I don't get how people are so unwilling to look at something
especially the most important thing, our eternal life in
a new way...most important, once they've discovered something they didn't know before. Believe in Purgatory, offer prayers for the souls in Purgatory and they will you. We are a family.

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Do you realize sincere Protestants believe in Purgatory but don't realize it.


PURGATORY IN ALL BUT NAME

By W. ROBERT ANFILL


One of the most frustrating experiences a Catholic can have in explaining his faith to Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestants is that they so often believe and accept the most mysterious and difficult Christian doctrines, such as the Trinity and the vicarious atonement, without a murmur and then balk at doctrines which even by their own standards should pose no difficulty at all. Purgatory is a prime example.

Protestants deny the existence of purgatory because they say that the only cleansing needed for salvation is the cleansing in the precious Blood of Jesus, poured out on the Cross for sinners. Catholics agree. The holy souls in purgatory are not experiencing a different or additional cleansing, but only the final effects of the one cleansing in the blood of Christ, since nothing unclean shall enter heaven (Rev. 21:27). Those who are being purified beyond death are not the unbelieving and the impenitent, who will go to hell; the souls in purgatory are those who have already been justified by grace and are at peace with God at their life’s end.

Protestants protest against purgatory, yet they have no objection to the idea that for their sins God sometimes allows Christians to endure both temporal judgments and deprivation of spiritual consolations. For example, the Presbyterian Westminster Confession (1646) says that true Christian believers may, through the temptation of Satan and of the world, the prevalence of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of the means of their preservation, fall into grievous sins; and for a time continue therein: whereby they incur God’s displeasure, and grieve his holy Spirit; come to be deprived of some measure of their graces and comforts; have their hearts hardened, and their consciences wounded; hurt and scandalize others, and bring temporal judgments upon themselves (from John H. Leith, ed., Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine in the Bible to the Present (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1973), p. 212). The Baptist Abstract of Principles (1859) says in a similar vein that believers may "fall, through neglect and temptation, into sin, whereby they grieve the Spirit, impair their graces and comforts, bring reproach on the Church, and temporal judgments on themselves . . . " (Leith, p. 342).

If a justified believer can suffer these consequences of sin, then why can’t the same believer experience analogous temporal judgments beyond death, if there remain in him "wood, hay, and straw" (1 Cor. 3:121) still to be consumed? In fact, Protestants should have fewer objections to purgatory than to other Catholic doctrines: In purgatory, there is no increase of "merit" even as the fruition of Christ’s grace in us—no good works of any kind. That is why Catholic theologians have coined the term "satispassion" to describe what happens there. The holy souls, in their present state, are assured of their salvation in Christ and eternally secure in this knowledge. Though they suffer, they are sustained by the love of God and helped by the prayers of the faithful. And if there is a purgatory, then there can be no more objection to these prayers than to any other intercessory prayer Christians might offer in the name of Jesus....

rest of the writing to be found at:


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