem is to be present in Bethlehem as if those are the only two possibilities.

This is the important part of this radical misquotation of scripture that Protestants who are quoting this passage like this are inventing a Bible verse that doesn’t exist. The actual Bible verse, 2 Corinthians 5:8 says, “We are of good courage and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.”

WC Fields, this is hopefully a line that will help you remember the difference between the real Bible verse and the fake Protestant one. I don’t mean all Protestants use a fake one. I mean I regularly hear this only from Protestants. It’s not a real Bible verse. It does not say to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord as if it must be one or the other. If you believe that you have to deny hell. If you believe to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, you have to deny the existence of hell. That’s a problem.

Moreover, if you read 2 Corinthians 5 and realize he’s talking the glorified body versus our earthly body, you would seemingly also have to believe that to be absent from the body here is to be in the glorified body in heaven, which Protestants don’t believe because that doesn’t happened yet. He’s talking about a future state here.

Nevertheless, let’s go to WC Fields. There’s a famous and not actually his real epitaph. It’s a fictitious one. He joked in a Vanity Fair article in I think 1924 that he wanted his epitaph to read, “Here lies WC Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.” There’ve been a lot of variations of that. All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia, on the whole. I’d rather be in Philadelphia, et cetera.

His actual tombstones says nothing like that. The point is WC Fields is not saying to be absent from the grave is to be present in Philadelphia. This is not what he’s saying at all. He’s not saying the two possible states or Philadelphia or the grave. He’s comparing the superiority of one place being buried to another place, Philadelphia. That’s probably a very unfair comparison. But the point is that he’s comparing two places.

Likewise in 2 Corinthians 5, St. Paul is comparing two places, earth and heaven. He’s not saying these are the only two possible places. We know they’re not. Because there’s a third one, hell. Whether you believe in purgatory or not, Paul is just not saying the line that Protestants are putting into his mouth and what he is actually saying doesn’t mean what they’re claiming he’s saying. Hopefully that’s clear.

Okay. What about then the idea that Christ does it all, Christ atones for all of our sins, therefore no purgatory? As I point out in the earlier video, that argument doesn’t make any sense because by that same reasoning, you’d have to say, “Since Christ paid for our sins, I don’t need to be purified in this life.” Neither Catholics nor Protestants believe that. I give much more explanation in the earlier one if you want see that.

But Michael Jeffries asks, I think that the weight of the didn’t Christ do at all objection lies less with the idea of postmortem sanctification, which is what I’d focused on, and more of the idea that purgatory serves as a temporal punishment for the sins committed after baptism.

It’s less of an argument against purgatory and more of an argument against a common conception of purgatory that I believe is officially taught by the church. In other words, purgatory does not heal the eternal separation from God brought about by mortal sin. Remember 1 John 5 distinguishes between sin that is deadly, what we call mortal sin; and sin that is not deadly, what we call venal sin. Mortal sin is not going to be cleansed by purgatory.

If your foundation is not Jesus Christ, you’re not one of the ones St. Paul’s talking about in 1 Corinthians 3. If you’ve rejected God, there’s nothing there to be purified. You just have a bad … You’ve not built on the foundation of Christ at all. Given that, Jefferies, is I think quite rightly pointing out is that many Protestants reject the idea of any punishment for Christians.

This is, as I said, the argument I thought was going to be raised in the comments in response to the Jimmy Akin, Matt Fradd argument. This notion that, “Well, Christians don’t really have sin or aren’t really punished for sin because Jesus is our intercessor. He’s our mediator. He purifies us from all sin.” That statement I thought was going to happen.

The problem with that argument is it totally misunderstands the way the Blood of Christ works and the way Jesus’ intercession and mediation and purification for our sin works. There’s a much deeper conversation that can at some point should be had about Jesus’ priestly ministry because I think many Protestants don’t understand how priestly sacrifice works.

I know this partly because years ago I did something on the Eucharist and I pointed out that in the Old Testament Passover sacrifice, you have two dimensions to the sacrificial act. You have the killing of the victim by the high priest, the Passover lamb, that’s preparation day. Then you have the family eating the lamb, smearing the blood on the doorpost and eating the lamb. This is the completion of the sacrifice. But it’s different agents, the high priest or the priest in the temple, in one case, and the family in the second is happening on different days, but it’s still considered to be one sacrifice.

They’re not sacrificing the lamb. They’re not mitigating what happened on preparation day. They’re completing what’s begun on preparation day. I read a Protestant response to what I’d written that he was really flummoxed by this. It was just I don’t see anywhere in scripture that disproves this. Of course, he doesn’t because this is basic Jewish sacrificial theology. This is basic pagan sacrificial theology, by the way.

St. Paul describes this in 1 Corinthians 10 as the basis for the eucharistic sacrificial theology. He compares the eating of Christ and the Eucharist to pagans eating food sacrifice to demons and the Jews eating the sacrifices offered at the altar because it is by the eating of them that you are incorporated into it. This sounds like a total digression.

The point that I’m making is Christ’s blood is a total purification for our sins. It has to still be applied to our life. That is not a reduction of anything he did. It’s the completion of. We make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ in our own bodies. As St. Paul says. That we have a role to play and Christ is not getting rid of that role to play.

Now, with this, comes an important dimension that there is still the possibility of punishment as a baptized, believing, faithful member of the elect. We see this very clearly. 2 Corinthians 2, St. Paul talks about a sinner in the body who had been briefly excommunicated, and then he says, “Bring him back.” Because he says, “For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough.”

Notice, there’s still punishment. There’s still church discipline and punishment for a believer. You might say, “Sure. There’s secular punishment,” or “Sure there’s punishment in the church, but there’s not going to be punishment by God.” I would say scripture says the exact opposite. There’s an entire punishment called discipline that is specific towards the sons and daughters of God.

Deuteronomy 8:5 says, “Know that in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.” Before you say, but that’s the Old Testament. Hebrews 12 points to this Old Testament theology as still applicable to us today. It says, “Have you forgotten the exhortation which addresses you as sons?” Then it quotes, “My son, do not lightly regard the discipline of the Lord nor lose courage when you are punished by him.”

Notice punished and disciplined or used seemingly interchangeably there. For the Lord, disciplines him whom he loves and chastises every son whom he receives. If you’re receiving punishment, discipline, chastisement, that’s not a disproof of your Christian standing. In fact, seemingly it’s the exact opposite as Hebrews 12 goes on to verse 7 to 8, “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons for what son is there whom his father does not discipline. If you are left without discipline in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.”

There is a category of punishment, eternal punishment that is on those outside of the Christian family that’s on those who are not in covenantal relationship with God on those who are not saved. But those who are in the relationship who are sons and daughters of God still receive a type of punishment usually called discipline.

Well, the point of that is for your edification, your growth, and yes, your purification. Given all of this, I’d say all of that is solidly biblical. Hopefully that’s clear enough. The last thing I want to address, I’m just putting it as M. Millers’ thoughtful comments, because I didn’t want to separate. M. Millers 7674 had a really lengthy comment.

I think Miller is a Protestant based on the comment. I was not 100% sure on that. But it’s really thoughtful. I really enjoyed reading it. I didn’t want to break it up into chunks. He begins, “Joe, this was a balanced take. Honestly, you were a lot more charitable than I thought you’d be. Thanks. I think I never really watched your videos and I just assumed with a name like Shameless Popery. You’d be dunking on Protestants the whole time.”

Hey, look, that’s fair. But let me just tell you very briefly the story of how this channel got its name. Shameless Popery was the name of my old blog from 2009. I created that blog while I was in law school. We really struggled to find a good name for it. All of the names that I could come up with Catholicism Contra Mundum, they all sounded way too like hoity to and obnoxious, and I didn’t want any of those.

I mentioned to my friend Don Roth, who’s now a professor at Dordt College here in the Midwest, and he’s a Dutch reformed Calvinist. He takes him like half a second and he just says, “Shameless Popery.” It was hilarious. I was like, “Oh, yeah. I like that.” The name’s always been a little bit tongue in cheek. I am unabashedly Catholic. But I wanted a name that had a little bit of levity to it. Unfortunately, it also is hard to spell. Occasionally, people would find my stuff while trying to look up potpourri for their home.

Anyway, that’s where it came from. It is not meant to be bashing Protestants. It was written by a Protestant. Nevertheless, Miller says he’s got a couple of points and he actually has five. Number one, the concept of purgatory, whether a place in space time, a spiritual realm, or some holy process that occurs after death is biblically reasonable and no thoughtful or honest Protestant should deny this.

Like you said, it isn’t committing to anything beyond the idea that nothing unclean can enter heaven, and most of us leave earth with some sin. Now, that’s exactly what I was trying to say in response to Huntsman. That he’s arguing against a particular vision of purgatory. Rightly or wrongly, that’s not really the point.

The idea that nothing unclean can enter heaven. Most of us leave earth with some sin. That’s the point I’m trying to get to. If you understand that, then you’ll realize the need for some kind of process of purgation, of cleansing of purification. Then we can quibble about the details. But we’ve already gotten onto the same page of saying yes to purgatory in some form.

Number two, Miller says, most Protestants find abhorrent. The idea of purgatory is a mini hell. For centuries it was taught this way. The Catholic Church no longer espouses this idea in the literal sense, but it’s hard to jettison all of that baggage. Right. St. Paul uses the language of fire. The church has used the imagery of fire, but we should understand even when we’re talking about something like the fires of hell, that what we mean by fire, there seems to be a spiritual rather than a material reality.

Meaning, if you’re without a body, what does it mean to go through fire? It seems to refer to a spiritual fire in a positive or a negative way depending on the circumstance. Just like when we talk about God as a consuming fire, we don’t mean literally that God has made a fire. I hope that’s abundantly clear. But this fire language is biblical language.

As long as we understand that the fires of purgation aren’t physical in the way that a camp fire, it might be physical. It’s hard to find another adequate set of things to describe this reality that as I’ve mentioned multiple times now. Eye has not seen. An ear has not heard.

Point number three, Miller says, the good thief argument is, in my opinion, the strongest argument against purgatory if there is one, because Christ says today. Trying to bring semantics into what today might’ve meant is ignoring the plain sense of the text and that Christ as a man dying was also speaking to another man dying on the cross.

I want to push back a little bit here on the plain language thing because a lot of Protestants are really committed to the idea of taking a text that is the superficial level. They will defend this by saying it’s the plain language. But if you read the New Testament over and over again, it’s exactly that way that people misunderstand what Jesus is actually saying.

In John 2, when Jesus says, “Destroy this temple. In three days I’ll rebuild it.” In a plain language reading, he’s in the temple. He’s obviously talking about the temple. He’s not. He’s talking about the temple of his body. The plain language read gets you totally wrong.

John 3, Nicodemus is talking to Jesus. Jesus tells me he has to be born again. The plain language is that he has to go back into his mother’s womb. That’s how Nicodemus understands. It means he’s totally wrong. John 4, the Samaritan woman’s at the well. Jesus talks about living water. He’s right there at a well. The plain language reading is well, obviously the well.

To say the plain language because Jesus is here on the cross, that is exactly the hermeneutic that screws up so much of biblical interpretation within the Bible. That should give us tremendous pause of just taking a surface level reading, which is what plain language usually means in practice.

Miller goes on to say, “The plain sense of the text is that Jesus was saying to this man because of his faith, he’d be with the Lord in paradise today. Now, because Jesus is God and can act outside of space time, He could have very well done his business preaching to the souls in purgatory that very day as it were.”

Right. Let’s talk a little bit about the good thief particularly. Then I want to reiterate a point I made earlier. But first, when Jesus, three Earth days later on Easter Sunday or two Earth days by our count, but three by the Jewish count, he encounters Mary Magdalene. He says to her, “Do not hold me for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” He can’t both have gone to the Father in his human soul with the good thief on Good Friday and still not have done that on Easter Sunday.

However, time works for God seemingly because these two moments, it hasn’t happened within that point. In fact, Acts 1 presents him for the next 40 days after Easter speaking and teaching with the apostles and says 43 or 42, depending on how you count it, days later, that Jesus ascends into heaven.

That is a weird interpretation of today. What does it mean for Jesus to say today you’ll be with me in paradise? There’s a lot of questions about what he means by today. St. Peter explicitly says to the Lord, a day is like 1,000 years, 1,000 years like a day. That suggests we shouldn’t settle at a plain language reading.

There’s a lot of question about what’s meant by paradise. Does this mean union with the Father? Does this mean in the bosom of Abraham? That’s not entirely clear. The early Christians don’t find the text referring to paradise to always mean that. Partly because paradise is one of the ways of referring to Eden. It’s understood as an intermediate state above earth, below heaven.

All that’s to say, I don’t know what happens to the good thief. But I would really hesitate to believe on the biblical evidence that he goes in is immediately present with God, the Father in heaven. Because it doesn’t look like that’s what happens even with Jesus.

But let’s say I’m wrong, that’s fine. Jesus and the good thief will say, ‘On Good Friday actually do go to heaven.” Even though Jesus says, “They don’t.” Would that disprove purgatory? Well, no. It wouldn’t. The fact that one guy is purified of all of his sins and does all of his purgation in a really bloody horrible way here on earth and then doesn’t have a further purgation after death, that doesn’t argue against purgatory at all.

Understand, the Catholic argument for purgatory is not every single person who is saved goes to purgatory. The argument is if you are a saved person who is not cleansed of your sin here on earth, you’ll go to purgatory. The good thief, it’s easy to argue, it’s cleansed of his sin here on earth. His final moments are spent in about the holiest way imaginable, consoling Christ on the cross.

Given that I don’t see any reason to view the good thief as an argument against purgatory, even if he did go in that 24-hour period to the right hand of the Father. We don’t know whatever happens to him here. But even if it’s sad, it wouldn’t disprove purgatory.

All right. Miller, going back to him. Number four, he says, “Many Protestants wrongly conflate the finished and completed work of Christ with the abolition of any temporal consequence for sin.” Very well said. They may admit to some civic or moral consequence on earth, but not in the afterlife. The truth is none of us really know. I would only quibble that last line. The truth is we do know that there are consequences for our actions.

But I’m going to go back to Miller. He says, “Not all who are sinners get their just recompense on earth.” That’s well said. The New Testament is clear on their being consequences for blatantly ignoring God’s law. If you’re a Christian who dies in the midst of doing something wrong, not something so gravely severe that it cuts off union with God, but something that is not in keeping with your Christian dignity, what happens to you in the Protestant schema? It’s not entirely clear.

It seems like you can’t be just sent directly to hell because you die believing in Jesus having a relationship with him, but also, you’ve got sin that isn’t taken care of. It seems like in practice, many Protestants have unknowingly or unintentionally just not treated sin with the seriousness that it deserves, that they’ve just denied in practice, even if not explicitly, that there really are consequences for sin and not just the sins you get caught doing here in this life that sin has consequences.

If you die without those consequences being dealt with, there’s a problem there and it has to be handled. Then the fifth and final point Miller makes, he says, “Lastly, I think the best resolution for this is for Protestants to admit that some form of purgation or purification needs to occur in some way to satisfy God’s justice, even for those who believe on the Son and are in friendship with God.”

Brilliantly said, I might only quibble with one word that even is really an only. If you’re not in union with God, there’s no purification possible. There’s no purgation possible for you because only through Christ can this purification happen. But I think Miller has said it very beautifully here. He says, “Catholics on the other hand need to admit that none of us really know what that will look like despite private revelations to mystics, or traditional depictions of purgatory.”

I think that’s actually a pretty fair point. We don’t want to get bogged down in a particular vision of purgatory, especially because all of the visions are falling short. Then he says, “It could be an instantaneous thing, it could be a process. It could be a place in the spiritual realm. Maybe it’s different for different people.” The Bible simply is not clear on this. We should avoid speculating and instead focus on the finished work of Jesus and obeying God’s righteous laws.

While I largely agree with what he’s saying there, I want to push back a tiny bit. That’s to say this, the reason it’s important to realize something like purgatory exists is because we here on earth have a moral duty to care for those who are spiritually suffering. That includes the holy souls in purgatory. Here I would point to 2 Maccabees 12. As I mentioned in the prior video, even if you don’t think this passage is part of the biblical canon, even though it should be, and I’ve got videos on why it historically was.

Even if you don’t think that it’s still a book that is the foundation for Hanukkah, which Jesus celebrates in John 10, it’s still a book that was treated with a great deal of respect by the Jews, and it’s still a book that is historically accurate. The Judas Maccabeus led Maccabean Revolt is a matter of history.

It’s not a heretical book. I mean, if you want to argue it is, you’ve got to argue against seemingly Hanukkah, seemingly against Jesus in John 10 and puts you in a weird spot, neither here nor there. Also, as I mentioned before, Hebrews cites to second Maccabees in Hebrews 11. It describes what’s going on. People point out, “Well, that may not prove that it’s canonical.” My argument in the video is not that it’s canonical, although I think it is. My argument is that it’s true, which is a much lower bar.

There’s plenty of true books that aren’t part of the Bible. I could think this biography of Napoleon accurately describes a thing that happened. I’m not saying it’s part of the Bible. 2 Maccabees 12, here’s what it says. They, this is Judas Maccabeus and his men, all blessed the ways of the Lord, the righteous judge who reveals the things that are hidden and they turn to prayer beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be holy blotted out. That is the sin of their fellow brothers in arms who have died.

The noble Judas exhorted the people to keep themselves free from sin, for they’ve seen with their own eyes what happened because of the sin of those who’d fallen. He also took up a collection, man-by-man to the amount of 2,000 drachmas of silver and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering.

I’ve mentioned all that before. But I mentioned it here just to set up the commentary in 2 Maccabees on this. That in doing this, he acted very well and honorably taking account of the resurrection for if he were not expecting that those would fall and would rise again, it would’ve been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead.

Notice, there’s nothing about time traveling prayers. This is a much more basic theology of prayer that unless there is some intermediate state between now and the resurrection, then there’d be no reason to pray for the dead. But if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore, he made atonement for the dead that they might be delivered from their sin.

I know by the time you see this, it’s going to be late November. November is the month. Catholics really traditionally make a practice of visiting cemeteries and praying for the people who’ve died, especially departed loved ones. You don’t have to do it in a cemetery, but it’s a good practice. We just went with my kids today and it’s good to be in a place to be reminded of death, both to be aware of your own mortality and the fact you’ll be judged someday.

Also, because we’re part of the Christian family with the souls and purgatory that the souls here on earth, the souls in purgatory, the souls in heaven are all one family, the body of Christ. The parts of the body that are suffering, we got to look out for them just like we want them to look out for us when we’re suffering.

I really encourage you, if you’re not in the habit of it. If this video has moved the dial even a little bit for you, ask God to purify in the best way possible. Anyone who needs purification and ask for those miracles that we don’t want to just presume on. Ask for them, make it instantaneous, make it glorious. Make it be just the best process imaginable and really get in the habit of praying for the souls in purgatory or the souls.

If you’re not comfortable with the word purgatory, the souls undergoing purification both here and hereafter. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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