Ben,
The Vatican came up with its doctrine of purgatory at the councils of Florence and Trent. Why then? Why wasn’t the teaching of purgatory being done from the beginning of the church? “but now once in the end of the world hath he (Jesus) appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Hebrews 9:26 Jesus himself paid the price for our salvation with his precious blood.
That’s a good question. Sorry I missed replying to it, I had to head out. Why then?
Let’s go back a bit further, the First Council of Nicaea. In 325, which proclaimed the nature of Christ’s divinity. Why did they wait close to 300 years to have this council? Wouldn’t it have been pertinent to establish this doctrine right away?
It was meant to address the heresies at the time which revolved around Arian and his denial of Christ’s divinity. It’s not as if Christ’s divinity wasn’t proclaimed right from the very beginning, but that until then, it had been unchallenged.
The same is true of purgatory. Purgatory has always been understood to be as such, it just wasn’t proclaimed until Trent and Florence, when the doctrine was challenged by the Protestants, in the same way as Arius challenged the nature of Christ’s divinity.