Purgatory is a man made construct built on false premises in order to keep man spiritually enslaved. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that purgatory is a place of intolerable suffering and agony. Cardinal Bellarmine said “the pains of purgatory are very severe, surpassing any endured in this life.” Death is not the disciple of the Risen Christ joyfully going home to be with his Savior but the fearful soul going to a place of unspeakable horror and suffering. This suffering is supposed to make satisfaction for the unrepentant guilt. Here they suffer the pain and anguish resulting from the fact that they are excluded from the presence of the Lord and endure the “punishment of the senses”, that is, suffers positive pains which afflict the soul. The duration as well as the intensity of the suffering varies according to the degree of purification still needed
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that this suffering can be shortened and alleviated by the prayers and good works of the faithful on earth and especially the sacrifice of the mass. The Pope is supposed to have the jurisdiction over purgatory. It is his peculiar prerogative to grant indulgences lightening the suffering or even terminating them.
The doctrine of purgatory offers the false hope that man has a chance to be saved after death.
It rests on the false doctrine that justification is progressive.
1. Man is justified only in such measure as he is sanctified,
2. Justification is a matter of degrees, so the Council of Trent declared it to be,
3. Since justification is a continuous process, the redeeming death of Christ, on which it depends, must be a continuous process also; hence its prolonged reiteration in the sacrifice by the Mass,
4. Since sanctification is obviously never completed in this life, no man ever dies completely justified; hence the doctrine of purgatory.
Justification is instantaneous, complete, and final,
1. Instantaneous, since otherwise there would be an interval during which the soul was neither approved nor condemned by God (Matt. 6:24),
2. Complete, since the soul, united to Christ by faith, becomes partaker of his complete satisfaction to the demands of the law (Col. 2:9, 10),
3. Final, since the union with Christ is indissoluble (John 10:28-29).
It rests on the false premises of,
1. Man must add something to the work of Christ,
2. That the “good” works of man are meritorious in the strict sense of the word,
3. That man can perform work in excess of the command to do his duty,
4. The Roman Catholic Church’s power of the “keys” is absolute in a judicial sense.
We can do nothing beyond what we are called to do that merits anything. It is our duty to do “good” works so how can anything we do redound to the benefit of anyone else except the recipient of the work? Luke 17:7-10, 7 But which of you, having a servant plowing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, Go and sit down to meat?
8 And will not rather say unto him, Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken; and afterward thou shalt eat and drink?
9 Doth he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I trow not.
10 So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.
It rests on false interpretation of scripture. It somehow reads into the mourning for Abraham, Moses, Saul and Abner, prayers to get them out of purgatory when the clear reading is that people were mourning (fasting being a part of it) for the loss of someone important. “The sting of death is sin”. The use of 2 Macc. 12:43-45 is laughable. It flies in the face of Roman Catholic doctrine. Judas Maccabeas is praying for soldiers who were killed because they were idol worshippers. Idolatry was a capital crime in Israel and there was no salvation for one caught worshipping idols. It is a mortal sin in Roman Catholicism. How then can the soldiers be in purgatory which is the place for “believers” to be purified, and how cans any prayer or “good” works save them? The use of Luke 23:43 to somehow make paradise, purgatory is shown to be false by 2 Cor. 12:4 where Paul says he was caught up into the same place and saw wonderful sights too glorious to mention. He did not say he saw intolerable suffering, in fact nowhere in the scriptures is there mentioned a place where believers go after death where they are exposed to intolerable suffering out side the presence of God who has said He would never leave us or forsake us.
Luke 16:19-31, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is used to somehow show that the rich man is in purgatory. What is missing in this fantasy are the words, “And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.” The rich man had not changed at all; he was still the same self absorbed, self important man in hell as he was on earth, ordering around one he thought to be his servant. He was fixed in his sin and was burning in hell. To try to read compassion in this is rank eisogesis. The deconstruction of Matt. 5:26, 18:34, Luke 12:58-59 to read that God is the judge and Satan is the adversary is just foolishness. This was part of the Sermon on the Mount spoken to simple folk who would understand exactly what Jesus was teaching, “if at all possible live at peace with all men”, not some esoteric teaching of a place of intolerable suffering and agony that could never be plainly spoken of.
When we die we (believers) are present with the Lord (Phil. 1:23, Luke 23:43, John 14:3, Matt. 28:20, 1 Thess 5:10. 2 Cor. 5:6-9 Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord:
7 (For we walk by faith, not by sight:)
8 We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.
9 Wherefore we labour, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of him.
Believers will not suffer the wrath of God because of sin. John 5:24, Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. John 3:36, 36 He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.
A Puritan writer wrote, “It is not the quantity of thy faith that shall save thee. A drop of water is as true water as the whole ocean. So a little faith is as true as the greatest. It is not the measure of thy faith that saves thee, - it is the blood that it grips to that saves thee”.
"That God's word damns your ceremonies it is evident; for the plain and straight commandment of God is, 'Not that thing which appears good in thy eyes shalt thou do to the Lord thy God, but what the Lord thy God has commanded thee; that do thou; add nothing to it; diminish nothing from it.' Now unless you are able to prove that God has commanded your ceremonies, this his former commandment will damn both you and them." -- John Knox (Knox, Works, 1:199. Cf. Calvin, The Necessity of Reforming the Church, in Tracts, 1:128-29.)
You done good. Happy Father's Day!
The doctrine of purgatory offers the false hope that man has a chance to be saved after death.
I would skip minor inaccuracies in the paragraph preceding the quoted statement (because the same inaccuracies may be found in Catholic sources), but this is fundamentally incorrect. The souls in purgatory are already saved, by the sacrifice of Christ. Nothing can deflect their progress toward Heaven. We pray for them not because we imagine to have a power to save them, -- we do not, and they have already been saved, -- but because we ask Christ to mercifully lessen the suffering they deserve in justice.
The condemned souls are not in Purgatory, but rather in Hell and we do not pray for them in order to "save" them. Of course, we do not presume to judge anyone and pray for all dead in the hope that those who are are in fact saved have an easier time in Purgatory.
false doctrine that justification is progressive [...] man ever dies completely justified; hence the doctrine of purgatory
The doctrine is that one's salvation has been made possible through the one and only sacrifice of Christ; one's justification indeed progresses since baptism through good works that one does on his own free will and grows in faith. Such sanctification is possible because of the divine grace that comes to us chiefly through the sacraments of the Church, having its source in Christ. Some men achieve complete sanctification in their lives (inaccuracy in your 4). Such was for example the Good Thief who accomplished complete conversion to the heart of Christ, was united with Him though his own suffering, and went to Heaven on the same day he died. Others die free from grave sin and are saved; others die in sin and are condemned. The doctrine of purgatory is not something without which progressive justification as I describe it crumbles. We could -- and some Orthodox do -- assume that no one passes through purgatory on his way to heaven, and still teach the same doctrine of progressive justification that we share with the Orthodox.
Justification is instantaneous, complete, and final
No disagreement here. Our disagreement is that the justification happens at particular judgement at the hour of one's death, while you confuse justification with original conversion of the heart. That is not necessarily instantaneous, certainly not complete or final, and you do not have a scripture to prove what you assert. Rather, people make a decision for Christ, yet fail to be justified in the end. Many as called, but few are chosen; many will call "Lord, Lord" but not all of those professing their faith will meet the test of Matthew 25, which is based on what they did rather than what they professed.
false premises of,
1. Man must add something to the work of Christ,
2. That the “good” works of man are meritorious in the strict sense of the word,
3. That man can perform work in excess of the command to do his duty,
4. The Roman Catholic Church’s power of the “keys” is absolute in a judicial sense.
Re. 1: the gospel calls us to do certain work and avoid sin on virtually every page. We take this call literally, and seriously.
2: I don't know what is meant by "meritorious in the strict sense of the word". We just do what the Gospel asks us to do: go to Church, feed the hungry, clothe the poor, etc.
3: Indeed man can go beyond duty. This is the meaning of Luke 17:7-10, given in response to the question of how to grow in faith. It plainly says that faith grown when one goes beyond duty. Likewise, in both Romans and Galatians -- in the passages the Protestants quote often defending "faith alone" doctrine, -- St. Paul explains that work done for reward or out of duty does not save, and then Paul proceeds to exhort us to do work of charity, which by definition is not under duty.
4: don't know what it means. Christ said, "what you bind I'll bind; what you loose I'll loose". Sounds like enough power to me.
The rest of your post deals with putative arguments for Purgatory that I am not familiar with, or it misrepresents the argument that is indeed made some time, in order to better defeat it. I'll just mention a few such instances. The Macabees illustrates that prayer for the dead, -- not mere mourning but a prayer to somehow help a dead soul along, -- was a part of the belief system of the Apostles. It is not supposed to contain the entire doctrine of the Purgatory, which at any rate would not apply to the souls that dies before the sacrifice of the Cross. The Rich man and the Lazarus is sometmes used to explain communion of saints, but I don't think it does any good to the doctrine of Purgatory, since the rich man is clearly placed in Hell, and beyond the impenetrable chasm; the prayer of Abraham cannot help him.
A good summary of the Catholic argument for purgatory is The Burning Truth About Purgatory. Also see Purgatory and The Roots of Purgatory
So what were these mistranslations in ScriptureCatholic.com?
Sorry for a hasty post. Will do better tomorrow, but hopefully this gives an outline of what I have to say about the objections you raised.