Protestants and Purgatory

Does purgatory have a place within a serious Christian understanding of salvation? Most evangelicals would say no. The Catholic Church has always said yes—and the reasons are biblical, ancient, and surprisingly compelling even to Protestant ears.

For better or worse, personal salvation occupies a central role in the modern understanding of the Christian faith, particularly within evangelicalism. Over the last two centuries the central emphasis of the gospel has shifted from God’s efforts to put the world to rights to a focus on the eternal destiny of the individual.

This represents a serious narrowing of the Christian faith. It gives rise to complications and misunderstandings, not least the reduction of personal salvation to an overly simplistic legal formula. It is this way of thinking that has excluded purgatory from the evangelical mindset, and it is precisely this way of thinking that the Catholic tradition resists.

The popular idea in evangelical circles that saying a certain prayer—even if “you really mean it”—is all it takes to secure salvation seems as superstitious as any excessive ritualism of which Protestants have historically accused Catholics. The sinner’s prayer too often serves as a type of incantation designed to force God to secure our eternal souls.

Surely faith is much more than a simple declaration of belief. (Jas 2:14–24) Contemporary evangelical teachings on salvation can remind one of the episode of The Office in which Michael Scott “declares” bankruptcy merely by shouting the phrase.

So, what then is salvation, and how then shall we be saved? And what role does purgatory play in the Catholic answer to this question?

Purgatory and Theosis

The Catholic tradition invites all Christians to recover an understanding of salvation as a process—the outworking of a lifelong relationship between God and the believer. Salvation’s beginning cannot be rightly distinguished from the process as a whole. This is why hard evangelical distinctions between justification, sanctification, and glorification can be unhelpful when treated as separate events rather than aspects of one reality.

The process by which God transforms believers into the image of Christ—sanctification in evangelical parlance—is distinguishable from its beginning—justification—in the same way a race is distinguishable from its starting line. Hypothetical distinctions can perhaps be made for purposes of emphasis, but one cannot exist without the other and each has no meaning apart from the whole. Their distinctions are more theoretical than real, for they are different aspects of the same, indivisible reality.

Salvation is not a point-in-time event but the all-encompassing reality of the believer’s participation in God’s greater plan of redemption for the world. Through this process, God transforms the believer into the divine image. As Athanasius wrote in On the Incarnation, “He was made man that we might be made God.”⁠¹ The Eastern Christian tradition calls this process theosis; the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls divinization “the only reason” the Son of God became man (CCC 460).

Protestant Purgatory

Evangelicals often speak of glorification as what happens when a believer dies. It is often portrayed as the purpose of salvation, “going to heaven,” in common speak. Evangelicals generally teach that this occurs instantaneously upon the believer’s death.

The problem is that this makes the lifelong sanctification that forms the heart of Christian life an almost superfluous afterthought to salvation. According to this system, the believer faithful to Christ since childhood and the deathbed convert who has lived a life of grave sin arrive at glorification on identical terms.⁠²

This sits awkwardly with Paul’s teaching about those who will be saved “as through fire” (1 Cor 3:15), and it raises an obvious question about shortcuts. If holiness can be conferred instantaneously at death, why would God not simply confer it instantaneously at conversion?

These were the questions that led me, then a Protestant, to rethink the concept of purgatory before I eventually entered the Catholic Church. The medieval abuses that scandalized the Reformers—trafficking in indulgences, mechanical accounting of penal time—are not the doctrine itself but distortions of it. The doctrine itself is straightforward: if salvation is a process, why should God abandon the process at death? If salvation is about more than our own individual destinies, why should death provide a shortcut to the end?

Purgatory is not a place where the believer is punished for sin—for Christ has redeemed us—but a state in which the believer allows Christ to finish his work (Phil 1:6). The Catechism teaches the same thing: those who die in God’s grace and friendship but are still imperfectly purified “undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven” (CCC 1030). Purgatory is the hope that God will not abandon his work when we die but will complete his commitment to transform us into the image of his Son. Painful it may be, but it is not a state to be feared. Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Spe Salvi §47, develops this point at length: the “fire” of purgatory is best understood as the encounter with Christ himself, whose holiness purifies the soul of its remaining attachment to sin. Purgatory is not Christ’s justice failing to be sufficient; it is Christ’s mercy completing what his justice has already accomplished.

This understanding is closer to the Catholic teaching than most Protestants realize, and it has surprising Protestant precedent. C.S. Lewis defended a version of purgatory in Letters to Malcolm, and John Wesley taught a doctrine of progressive sanctification after death that bears a strong family resemblance. Even Pope John Paul II, in a 1999 general audience, described purgatory primarily as the encounter with Christ that purifies us of attachment to sin rather than as a place of penal suffering.

Once Saved Always Saved?

Looking at salvation in this light reframes other related issues. If salvation is a process, the question, “Can I lose my salvation?” becomes nonsensical. Salvation is not something to be possessed, like a wallet, that can be accidentally lost or misplaced. It is a life-giving dependency on the Father that cannot be reduced to a legal formula about justification.

God offers his grace that brings freedom from the bondage of sin. Man must only receive it and accept Christ as his new master, but that acceptance does not bring man into a passive experience of salvation.

Because salvation is relational, man must cooperate with the grace offered to him. Should he reject God’s grace, God will not force it upon him.

Like purgatory, the Catholic doctrine of mortal sin—despite its frequent practical perversions on both sides of the Reformation—is essential to a relational understanding of salvation. Mortal sin, as the Catechism defines it, is grave matter committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent (CCC 1857). It demonstrates that human beings can, through deliberate choice, reject God in the most personal terms. Understood properly, the doctrine removes sin from a legalistic ledger and places it back into the context of relationship.

The phrase itself can be unhelpful because of the baggage it carries in traditional Protestant-Catholic disputes and its tendency to be reduced to a legalistic formula. The underlying concept, however, should be recognizable to any evangelical who takes seriously the warnings of Scripture against falling away.

I often think of it as a marriage. If I speak in anger toward my wife or do something inconsiderate, I may have failed as a husband, but such things are unlikely to cause a severe break in our relationship. They simply demonstrate my imperfections and reconciliation is generally easy—assuming such minor slips are not habitual.

If I am unfaithful to her, however, something very significant happens to the foundations of our relationship, and we cannot go on as before without some kind of significant restoration. I can through my actions destroy our relationship without undertaking the legal process of divorce. Indeed, there is much more to our relationship than the law.

Such is mortal sin: in committing it we make an intentional choice to cut off our relationship with the Father. The obsession with legalistic formulas has deprived many Christians of this understanding. We want to be able to say with precision what sin is mortal and what is not (1 John 5:16–17). When we do, however, we are left either to reject the idea altogether—creating an illogical hybrid of Calvinist and Arminian theology—or to take it so far that every mistake becomes a revocation of God’s grace.

This betrays a lack of understanding of the underlying concept. The point is that salvation is relationship, and real relationship requires cooperation. No one who intentionally, continually, and habitually sins has any hope of salvation absent repentance.

There is no such thing as “fire insurance” to be purchased by the recitation of a certain prayer or creed. Salvation lies only close to God, and those who forsake God forsake salvation. God will pursue the individual to bring him back to the fold, but should he refuse God’s overtures, God will relent.

Death, therefore, merely eternalizes one’s state before God. Hell is the freely chosen separation from God by those who refuse to be otherwise. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce, “The doors of hell are locked on the inside”—a thought to which the Catholic tradition is deeply sympathetic.⁠³

Security of the Believer

Those in Christ never have to fear damnation, for it is not something into which a believer can accidentally slip. Yet, should they freely choose apostasy, God will not override the free will he gave them (Heb 6:1–8).

That is the real security: knowing that God remains with us and assures us of our salvation if we will only remain with him (Matt 24:13). Yet in their emphasis on this, many evangelicals end up portraying God as a kind of cosmic kidnapper, luring us into his van. We may enter voluntarily, but once inside, there is no getting out.

That, however, is not freedom; it is coercion. To love God, we must be free to reject him. If we are free to choose God’s path of salvation, we must be free to abandon it. Recognizing this will restore our understanding of salvation as a relationship between God and man, not as a legalistic formula to be worked out.

It is for this reason that Paul tells us to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12)—and it is this same logic that makes purgatory not a frightening intrusion on the gospel but its natural completion.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is purgatory in the Bible?

Yes, though the word itself does not appear. The clearest passage is 1 Corinthians 3:10–15, where Paul describes a postmortem judgment by fire in which a person’s works are tested; the one whose work is burned up “will be saved, but only as through fire.” The doctrinal warrant for prayer for the dead, on which the practice of suffrages for souls in purgatory rests, comes from 2 Maccabees 12:38–46, where Judas Maccabeus offers prayer and sacrifice for fallen soldiers “that they might be delivered from this sin.” Other texts cited by the tradition include Matthew 5:25–26, Matthew 12:32 (a sin that “will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come”), and 1 Peter 3:18–20.

What does the Catholic Church teach about purgatory?

The Catholic Church teaches that all who die in God’s grace and friendship but are still imperfectly purified are indeed assured of their eternal salvation, but after death they undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven (CCC 1030). Purgatory is not a second chance, not a third location alongside heaven and hell, and not a punishment Christ has not already paid for. It is the final purification of those who are saved—the completion of the sanctification God began in this life. The Church draws this teaching from Scripture and from the constant practice of prayer for the dead in the early Church.

Did the early Church believe in purgatory?

The early Church prayed for the dead from the second century onward, and the rationale for that practice presupposes a state of postmortem purification for the saved. Tertullian (De Corona 3, c. 211) describes the annual offerings made for the dead as an established custom; Augustine prays for his deceased mother Monica in the Confessions (Book IX, c. 397–400); Cyprian, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa all attest to a process of purification after death. The fully developed Western doctrine took centuries to crystallize, but the underlying conviction is apostolic in origin.

Is purgatory a “second chance” for salvation?

No. Purgatory is only for those who die in God’s grace—that is, for those whose salvation is already assured. It is not a way to be saved if one dies outside of friendship with God. As the Catechism puts it, “The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect” (CCC 1031). The point is purification of the saved, not deliberation about who is saved.

Doesn’t purgatory undermine the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement?

This is the central Protestant objection, and the Catholic answer is that purgatory presupposes Christ’s sufficiency rather than denying it. Christ has fully paid the penalty for sin; that work is complete and unrepeatable. What remains in the believer at death is not unpaid debt but lingering attachment to sin—the disordered loves and habits that the lifelong process of sanctification was meant to purify but did not finish. Purgatory completes that process, applying the merits Christ has already won. The Catechism states the principle directly: “This final purification of the elect… is entirely different from the punishment of the damned” (CCC 1031). It is sanctification, not satisfaction.

Did C.S. Lewis believe in purgatory?

Yes, in a qualified sense. In Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964), Lewis wrote that he believed in purgatory and described it as the soul saying, “It may hurt, you know,” and Christ replying, “Even so, my son.” He explicitly rejected the late-medieval picture of purgatory as a place of punitive torment, but he affirmed the deeper Catholic principle that the soul must be purified before it can bear the unmediated presence of God. His view is much closer to the Catholic doctrine—and to the original patristic conception—than the polemical Protestant caricatures suggest.

What did Martin Luther originally believe about purgatory?

Luther was not initially opposed to the doctrine of purgatory itself. The Ninety-Five Theses of 1517 attacked the abuse of indulgences but treated purgatory as a settled doctrine. Luther wrote in 1519 that “the existence of purgatory I have never denied,” and his 1519 sermon on indulgences and grace explicitly affirmed it. Only later, after the doctrine of purgatory became increasingly tied in his mind to the abuses of the indulgence system, did he reject it. The doctrinal break with the Catholic Church on purgatory was a consequence of the Reformation, not its cause.

Do Anglicans believe in purgatory?

Anglican opinion has never been monolithic. The Thirty-Nine Articles (1571) Article XXII rejected the “Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory” as “a fond thing vainly invented,” but that rejection was specifically of the late-medieval distortions Luther had attacked, not of any postmortem purification. The Anglo-Catholic and high-church tradition—going back to John Henry Newman before his reception into Rome and to many subsequent Tractarians—has affirmed an “intermediate state” in which souls are prepared for the beatific vision. C.S. Lewis (an Anglican) is the most accessible modern example. The line within Anglicanism runs not between “purgatory” and “no purgatory” but between those who keep the late-medieval polemic and those who recover the older Christian conviction in milder language.

What is the difference between purgatory and hell?

Hell is the eternal, freely chosen separation from God by those who refuse his love. Purgatory, by contrast, is temporary, exists only for those already saved, and is oriented entirely toward union with God. The souls in purgatory are not in any state of doubt about their eternal destiny; they are being made ready for it. Hell is the absence of God; purgatory is the painful but joyful preparation to enter his presence (CCC 1033–1037).

Do Catholics believe purgatory involves fire?

The Catholic Church does not dogmatically define the nature of purgatory’s suffering. The fire imagery comes from 1 Corinthians 3:15 and from a long Christian tradition of describing purification metaphorically as fire. Many modern Catholic theologians—including Pope Benedict XVI in Spe Salvi §47—have suggested that the “fire” of purgatory is best understood as the encounter with Christ himself, whose holiness purifies the soul of its remaining attachment to sin. The Church requires belief in the reality of postmortem purification but leaves the specific phenomenology open.

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Footnotes

1. 1. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), §54. The full passage reads: “He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father.” This does not mean that human beings become God in essence but rather that God transforms our nature to reflect the divine nature through grace. The Catholic Catechism teaches the same reality, calling it “divinization” and citing it as “the only reason” the Son of God became man (CCC 460). For an accessible introduction, see Norman Russell, Fellow Workers with God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009).

2. 2. The standard Reformed answer—that God’s electing decree explains the discrepancy and that sanctification is itself God’s sovereign work—is internally coherent but does not address the question of why the lifelong process of sanctification matters at all if its end result can be conferred instantaneously. See further Calvinism vs. Catholicism.

3. 3. C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), preface. This view also has substantial patristic support: Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, and (with controversial nuances) Origen all wrestled with the question of whether divine love can ever be wholly resisted. See Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell: The Descent into Hades from an Orthodox Perspective (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009), 78, 193. The Catholic Church definitively affirms the reality of hell as eternal separation from God for those who freely refuse his love (CCC 1033–1037), while emphasizing that the choice is genuinely the soul’s own.