Actually, the Catholics still have that sensible idea—it’s the Protestants that discarded it. The sensible idea is purgatory, the place where sins are accounted for. Purgatory is temporary, unlike hell, so the punishment can be in proportion to the sins.

Of course, very little of the made-up religion of Christianity is actually sensible. What I mean is: given that you must have hell, a purgatory with fair punishment for the bad done in life is a sensible alternative.

Encounter with purgatory

I was raised Presbyterian, and my first encounter with the idea of purgatory came from reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, written around 1600. At the end of Act 1, Hamlet is confronted by a ghost who identifies himself as the spirit of his dead father, visiting the earth briefly to convey a message. The ghost explains that he was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle and demands revenge.

This depiction of purgatory is odd in several ways: if the ghost had a human shape, why wasn’t he recognizable by Hamlet as his father? How can ghosts get temporary passes out of purgatory? How is the goal of revenge noble enough to get such a pass, especially when (spoiler alert) almost everyone, including Hamlet, dies at the end?

This illustrates how the idea of purgatory has changed through time. But how is this possible? Isn’t purgatory clearly defined in the Bible?

Nope, and that’s where we begin our journey.

Where did purgatory come from?

Jesus tells a parable in Luke 12 about readiness. He uses servants who don’t know when their master will return to parallel Jesus’s followers who don’t know when the Son of Man will arrive. In 12:47–8, Jesus distinguishes between servants who commit greater and lesser misdeeds, saying that they will receive greater and lesser punishments. This parable has been interpreted as referring to the afterlife and a rejection of one-size-fits-all punishment.

Another passage comes from Paul (1 Corinthians 3:12–15). It imagines people building the foundation of their lives out of materials that are precious (gold, silver, and jewels) or cheap (wood or straw). Fire will test these foundations, burning up the wood and straw but leaving the precious materials intact. This trial suggested to the early church fathers a purification process, which gave support to purgatory.

A final passage is 2 Maccabees 12:41–45. (The contents of the Bible varies by denomination, and the first two books of Maccabees are some of the handful of books in the Roman Catholic Bible that are not in the Protestant Bible.) This book was written in the second century BCE and documented the remarkably successful revolt of the Jews against the Seleucid Empire.

At the end of 2 Maccabees 12, the Jews fight a battle. Afterward, the living begin to bury their fallen, but they discover that each dead man was carrying “objects dedicated to the idols of Jamnia.” Clearly these men were hedging their bets, not putting their full support behind Yahweh. Their surviving comrades then prayed for these sins to be forgiven and sent money to Jerusalem for a sacrifice to make amends. This acknowledged both an afterlife and the expectation that prayers and sacrifices from the living will benefit the dead.

But there’s another side to that coin

As we’ve seen many times, including the last post, the context of any Bible passage is the entire Bible. With almost 800,000 words in its English version, the Bible says lots of things, many of which are contradictory. A clear statement in one book often crashes into another clear statement elsewhere.

One passage that argues against purgatory is Luke 23:42–3, in which Jesus is on the cross with two other criminals. The first criminal mocks Jesus, while the other defends him.

Then [the second criminal] said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

This makes no mention of a prolonged period in purgatory.

Here’s another that rejects purgatory as a way station on the path to heaven.

Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. (John 5:24)

In the parable of the sheep and the goats, the king separates the good people from the bad ones. Jesus concludes:

[The bad people] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. (Matthew 25:46)

Again, there are just two choices. Purgatory isn’t a third option.

Where do these ideas come from?

Years ago, I listened to a series of Sherlock Holmes radio plays. These didn’t come from the official Conan Doyle stories but were new adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Each would end with an acknowledgement such as, “This story was inspired by an incident in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’” The details of the mysterious incident that launched each story were never made clear.

That’s how it is with some of these points of Christian dogma like purgatory or the Trinity. The Bible gives no clear explanation of either; there’s little more foundation than “inspired by an incident.”

Why is this Catholic but not Protestant?

If you remember anything about the Reformation (also known as the Protestant Reformation), it’s probably Martin Luther’s publishing his Ninety-five Theses in 1517. One of Luther’s primary complaints was the Church’s sale of indulgences.

So how do indulgence work? The Roman Catholic Church imagines that the aftermath of a sin has a guilt component and a punishment component. If a Catholic is in a good relationship with God (up to date on confessions, for example), the guilt has been forgiven, but there’s still that punishment. If it’s not taken care of in life, it carries over into the afterlife. Living Catholics can reduce the burden of punishment on the dead through indulgences, which include prayers, good works, and financial donations.

Luther’s complaint was the sale of indulgences (though where a donation supporting the good work of the Church becomes a crass sale of a license to sin is not clear). Initially, Luther was merely cautious about indulgences but soon rejected them completely. He argued that the soul was insensate between bodily death and resurrection, and purgatory was an “unbiblical corruption.” This rejection caught on among other Protestant reformers, who argued “salvation by grace alone” rather than salvation by works.

This is what a manmade doctrine from God looks like

What does a doctrine cobbled together from a few cherry-picked Bible verses and wishful thinking look like? Here are some of the issues that theologians have debated about purgatory.

• Is purgatory a physical place? The earliest notions were of a state of existence rather than a place, then it became a place about a thousand years ago. Lately the pendulum has swung back.
• What’s the point of Jesus’s sacrificial death if people must be purified through torment in purgatory?
• Is purification done with actual fire? How long is this process?
• How much pain is caused? Augustine speculated that it is far greater pain than is possible on earth. Others imagine that those in purgatory are in peace because they are confident in their salvation.
• Is punishment in purgatory correctly seen as vengeance by God?

Dante’s Inferno was just the most popular of a large number of medieval works in the afterlife-tourism genre that answered these questions with fiction. Trying to use theology instead, purgatory was addressed in three Church Councils. One conclusion that admits the flimsy foundation of purgatory was for the Church to avoid “difficult and subtle questions which tend not to edification.”

Society would be better off if the Church avoided entirely those questions it can’t answer, in particular every supernatural question.

See also:

• Silver-Bullet Argument #28: Because Heaven Is too Horrible to Endure
• Tolerating Hell While in Heaven: 4 Lessons

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Image from osseous (license CC BY 2.0)
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Let’s conclude our critique of the Christian idea of hell with one final response. This one’s a biggie.

I responded to William Lane Craig’s justification for hell here, and this series of posts critiquing Christian hell begins here. We’ll conclude with one final point.

9. Heaven is hellish

How can you be happy in heaven, knowing of the billions of people in torment in hell, especially if heaven gives you wisdom or enlightenment to more clearly perceive right and wrong? One response is that our human compassion must be deadened so that we’re no longer concerned about the suffering. Thomas Aquinas’s logic went like this: “Whoever pities another shares somewhat in his unhappiness. But the blessed cannot share in any unhappiness. Therefore they do not pity the afflictions of the damned.” By this view, heaven is so horrible a place that one must be anesthetized to endure it.

The opposite argument—that those in heaven will celebrate the torture—is also popular. To show how consistent this schadenfreude is throughout Christian opinion, I’ll share a number of quotes. First, from the early church fathers:

What a spectacle . . . when the world . . . shall be consumed in one great flame! . . . What there excites my admiration? What my derision? Which sight gives me joy? As I see . . . illustrious monarchs . . . groaning in the lowest darkness, philosophers . . . as fire consumes them!
— Tertullian (d. 240)

They who shall enter into [the] joy [of the Lord] shall know what is going on outside in the outer darkness. . . . The saints’ . . . knowledge, which shall be great, shall keep them acquainted . . . with the eternal sufferings of the lost.
— Augustine (d. 430)

From thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas:

The saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of Divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy.

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly, and give more abundant thanks to God for it, a perfect sight of punishment of the damned is granted them.

From the First Great Awakening (early eighteenth century):

The view of the misery of the damned will double the ardor of the love and gratitude of the saints in heaven. The sight of hell-torments will exalt the happiness of the saints for ever. It will not only make them more sensible of the greatness and freeness of the grace of God in their happiness, but it will really make their happiness the greater, as it will make them more sensible of their own happiness
— Rev. Jonathan Edwards

The godly wife shall applaud the justice of the Judge in the condemnation of her ungodly husband. The godly husband shall say “Amen!” to the damnation of her who lay in his bosom. The godly parent shall say “Hallelujah!” at the passing of the sentence of his ungodly child; and the godly child shall from his heart approve the damnation of his wicked parent who begot him and the mother who bore him.
— Rev. Thomas Boston

Though Christian apologists usually have the tact to tap dance around this issue today, this “God’s plan must be perfect . . . somehow” attitude is sometimes confronted frankly. A Catholic Truth Society pamphlet from fifty years ago said, “What will it be like for a mother in heaven who sees her son burning in hell? She will glorify the justice of God.”

Besides abandoning the entire senseless jumble of claims, what option do they have? 

 Image via Quinn Dombrowski, CC license

Let’s continue with a critique of the Christian idea of hell. I responded to William Lane Craig’s justification for hell here, and the first three responses to hell are here.

4. Substitutionary atonement

Substitutionary atonement (the punishment of Jesus substitutes for the punishment we deserve) is another way in which God is out of step with a modern sense of justice.

Christianity tells us that we’re bad. In fact, we’re so bad that we can never deserve heaven, no matter what good we do in our miserable little lives. But lucky for us, Jesus took on our sins-to-be in a Bronze-Age-style human sacrifice, satisfying God’s justifiable rage. Now we’re washed clean and can deserve heaven, but more questions arise. Why was Jesus an afterthought in God’s perfect plan? Shouldn’t Jesus have been there from the beginning? How can an all-wise and all-loving god get angry at imperfect beings’ imperfections? How can an omniscient god be angry at something that he foresaw before he even started the project?

But those questions are a tangent. Think of how wrong substitutionary atonement would be for Western justice. In cases where the justice system discovers that the wrong person was imprisoned for a crime, no one says, “Well, someone received punishment, and that’s all that matters.”

See also: Criticizing the Logic of the Atonement

5. Free will

Apologist Norm Geisler argued that atheists wouldn’t like a world with God as a cosmic nanny, always clearing any dangers from the path ahead. Atheists are outraged when God lets people die from injustice, he says, but what if God gave them their wish? The murderer’s bullet would turn to butter, the wall would turn into water just before the car crashed into it, and so on. There would be no moral consequences and no chance for moral development in such a world where free will is constrained to permit only good actions.

But our free will is already constrained. I can’t read minds, I can’t fly, I can’t see x-rays, I don’t have telekinetic killing power, and I don’t have laser eyes. Nevertheless, I muddle along despite all these constraints on my free will. There’s no evidence that a loving god carefully tuned the traits of our reality to give us a just-right Goldilocks world where we have some character-building challenge but not too much. Instead, this is just one more Christian attempt to paper over the lack of evidence for God.

You’d think that Christians would find the opportunity to show evidence for God, but here as with similar issues, Christian apologists are only eager to rationalize away the lack of evidence.

“What about here?” we ask. “Shouldn’t we see evidence of God here?”

“No,” the Christian replies, “there again things look just like there’s no God at all.”

And let’s not imagine God as a champion of free will. When God permits the murderer or rapist free will to carry out their actions, that imposes on the free will of the victims.

God as the champion of free will? Tell that to the person who is locked in hell against his will. The Bible itself tells of God deliberately trampling people’s free will.

• He hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he wouldn’t yield to Moses (Exodus 9:12), and he hardened the hearts of the Jewish opponents of Jesus so that they wouldn’t believe (John 12:37–40).
• “God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden” (Romans 9:18).
• “The Lord foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples” (Psalms 33:10).
• “For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses” (Joshua 11:20).

6. What’s the point of life on earth?

As explored in part 1, we know that our world isn’t the greatest possible world. Heaven is far better, so why didn’t God skip a step and make us in heaven? Or if life on earth is like heaven except without the wisdom to use free will, God could just give us that wisdom.

Earth as a winnowing test is a ridiculous notion. God already knows who’s naughty and who’s nice, and he could avoid making bad people in the first place. Sure, one could handwave that the good people only get that way because of the existence of the bad ones, but (1) there’s no reason to imagine that (this is the Hypothetical God Fallacy), and (2) again, God could’ve just made us in heaven and avoided creating earth.

7. God is a poor teacher

Jesus told his followers to choose the narrow road, because most people would take the broad road to destruction (Matthew 7:13–14).

Is God so bad a teacher that most of his students fail? Many human teachers pass all of their students. You’d think that an omniscient and omnipotent teacher would do a better job.

8. God’s responsibility

If everything happens according to God’s plan, then God makes most of humanity knowing that they’re destined for hell. This doctrine of predestination is made explicit in Calvinism. While the opposite view of Arminianism rejects predestination, it’s hard to imagine an omniscient God who is nevertheless surprised and saddened when anyone is sent to hell.

Concluded with one final arguments on the illogic of hell in part 3.

Talking with theists about religion sometimes—
and by sometimes I mean almost always—
feels like “Groundhog Day,”
a painful and monotonous slog
that simply travels the same territory over and over and over.
— Godless Mama

Acknowledgment: this post has been informed by the excellent Reasonable Doubts podcast (episode rd39 @37:50 – 50:30).

Image via gags9999, CC license