Why N.T. Wright is Wrong About Purgatory

As I’ve mentioned before, N.T. Wright is one of the most interesting and influential theologians alive today, and I’m generally grateful for his career and his writings and his contributions to Christianity. Having said that, I think that he has some major blind spots and weaknesses in some of his arguments against Catholicism (and particularly, the Catholic vision of the afterlife), and this is the third and final of a three-part response to his specific arguments. Part One was on Catholic and Orthodox belief in the Assumption of Mary; and Part Two was on the idea of differences in Heaven (e.g., if some Saints are higher or lower than others). You need not read those to make sense of what I’m going to say today, but they are conceptually linked, so if you’re interested in the argument, you might enjoy those.

Once more, the arguments in question are laid out in his book For All the Saints? Remembering the Christian Departed, and the relevant excerpt is available in full here. Today, I want to look at the particulars of his arguments against the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. But before I do that, I want to point to what the Catechism of the Catholic Church actually teaches about Purgatory, since it’s so often misunderstood:

1030 All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but 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.

1031 The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. The Church formulated her doctrine of faith on Purgatory especially at the Councils of Florence and Trent. the tradition of the Church, by reference to certain texts of Scripture, speaks of a cleansing fire:

The Catechism then quotes St. John Damascene, one of the Eastern Church Fathers: “As for certain lesser faults, we must believe that, before the Final Judgment, there is a purifying fire. He who is truth says that whoever utters blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will be pardoned neither in this age nor in the age to come. From this sentence we understand that certain offenses can be forgiven in this age, but certain others in the age to come.”

The idea of Purgatory is radically simple. Revelation 21:27 says of the New Jerusalem that “nothing unclean shall enter it, nor any one who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” The difference between the Lutheran doctrine of “forensic” justification (in which you are declared clean) and the Catholic one, is that Catholics believe that God actually purifies you. If you aren’t clean, and really clean not just pretend-clean or “declared” clean, you can’t enter Heaven, and you can’t enter the New Jerusalem. That cleansing begins in this life (a point Wright concedes below, as we’ll see). It is either completed during this lifetime, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then it still needs to be completed before entering Heaven. Hence: Purgatory. But notice that this means that Purgatory isn’t a final place in the way that Heaven or even Hell is. It’s the state of being purified to enter Heaven.

So how does Wright argue against this?

Argument #1: The Good Thief

Wright’s first argument is a staple of anti-Purgatory argumentation:

In particular, we must take account of the well-known and striking saying of Jesus to the dying brigand beside him, recorded by Luke (23.43). ‘Today,’ he said, ‘you will be with me in paradise.’ ‘Paradise’ is not the final destination; it is a beautiful resting place on the way there. But notice. If there is anyone in the New Testament to whom we might have expected the classic doctrine of purgatory to apply, it would be this brigand. He had no time for amendment of life; no doubt he had all kinds of sinful thoughts and desires in what was left of his body. All the standard arguments in favour of purgatory apply to him. And yet Jesus assures him of his place in paradise, not in a few days or weeks, not if his friends say lots of prayers and masses for him, but ‘today’.

I first heard this argument as a teenager watching (for some reason) a televangelist preacher. At the time, I thought the argument was thoroughly convincing. Later, I realized that there are two major holes in the reasoning.

First, the argument turns on something that there’s no evidence for: that the good thief “had no time for amendment of life; no doubt he had all kinds of sinful thoughts and desires in what was left of his body.” But the biblical picture is just the reverse.  All of the Evangelists mention that Jesus was crucified between two thieves. In Mark’s account, he says simply that “those who were crucified with him also reviled him” (Mark 15:32). But at some point, one of the two men seems to have had a conversion (Luke 23:39-43):

One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

What more evidence could we ask for of an authentic conversion or “amendment of life”? The thief went from bemoaning his own sufferings and taunting Jesus to realizing that Jesus was innocent, and that he (the thief) was being justly punished. He accepted the torments his own sins were causing him, and pleaded to Jesus for mercy. By any reasonable reading of the text, the man had both a profound conversion, and even suffered bodily torments for his sins, even to the point of enduring the death penalty for what amount to property crimes. He doesn’t seem to be holding on to how great thieving was: he seems horribly and painfully aware of the awfulness of sin, and totally repentant. From a Catholic perspective, his soul looks like it’s been (very quickly and very painfully) purified. What further purgation would Wright demand of him? In other words, at most, the argument proves that this one guy didn’t go to Purgatory… and it makes totally sense that he didn’t.

But the second hole that I eventually discovered in the “Good Thief” argument is that it turns heavily on forcing our earthly timeline onto God. Wright’s point is that the Good Thief must be in Paradise with Jesus “not in a few days or weeks, not if his friends say lots of prayers and masses for him, but ‘today’.” In other words, the entire point of the argument is that it reads Jesus as meaning that, on Good Friday, He and the Good Thief were going to Heaven.

But as St. Paul points out, Jesus on Good Friday doesn’t ascend into Heaven. He descends into Hell (see Eph. 4:9-10). St. Peter talks about him preaching to the souls from the days of Noah (1 Peter 3:18-22). And on Easter Sunday, after Jesus rose from the dead, He said to Mary Magdalene, “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17).

All of this is to say that there may be good arguments against Purgatory, but this prooftext just isn’t one of them.

Argument #2: Does 1 Corinthians 3 Mean What it Says?

Wright next tackles 1 Corinthians 3:10-15, which he calls “one of the most striking passages in the New Testament on judgment at or after death.”  The passage reads:

According to the commission of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it.  For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.  Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble— each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.  If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will 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.

That sounds a lot like purgatory. Paul is clearly referring to two groups of saved believers, each of whom has built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ. The man in the first group has built well and will be rewarded. The man in the second group will find his work “burned up,” and he “will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” All of this would seem to neatly prove both Purgatory and (more generally) the idea that there are levels of glory in the afterlife. So how does Wright respond?

First, he says that “this is the only passage in the New Testament which makes such a clear distinction” although he mentions two others (the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30, and the parable of the ten pounds in Luke 19:11-17) parenthetically. Even if that were true, what difference would that make? To say that even one passage teaches Purgatory would seem to be all that is necessary (unless one holds to the idea that St. Paul is wrong in 1 Corinthians). After all, the word “hell” only appears 13 times in the New Testament, and never in the Old Testament.

Next, Wright simply waves the passage away while denying that he is doing so:

Yet even here there is no sign of a distinction in terms of temporal progression. Paul does not say that the people who have built with gold, silver and precious stones will go straight to heaven, or paradise, still less to the resurrection, while those who have used wood, hay and stubble will be delayed en route by a purgatory in which they will be punished or purged. No: both will be saved.  One, however, will be saved gloriously, and the other by the skin of their teeth, with the smell of fire still on them. This is a solemn passage, to be taken very seriously by Christian workers and teachers. But it does not teach a difference of status, or of celestial geography, or of temporal progression, between one category of Christians and another.

But the natural reading of the text is precisely that there’s a temporal progression: that a man has his earthly works, and then there’s a purifying fire, and then “he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” Of course, just as we saw with the last argument, there’s always a question of what we mean by “temporality” when we’re dealing with the afterlife, so we shouldn’t assume that the flow of time works the same way (and at the same pace) in a purely-spiritual realm as it does in a bodily one. But there’s certainly temporality in the basic sense of before-and-after. In fact, Wright’s objection (“No: both will be saved.  One, however, will be saved gloriously, and the other by the skin of their teeth, with the smell of fire still on them”) is precisely what the doctrine of Purgatory teaches.

Argument #3: Purgatory is Late and Roman?

Wright avers, somewhat vaguely:

Purgatory was, of course, an idea that took some time to get going. When it was established it was only held by one part of the church, i.e. the Roman Catholic part. It was firmly rejected, on good biblical and theological grounds, by the sixteenth-century Reformers. 

Wright doesn’t bother to mention when he thinks that the doctrine of Purgatory arose or what the good biblical and theological arguments are that the Reformers used against it. All we know is that he think it is a late (he later says “medieval”) addition to Christianity, and one confined to the West. Neither of those claims are true.

Belief in purgation after death was widespread (remember, the Catechism quotes St. John of Damascene, from the East) and even predates Christianity. 2 Maccabees 12:39-45 (a book treated as Scripture in both Orthodoxy and Catholicism, and which predates the New Testament) includes prayers of atonement for the dead. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that Purgatory is quite clearly taught in Rabbinical Judaism, and there are clear descriptions of it in Jewish Midrashim. So it’s not true that Purgatory is either late or Western. While different religious traditions within Judaism and Christianity might differ about the particulars of it, the core idea of purgation after death was widely accepted before the Reformation. (As an aside, when Wright says that “there is one doctrine of purgatory, that taught by Rome, and Anglicans reject it,” he shows his ignorance of Eastern Orthodox and Jewish views on the subject).

Argument #4: Does 2 Maccabees 12 Mean What it Says?

After claiming that Purgatory does not come from the Bible, Wright turns to one of the Biblical passages often used in support (to which I have already alluded):

Some still appeal to the Bible in support of purgatory, but they appeal in vain. There is a famous passage in 2 Maccabees 12.39-45 where some who have died in battle are found to have been secret idolaters, whereupon Judas Maccabeus and his followers offer prayers and sacrifices on their behalf to make sure that they will come to share in the resurrection. This passage does indeed envisage an intermediate state: the resurrection has not yet happened, and some who (it was hoped) would attain it were found to have committed sin that had not yet been atoned for. But this isn’t ‘getting out of purgatory’; it’s a matter of ensuring that, though all alike are in the intermediate state, these ones will rise again (not ‘go to heaven’, we note) to enjoy God’s new world when it comes. The books of the Maccabees are, of course, in the Apocrypha; but the early Christians would in any case have replied that ‘the blood of Jesus, God’s son, cleanses us from all sin’ (1 John 1.7).

In short, Wright’s claim is twofold: that 2 Maccabees isn’t really Scripture, and that the early Christians “would in any case have” responded to it like good Evangelical Protestants, by quoting 1 John 1:17 out of context to say that “the blood of Jesus, God’s son, cleanses us from all sin.”

But there’s no need to engage in such wild speculation about what the Fathers would have said, because the Fathers in fact did know about 2 Maccabees, and sounded… nothing like Wright claims they would. St. Augustine, for instance, writes to a fellow bishop, St. Paulinus, an entire book On the Care for the Dead. A widow has asked Paulinus to place the body of her son in “the basilica of most blessed Felix the Confessor.” Paulinus agreed, and wrote asking Augustine his thoughts on the matter. Paulinus’ own view was that “it does profit a person after death, if by the faith of his friends for the interment of his body such a spot be provided wherein may be apparent the aid, likewise in this way sought, of the Saints.” Augustine agreed, and said,

Possibly your inquiry is satisfied by this my brief reply. But what other considerations move me, to which I think meet to answer, do thou for a short space attend. In the books of the Maccabees we read of sacrifice offered for the dead. Howbeit even if it were no where at all read in the Old Scriptures, not small is the authority, which in this usage is clear, of the whole Church, namely, that in the prayers of the priest which are offered to the Lord God at His altar, the Commendation of the dead has also its place.

In other words, we know that our prayers for the dead are efficacious for two reasons. First because, 2 Maccabees says so. Augustine’s response makes clear that 2 Maccabees is considered part of the “Old Scriptures”; that is, the Old Testament, not Apocryphal. (Augustine repeatedly affirms the canonicity of the two books of Maccabees, but that’s another story). But second, he argues that even if Scripture were silent, it would be enough proof that it was the universal practice of the early Church to pray for the dead in this way.

Now, you might think that St. Augustine and the whole early Church was wrong in these views, but it’s silly to pretend that they believed and sounded like Evangelical Protestants on this matter, because they couldn’t have been much farther apart. Likewise, in The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, which dates to around 203 or so, there are lengthy portions which purport to be (and are generally accepted by scholars to be) written by St. Perpetua herself. In one section, she describes seeing her dead brother Dinocrates in a vision in the night (it’s not clear if she is dreaming or not) in which he “was parched and very thirsty, with a filthy countenance and pallid colour, and the wound on his face which he had when he died.” Perpetua says that

For him I had made my prayer, and between him and me there was a large interval, so that neither of us could approach to the other. And moreover, in the same place where Dinocrates was, there was a pool full of water, having its brink higher than was the stature of the boy; and Dinocrates raised himself up as if to drink. And I was grieved that, although that pool held water, still, on account of the height to its brink, he could not drink.

She gets up and begins to pray fervently for him, night and day. Eventually, she has another vision (or dream) in which

that place which I had formerly observed to be in gloom was now bright; and Dinocrates, with a clean body well clad, was finding refreshment. And where there had been a  wound, I saw a scar; and that pool which I had before seen, I saw now with its margin lowered even to the boy’s navel. And one drew water from the pool incessantly, and upon its brink was a goblet filled with water; and Dinocrates drew near and began to drink from it, and the goblet did not fail. And when he was satisfied, he went away from the water to play joyously, after the manner of children, and I awoke. Then I understood that he was translated from the place of punishment.

So Dinocrates is in a place of temporal punishment, but through her prayers, he is purified and released. Again, one can reject the early Christian view as not Evangelical enough (or as contrary to an Evangelical reading of the Bible), but you can’t reject it as not consist it with early Christianity. This simply is the view of early Christianity.

Argument #5: A Two-Stage Cleansing Process?

Wright also argues that the doctrine of Purgatory doesn’t take the reality of bodily death seriously enough:

But what should not be in doubt is that, for the New Testament, bodily death itself actually puts sin to an end. There may well be all kinds of sins still lingering on within us, infecting us and dragging us down. But part of the biblical understanding of death, bodily death, is that it finishes all that off at a single go.

The central passages here are Romans 6.6-7 and Colossians 2.11-13, with the picture they generate being backed up by key passages from John’s gospel.  Both of the Pauline texts are speaking of baptism. Christians are assured that their sins have already been dealt with through the death of Christ; they are now no longer under threat because of them. The crucial verse is Romans 6.7: ‘the one who has died is free from sin (literally, ‘is justified from sin). The necessary cleansing from sin, is seems, takes place in two stages.  First, there is baptism and faith.  [….] But the glorious news is that, although during the present life we struggle with sin, and may or may not make small and slight progress towards genuine holiness, our remaining propensity to sin is finished, cut off, done with all at once, in physical death.  ‘The body is dead because of sin,’ declares Paul, ‘but the spirit is life because of righteousness’ (Romans 8.10). 

This is some of the most egregious proof-texting I’ve ever seen from a respected theologian.

In Romans 6, St. Paul asks, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (Rom. 6:1-2). That is, the “death” that Paul is speaking of is a past event for the Christian, when we “were buried therefore with him by baptism into death” (Rom. 6:4). The death in question is our death to sin, when we buried our old selves in baptism, and rose with Christ. As Paul says in Colossians (the other passage Wright cites), “you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col. 2:12). This is explicitly not about our future bodily death, but about our death to the body (that is, our no longer being slaves to the flesh).

That’s how St. Paul can say to the (alive and breathing) Romans that “you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God really dwells in you” and that “if Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness” (Rom. 8:9-10).

Argument #6: Purgatory is Unbiblical… Except When it Isn’t

I want to group together the final few arguments that Wright makes. First, he argues that belief in Purgatory rejects the power of the Cross:

I cannot stress sufficiently that if we raise the question of punishment for sin, this is something that has already been dealt with on the cross of Jesus. […] The idea that Christians need to suffer punishment for their sins in a post-mortem purgatory, or anywhere else, reveals a straightforward failure to grasp the very heart of what was achieved on the cross.

Second, he argues that Purgatory is contrary to Romans 8 (as if Purgatory is a state of being cut off from God):

Think about one of Paul’s best-known chapters, often rightly read at funerals. ‘There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ,’ he writes (Romans 8.1). The last great paragraph of the chapter leaves no room to imagine any such thing as the doctrine of purgatory, in any of its forms. ‘Who shall lay any charge against us? … Who shall condemn us? … Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?… Neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor the present nor the future, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!’ And if you think that Paul might have added ‘though of course you’ll probably have to go through purgatory first’, I think with great respect you ought to see, not a theologian, but a therapist.

But then Wright makes a third argument, which I think both answers these last two, as well as many of his other earlier arguments:

In fact, Paul makes it clear here and elsewhere that it’s the present life that is meant to function as a purgatory. The sufferings of the present time, not of some post-mortem state, are the valley we have to pass through in order to reach the glorious future. The present life is bad enough from time to time, goodness knows, without imagining gloom and doom after death as well. In fact, I think I know why purgatory [became so popular, why Dante’s middle volume is the one people most easily relate to. The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings which form the gateway to life. 

Think about just what Wright is saying here. After spending page after page of talking about how unchristian it is to think that Christians should need to undergo purgation when we have the Blood of Jesus, Wright concludes by saying that we’re undergoing purgation now.

This completely undermines his foregoing arguments, for a few reasons. First, if earthly purgation isn’t contrary to the love of God, or the Blood of Christ, or belief in Christ – if, in fact, Christians are promised such purgation during this life – then why would post-mortem purgation be contrary to any of those things? While Romans 8 may be popular at funerals, it was written about us on earth. So if Wright doesn’t need a therapist for seeing earthly purgation as compatible with Romans 8, I don’t know why St. Augustine needs one for seeing post-mortem purgation as compatible with it, as well. If Wright isn’t denying the power of the Cross to believe in earthly purgation, why is St. Perpetua denying the power of the Cross by believing in post-mortem purgation?

Second, if Wright is conceding that purgation is part of God’s plans for His Saints, then the case for Purgatory is clear. Once you accept this, and accept that some Christians complete this purgation in this life and some don’t, you are left with two possibilities. One is that there is a post-mortem state in which this purgation is completed. The other is that the purgation wasn’t actually that important, and God will simply dispense with it with after death (in which case… why does He permit us to go through such needless purgation here on earth?).

And third, Wright is pointing out something enormous: thatPurgatory makes sense, and rings true to life. When an atheist says that humans just have a naturally-ingrained impulse for religion, they might think that this is an argument against religion, but it isn’t. It’s precisely what we would expect if religion is true. As C.S. Lewis has pointed out, every other desire we have (like hunger, thirst, and sexual desire) corresponds to an existing reality that fulfills the desire, so if we have a desire for heaven, that would at least seem to suggest that it, too, has a corresponding fulfillment.

The Protestant idea that God simply snaps His fingers and removes all of our sinful attachments is within His power, but not how we actually see Him behaving most of the time. There may be a handful of such miraculous cases, but far more often He heals us through the slow purgative process to which Wright alludes. In other words, the Catholic belief in Purgatory looks and sounds like real life. The Protestant belief in painless and instantaneous purification from our attachment to sin looks and sounds like a get-rich-quick scheme. Which sounds more like St. Paul’s warning that “the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths” (2 Tim. 4:3-4)?

That seems like a good place to conclude: there’s a good case to be made for Purgatory from Scripture, from the beliefs and practices of the ancient Jews and the earliest Christians (which, if they were wrong, one would have expected to find rebuked by Jesus or the Apostles), and from our whole experience of what the Christian life is like and the way that God chooses to work with us. Sure, it’d be great sometimes to not have to deal with inclinations towards sin, or the actual struggle for holiness. But God chooses to let us have that struggle so that, with His grace, we can become authentically holy.