Posted on 11/05/2005 9:15:01 PM PST by Coleus
b'shem Y'shua
However, at the same time, the obligaton to repay for the offense against God remains. That is why the priest recommends a penace for the person confessing their sins. The penitent is obligated to perform the sacramental penance. However, in addition to this, pious souls also take up voluntary penances, in order to satisfy that which must otherwise be made after death in Purgatory.
And
I believe Y'shua died for all my sins ;
if I but repent of them and call on Him.
Why pray tell believe in Purgatory?
b'shem Y'shua
See post 22 above.
And
I believe Y'shua died for all my sins ;
if I but repent of them and call on Him.
Why pray tell believe in Purgatory?
My sins are covered by my High Priest Y'shua!
I call on Him and do not need an intermediary.
b'shem Y'shua
See post 22 above, again. And this time pay attention to the part about the consequences of sin.
T>See post 22 above, again. And this time pay attention to the part about the consequences of sin.
I note from your lack of love for your brother
that you are not a follower of the Christ,
but instead are a Pagan.
However
Re-reading 22 above:
I follow the Word of G-d and not the word of man.
Ps. 146:1 Praise the LORD. [Hebrew: Hallelu Yah; also in verse Praise the LORD, O my soul.
Ps. 146:2 I will praise the LORD all my life; I will sing praise to God as long as I live.
Ps. 146:3 Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who save.
Ps. 146:4 When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; very day their plans come to nothing.
Ps. 146:5 Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose in the LORD his God,
Ps. 146:6 the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything them the LORD, who remains faithful for ever.
b'shem Y'shua
Post #27 was a particularly loving and "Christian response." Who pray tell is the pagan here?
You need to get some help, seriously.
The Vatican Secretariat on External Opinion has recently changed the name of Purgatory to Happytoria. Apparently, they were getting tired of all the Protestant Knee-Jerking getting in the way of actual dialogue.
What a wonderful thing to do!
Wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the info.
Two Judgments
When we die, we undergo what is called the particular, or individual, judgment. Scripture says that "it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Heb. 9:27). We are judged instantly and receive our reward, for good or ill. We know at once what our final destiny will be. At the end of time, when Jesus returns, there will come the general judgment to which the Bible refers, for example, in Matthew 25:31-32: "When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." In this general judgment all our sins will be publicly revealed (Luke 12:25).
Augustine said, in The City of God, that "temporary punishments are suffered by some in this life only, by others after death, by others both now and then; but all of them before that last and strictest judgment" (21:13). It is between the particular and general judgments, then, that the soul is purified of the remaining consequences of sin: "I tell you, you will never get out till you have paid the very last copper" (Luke 12:59).
Money, Money, Money
One argument anti-Catholics often use to attack purgatory is the idea that the Catholic Church makes money from promulgating the doctrine. Without purgatory, the claim asserts, the Church would go broke. Any number of anti-Catholic books claim the Church owes the majority of its wealth to this doctrine. But the numbers just dont add up.
When a Catholic requests a memorial Mass for the deadthat is, a Mass said for the benefit of someone in purgatoryit is customary to give the parish priest a stipend, on the principles that the laborer is worth his hire (Luke 10:7) and that those who preside at the altar share the altars offerings (1 Cor. 9:1314). In the United States, a stipend is commonly around five dollars; but the indigent do not have to pay anything. A few people, of course, freely offer more. This money goes to the parish priest, and priests are only allowed to receive one such stipend per day. No one gets rich on five dollars a day, and certainly not the Church, which does not receive the money anyway.
But look at what happens on a Sunday. There are often hundreds of people at Mass. In a crowded parish, there may be thousands. Many families and individuals deposit five dollars or more into the collection basket; others deposit less. A few give much more. A parish might have four or five or six Masses on a Sunday. The total from the Sunday collections far surpasses the paltry amount received from the memorial Masses.
A Catholic "Invention"?
Fundamentalists may be fond of saying the Catholic Church "invented" the doctrine of purgatory to make money, but they have difficulty saying just when. Most professional anti-Catholicsthe ones who make their living attacking "Romanism"seem to place the blame on Pope Gregory the Great, who reigned from A.D. 590604.
But that hardly accounts for the request of Monica, mother of Augustine, who asked her son, in the fourth century, to remember her soul in his Masses. This would make no sense if she thought her soul would not benefit from prayers, as would be the case if she were in hell or in the full glory of heaven.
Nor does ascribing the doctrine to Gregory explain the graffiti in the catacombs, where Christians during the persecutions of the first three centuries recorded prayers for the dead. Indeed, some of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, like the Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity (both written during the second century), refer to the Christian practice of praying for the dead. Such prayers would have been offered only if Christians believed in purgatory, even if they did not use that name for it. (See Catholic Answers Fathers Know Best tract The Existence of Purgatory for quotations from these and other early Christian sources.)
Why No Protests?
Whenever a date is set for the "invention" of purgatory, you can point to historical evidence to show the doctrine was in existence before that date. Besides, if at some point the doctrine was pulled out of a clerical hat, why does ecclesiastical history record no protest against it?
A study of the history of doctrines indicates that Christians in the first centuries were up in arms (sometimes quite literally) if anyone suggested the least change in beliefs. They were extremely conservative people who tested a doctrines truth by asking, Was this believed by our ancestors? Was it handed on from the apostles? Surely belief in purgatory would be considered a great change, if it had not been believed from the firstso where are the records of protests?
They dont exist. There is no hint at all, in the oldest writings available to us (or in later ones, for that matter), that "true believers" in the immediate post-apostolic years spoke of purgatory as a novel doctrine. They must have understood that the oral teaching of the apostles, what Catholics call tradition, and the Bible not only failed to contradict the doctrine, but, in fact, confirmed it.
It is no wonder, then, that those who deny the existence of purgatory tend to touch upon only briefly the history of the belief. They prefer to claim that the Bible speaks only of heaven and hell. Wrong. It speaks plainly of a third condition, commonly called the limbo of the Fathers, where the just who had died before the redemption were waiting for heaven to be opened to them. After his death and before his resurrection, Christ visited those experiencing the limbo of the Fathers and preached to them the good news that heaven would now be opened to them (1 Pet. 3:19). These people thus were not in heaven, but neither were they experiencing the torments of hell.
Some have speculated that the limbo of the Fathers is the same as purgatory. This may or may not be the case. However, even if the limbo of the Fathers is not purgatory, its existence shows that a temporary, intermediate state is not contrary to Scripture. Look at it this way. If the limbo of the Fathers was purgatory, then this one verse directly teaches the existence of purgatory. If the limbo of the Fathers was a different temporary state, then the Bible at least says such a state can exist. It proves there can be more than just heaven and hell.
"Purgatory Not in Scripture"
Some Fundamentalists also charge, as though it actually proved something, "The word purgatory is nowhere found in Scripture." This is true, and yet it does not disprove the existence of purgatory or the fact that belief in it has always been part of Church teaching. The words Trinity and Incarnation arent in Scripture either, yet those doctrines are clearly taught in it. Likewise, Scripture teaches that purgatory exists, even if it doesnt use that word and even if 1 Peter 3:19 refers to a place other than purgatory.
Christ refers to the sinner who "will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come" (Matt. 12:32), suggesting that one can be freed after death of the consequences of ones sins. Similarly, Paul tells us that, when we are judged, each mans work will be tried. And what happens if a righteous mans work fails the test? "He will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire" (1 Cor 3:15). Now this loss, this penalty, cant refer to consignment to hell, since no one is saved there; and heaven cant be meant, since there is no suffering ("fire") there. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory alone explains this passage.
Then, of course, there is the Bibles approval of prayers for the dead: "In doing this he acted in a very excellent and noble way, inasmuch as he had the resurrection of the dead in view; for if he were not expecting the dead to rise again, it would have been useless and foolish to pray for them in death. But if he did this with a view to the splendid reward that awaits those who had gone to rest in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Thus he made atonement for the dead that they might be freed from this sin" (2 Macc. 12:4345). Prayers are not needed by those in heaven, and no one can help those in hell. That means some people must be in a third condition, at least temporarily. This verse so clearly illustrates the existence of purgatory that, at the time of the Reformation, Protestants had to cut the books of the Maccabees out of their Bibles in order to avoid accepting the doctrine.
Prayers for the dead and the consequent doctrine of purgatory have been part of the true religion since before the time of Christ. Not only can we show it was practiced by the Jews of the time of the Maccabees, but it has even been retained by Orthodox Jews today, who recite a prayer known as the Mourners Kaddish for eleven months after the death of a loved one so that the loved one may be purified. It was not the Catholic Church that added the doctrine of purgatory. Rather, any change in the original teaching has taken place in the Protestant churches, which rejected a doctrine that had always been believed by Jews and Christians.
Why Go To Purgatory?
Why would anyone go to purgatory? To be cleansed, for "nothing unclean shall enter [heaven]" (Rev. 21:27). Anyone who has not been completely freed of sin and its effects is, to some extent, "unclean." Through repentance he may have gained the grace needed to be worthy of heaven, which is to say, he has been forgiven and his soul is spiritually alive. But thats not sufficient for gaining entrance into heaven. He needs to be cleansed completely.
Fundamentalists claim, as an article in Jimmy Swaggarts magazine, The Evangelist, put it, that "Scripture clearly reveals that all the demands of divine justice on the sinner have been completely fulfilled in Jesus Christ. It also reveals that Christ has totally redeemed, or purchased back, that which was lost. The advocates of a purgatory (and the necessity of prayer for the dead) say, in effect, that the redemption of Christ was incomplete. . . . It has all been done for us by Jesus Christ, there is nothing to be added or done by man."
It is entirely correct to say that Christ accomplished all of our salvation for us on the cross. But that does not settle the question of how this redemption is applied to us. Scripture reveals that it is applied to us over the course of time through, among other things, the process of sanctification through which the Christian is made holy. Sanctification involves suffering (Rom. 5:35), and purgatory is the final stage of sanctification that some of us need to undergo before we enter heaven. Purgatory is the final phase of Christs applying to us the purifying redemption that he accomplished for us by his death on the cross.
No Contradiction
The Fundamentalist resistance to the biblical doctrine of purgatory presumes there is a contradiction between Christs redeeming us on the cross and the process by which we are sanctified. There isnt. And a Fundamentalist cannot say that suffering in the final stage of sanctification conflicts with the sufficiency of Christs atonement without saying that suffering in the early stages of sanctification also presents a similar conflict. The Fundamentalist has it backward: Our suffering in sanctification does not take away from the cross. Rather, the cross produces our sanctification, which results in our suffering, because "[f]or the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness" (Heb. 12:11).
Nothing Unclean
Purgatory makes sense because there is a requirement that a soul not just be declared to be clean, but actually be clean, before a man may enter into eternal life. After all, if a guilty soul is merely "covered," if its sinful state still exists but is officially ignored, then it is still a guilty soul. It is still unclean.
Catholic theology takes seriously the notion that "nothing unclean shall enter heaven." From this it is inferred that a less than cleansed soul, even if "covered," remains a dirty soul and isnt fit for heaven. It needs to be cleansed or "purged" of its remaining imperfections. The cleansing occurs in purgatory. Indeed, the necessity of the purging is taught in other passages of Scripture, such as 2 Thessalonians 2:13, which declares that God chose us "to be saved through sanctification by the Spirit." Sanctification is thus not an option, something that may or may not happen before one gets into heaven. It is an absolute requirement, as Hebrews 12:14 states that we must strive "for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord."
NIHIL OBSTAT: I have concluded that the materials
presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004
From the article just above:
**Prayers are not needed by those in heaven, and no one can help those in hell. That means some people must be in a third condition, at least temporarily. This verse so clearly illustrates the existence of purgatory that, at the time of the Reformation, Protestants had to cut the books of the Maccabees out of their Bibles in order to avoid accepting the doctrine.**
You don't believe in Purgatory, because you cut it out of your Bible.
Luke 12:47-48
And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.
According to the grace 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.
I Corinthians 3:11 - 15 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, straw -- 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.
The book also promotes suicide ; do you support that as well?
b'shem Y'shua
And where is purgatory in the Bible? I do believe that the thief on the cross when to heaven the very day he died. Only one prayer was needed for him to go to heaven. His own prayer to Jesus, "Lord, remember me.....". This leaves no gray area for purgatory.
Because Christ teaches there is a third state of existence after we die, where one can repent of forgiven sins - to repay our temporal debts caused by our sins. Nothing unclean shall enter heaven. I imagine very few will die in an absolute state of grace - through the mercy of God, we can become so, we can throw off all unclean tendencies, all unclean desires, all attachments to anything other than God. It is NOT just about sin! Our will must be turned entirely to God in heaven. Is your will entirely turned towards God now? I doubt it. Purgatory gives us a chance to become even more like Christ.
Regards
PROMOTES? Or details it?
Regards
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