The difficulty I speak of includes many setbacks and certainly not this success only march forward. So… I don’t buy it. Sounds like wishful thinking to me. The reliability is in God not in us. So a much more likely description is one where despite slipping backward God never gives up and keeps encouraging us to try again. Perhaps God finds a way to minimize how damage we get from such setbacks – that sounds reasonable.
While I don’t credit the literal description of fiery punishment, I think it all too likely that the metaphor is a pretty good one and like I said the process of removing sin is quite painful.
And then there is the contrast with the easy comfortable road which wide because too many people always look for the easiest way to go.
I do not agree with changing this to read, “No one comes to the father except by giving my name as a password and reciting the correct doctrines.”
Christianity is salvation by the grace of God not salvation by correct belief.
I am Christian only because I think it is correct and certainly not because I think it earns me anything at all. It is just my opinion for whoever cares.
I find myself in complete agreement with this Mitchel.
I think that those who seem to think that purgatory is theological need to first look at how it came into being in the first place (Catholicism and the need to raise money for the construction projects of bricks and mortar).
The bible has some very specific statements in relation to the notion of purgatory:
we cannot buy our way out of “the wages of sin is death” (Judas throwing the pieces of silver at the priests)
Christs statements about Lazarus in the grave…that he was “Dead”
Ecclesiastes 9: 2It is the same for all: There is a common fate for the righteous and the wicked, for the good and the bad,a for the clean and the unclean, for the one who sacrifices and the one who does not. 5For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing. They have no further reward, because the memory of them is forgotten. 6Their love, their hate, and their envy have already vanished, and they will never again have a share in all that is done under the sun.
1 Thessalonians provides a very clear description of the Second Coming…
16For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will be the first to rise. Lord.
17. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.
If all those who are saved, or may be saved, are already in heaven, then the Second Coming of Christ isnt necessary is it (pretty logical i think). The idea that those who God has not yet decided are worthy of heaven or not seem to preceed those who are worthy isnt the model that the bible presents to us. Christ came down here for the sinners…he didnt meet them halfway! There is the added problem of the model of the Old Testament Tabernacle and Sanctuary Services.
The rituals in the O/T Mosaic teachings doesnt support any notion of purgatory. Im open to anyone being able to show me which of the feasts in the Sanctuary Service and which element within the Tabernale represents purgatory…any takers?
Just in case anyone decides to bring up the intercessionary prayer in the O/T services…these are rituals prophesying that it is Christ who will come to this earth and he will take on the priesthood according to the order of Melchizzadek…it is a literal event that takes place after the cross. So a Catholic priest offering intercession on our behalf isnt following that model.
Finally , if dead people, like Lazurus, know nothing, how can such an individual use consciousness to perform works in purgatory in order to elevate themselves to heaven?
How does righteousness by faith through grace fit with that exactly? We are not saved by any works of our own…they are nothing but filthy rags. I dont see any bibilcal relationship between righteousness by faith through grace and purgatory!
With the exception of a small caveat… i also agree with the above statement.
The only reason that theological belief is important is so that we may know whether or not the gospel being presented to us is truth. The reality is, the only way we can know if it is truth is to follow the lead of the Berean Jews
Acts 17:11
Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
Purification does not happen through our suffering, it happens through the work of God - the sacrifice of Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Suffering “due to sins already forgiven” may happen during our life, for example when a criminal repents and confesses his sins and thereafter, gets a sentence to prison. This kind of punishment settles the case towards the society but it does not purify the criminal for heaven.
A favourite expression of Paul, followers of Jesus being ‘in Christ’, gives one solution to these questions.
If I am in Christ, I was punished and died when Jesus died on the cross.
Because of the resurrection of Jesus I can experience resurrection life when I am in Christ - now partly and once fully.
Death without resurrection is not sufficient for new life - a dead man is just a dead man, lifeless.
When God looks at me, He sees Jesus because I am in Christ. Jesus is pure and holy, so that is how I can be treated holy although my own life has not been sufficiently pure and holy.
With Jesus, I hope my own life starts to reflect more and more the image of Jesus, the pure and holy one. It is a way of life, the Jesus road. I will not be fully ready when I die but as long as I walk on this Jesus road, I am ‘in Christ’, forgiven, holy and waiting for the better resurrection.
No need for post-life purgatory, I hope.
No metaphor or expression is perfect in the sense that it would give answers to all questions. The ‘in Christ’ expression does not reveal the answer to all questions but it may give an idea of how the death of Jesus could be my punishment, and how I can be pure and holy in the eyes of God despite all the mistakes and flaws of my personal life.
Sounds like someone just likes being right or at least thinking they are right. Seems to me, being saved is much better than being right. LOL My experience in life tells me we can be right and just make a huge mess of things. So to me, it looks like a really bad bet to put your faith in being right. Much better to put your faith in God. I mean, OF COURSE, just like everyone else, I think I am right, because otherwise I wouldn’t believe it. So… how does that differ from putting your faith in being right? Well the gospel of salvation by the grace of God is part of it. But another part is in something Jesus said:
Matthew 7 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.
Since if I would not like to be judge by whether I am correct in my beliefs, then this means it would be unwise to judge other people by that criterion. So not putting your faith in being correct also means not judging other people by whether you think their beliefs are correct. We could all be wrong. Frankly, we probably are all wrong… regardless of what we think the scriptures are telling us.
The traditional answer is no, at least that is the answer in protestant churches.
We know very little about what happens between death and resurrection but the scriptures do not tell about such a possibility and I assume that old tradition does not either suggest such a possibility.
The period between death and resurrection may be blackness without thoughts, or it may be being somewhere like ‘spiritual paradise’/‘heaven’ or ‘Sheol’/‘Hades’/‘Tartarus’. If it is just blackness, there are no choices before resurrection. In the other options, there probably are no possibilities to move from the ‘bad’ place to the ‘good’ place.
Well - I suppose that would mean that Peter and Paul were just wrong about that then - it is only mentioned in passing by them after all, and not the main points being expressed in the passages where such mentions are found. Paul just seems to presume it is an accepted practice to be baptised on behalf of a dead person. (1 Corinthians 15). Hardly the stuff to build big doctrinal certainties around. But I sure do want to live into the hope that is to be found in Christ … on behalf of everyone - not just myself or my own tribe, whatever I may deem that to be. To try to make God a small, tribal, and provincial god with a limited reach doesn’t seem to me a faithful following of scriptures, let alone Christ.
It can be confusing, but just because Paul mentions the practice of baptizing for the dead that some of the Corinthians were doing does not mean we need to interpret this as his endorsement or belief in the practice. Rather, he seems to use the example to build a larger argument in this chapter that the resurrection is real. Perhaps he used such an example for hyperbolic effect? In any case, I’m with you—it seems dicey to build an entire doctrine around this isolated phrase when it seems to go against much else that is taught about baptism, salvation, and freewill choices of the individual.
1 Petr 4:6 - For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.
It’s misleading to talk about a “period” between death and resurrection, because it’s outside of time. Otherwise we come up with the medieval ideas that a person dies in year X and is resurrected in year Y, and that this “period” can be shortened by the prayers and indulgences of the living. What came to be called “purgatory” is simply the process of being made ready to meet God. It’s not a period of time, and it’s not a place.
I like to interpret it that way - but I guess others for whom it may be important to not go that direction would probably answer you that “the dead” there may just be referring to present (and living) people who are dead in their sins.
But I’m a believer (hopeful in the extreme) in a God of not just second chances, but third, fourth, fifth … - and I’ve burned through many times that already! And I have no illusions about reaching some sort of “pure and holy” state before I die - so I will still be a work in progress at that point too, whenever that is. But I trust a holy and loving God. Whenever it is that I am finally made ready to be part of heavenly communion with God and all others, I just trust that such preparation will happen, and is already happening now while I’m physically here too.
Rom 5: 3-5 Not only so, but we[a] also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope.5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
James 1:2-4 2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters,[a] whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
A refining and sanctifying purgatory is not at odds with any Christian teaching in my view. I may add my own punitive aspect to it because I an unsure how to understand what Jesus did on Cross. I waver between sins being punished and the idea that if forgiveness is truly free, there was no need for a literal atonement. I am all not sure how free will plays or doesn’t play into us being purified in heaven. I think the issue is I have a lot less settled and forcing doctrine than you due to a different view of scripture and a real lack of understanding of what Jesus accomplished on the Cross. He did something amazing that saved me but I am not buying the modern conception of penal substitution for sure. I see these as open issues that we know very little about despite how brazenly selective some theologians are in their proof-text hunting.
Early persecuted Christians also prayed for the dead which makes some sort of “purgatory” (a rose by any other name) quite early. As early if not much earlier than the concept of the “New Testament” canon that is oddly used to debunk belief in purgatory via silence (which is not an argument).
The problem is “in Christ” and “crucified with Christ” can mean many things. They work fine with the solidarity model of atonement. I don’t think I agree with your phrasing here either: “Because of the resurrection of Jesus I can experience resurrection life when I am in Christ.” I think I could have always experienced that if God chose. I think of the death on the Cross as Him telling us He has power over death, not Him defeating death. He is showing it to us. See Genesis 1. God has no rivals and is sovereign over everything from the beginning. There is no theomachy there and I am not sure why we need it in our atonement model. He does not need to defeat death for his sake so we can experience life ever-after. He just needs to choose what He wants or how He wants the Sacred mediated. In some models of atonement the Cross happened to change our view of God, not for Him to change his view of us. God become many was meant to offer us solidarity and break down our walls so we let Him in. Now as I have stated, I am aware that Scripture goes well beyond this model in many places into a sort of “blood magic” I do not understand. As much as I am inclined to dismiss the solid dome in the sky in Genesis 1 as part of an ancient mistaken worldview God accommodated, I wonder if He just didn’t do the same with all the “life is in the blood” and sacrifice stuff. I think the whole sacrificial system may have been simply accommodated by God and His followers really found it the best way to express the Incarnation and death of Christ at the time. I think I live in a time where animal sacrifice just makes no sense anymore nd this model needs tweaking. The Incarnation itself (the divine condescension) is just as important, if not more so, than the Cross to me. I think the Cross is emphasized so heavily in the NT because it has to be. It was a major scandal and stumbling block. Unless it can be explained why Jesus/God was Crucified by Rome, the entire Incarnation and any self-claims of Jesus lose their value. In fact, I think it was about ending the sacrificial system altogether. God didn’t need/like or want to accommodate it any longer.
An that is why II think purgatory is entirely logical. Argument goes as follows:
Premise 1: There will be neither sin nor attachment to sin in heaven**.** Premise 2: We (at least most of us) are still sinning and are attached to sin at the end of this life. Conclusion: Therefore there must be a period between death and heavenly glory in which the saved are cleansed of sin and their attachment to sin.
These premises could be wrong but it seems to me, the idea that there are levels or a progression in the afterlife, which none of us really knows what it is truly like, just makes sense to me. It is largely an intellectual discussion though. It doesn’t really change much about how I live my life in my mind whether it exists or not.
It could also just be “dead believers in Christ” awaiting the general resurrection. In the earliest NT work written, Paul’s converts in Thessalonica were shocked by how many Christians had fallen asleep before Jesus returned.
It could refer to the spiritually dead.
Or it could refer to all the dead
I suppose various Christians will largely just interpret (force fit it) based on what they already believe under the mistaken assumption that the Bible is univocal on everything and inerrant.
It strikes me as being speculative at best. Death and what follows is still a mystery to those of us who are still living. It would appear that Scripture is not definitive other than the fact that Jesus conquered it and that we should not fear it any more. Any notion of suffering or endurance would seem to contradict that.
I have always thought that speculating on the future was a fool’s game. We have a promise from God that we can cling to, why do we need to know the precise details?
I think Peter is referring to the previous chapter, 3:19-20
1Petr 3:19 in which he [Jesus] went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison,
1Petr 3:20 because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.
I like your post except i think about this part a little bit differently…
We die to self and look to the cross for respite.
When the Israelites followed Moses command and looked upon the serpent on the stake in the wilderness, they were immediately healed from the consequence of their transgression, not further punished.
So Moses made a bronze snake and mounted it on a pole. Whenever someone was bitten, and he looked at the bronze snake, he recovered.'” -Numbers 21:8-9
That is ignoring the statement that the Berean Jews listened to the apostle Pauls teachings, and rather than taking him at his word, they opened the scriptures to check for themselves.
Doing the above is not judging…its applying due diligence.
Btw, what scriptures do you think the Bereans studied given Paul died in the A.D 60’s and so these events were relatively soon after Christs death?
(I wonder how many individuals realise they were studying Old Testament scriptures…the same ones Christ would have used in the temple on the Sabbath?)
That tells us that the gospel must harmonise with Old Testament writings to be true. Anyones theology and doctrine that does not align with Old Testament writings is clearly false/heresy.
I think the pushback would be that if this were true then they were just the people who lived long ago before the Gospel. They were told the gospel. People who have heard the gospel today wouldn’t get that 2nd chance (or maybe 1st chance?). “It is appointed for men to die once…”