Purgatory, the Cross, and the Threshold
A Response to Mike Shreve’s “Purgatory — Does It Exist?”
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
Where I Stand
I stand with Mike Shreve on the central point: there is no debt left for a forgiven child of God to pay after death, and any doctrine that sends the redeemed to suffer off a remaining penalty diminishes what Christ finished on the cross. Where I part from him is narrower but important. Something real does happen to an imperfect believer at the threshold of the Father’s presence, and Scripture says so. That event is a purging. It is not Purgatory.
Shreve’s article, published on his site To Catholics with Love in October 2024, is a sustained Protestant case against the Catholic doctrine. He works through the Catechism’s five paragraphs on the subject, sets them against the promises of grace, friendship, and imputed righteousness, traces the doctrine’s late formal definition, and answers the two texts Catholics lean on most: 2 Maccabees 12 and 1 Corinthians 3. His closing charge is that Purgatory is a tyranny over the mind that has robbed billions of believers of the joy of their salvation.
Much of the article is sound, and some of it is excellent. But a rebuttal is strongest when it first understands what the doctrine it opposes was trying to say. Purgatory is a wrong answer to a right question. This essay tries to name the question, give the Catholic case its strongest form, mark where Shreve’s argument is weaker than it needs to be, and then offer the answer I believe Scripture and the structure of the atonement actually give.
Where Shreve Is Right
Shreve is right that the cross fully discharges the liability of sin. “It is finished” (John 19:30) is not a partial receipt. The thief on the cross received salvation today (Luke 23:43), not a deferred release. Paul could say that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8), and that to depart and be with Christ is far better (Philippians 1:23). Neither statement leaves room for a long interval of penal suffering between death and the presence of Christ.
He is also right that the doctrine, as it developed in practice, treats the soul’s suffering as payment. The Catechism speaks of the “temporal punishment” of sin (CCC 1472), and the system of suffrages and indulgences assumes that this punishment can be shortened by prayers, Masses, and works offered on the dead man’s behalf (CCC 1032). That is an accounting model. Once the question becomes how much remains owed and how it can be paid down, the believer is back in the economy of works that the gospel abolished.
There is a deeper reason this cannot work, and it strengthens Shreve’s case. In an earlier essay I argued that moral disorder is conservative: once introduced, it does not fade with time, and a later good act cannot reach back to cancel an earlier wrong. Good works fail as payment for sin because they always arrive too late. The same logic applies to suffering after death. Pain endured later is still later. It cannot travel back to the moment of the sin any better than a good deed can. If no amount of righteous living can pay the debt, no amount of purgatorial pain can pay it either. Only a remedy generated by one who owed nothing, and applied by Him, can reach the account. That is the cross.
Finally, Shreve is right about the effect on the believer. A man who thinks he must still pay will live under a low, steady fear, and fear is a poor engine of holiness. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment (1 John 4:18).
The Question Under the Question
The question Purgatory was reaching for is this: how does an unfinished person become fit for the unveiled presence of a holy God? Every honest believer knows he dies unfinished. He still carries resentments not yet released, habits of mind not yet conformed, loves that are still disordered. Shreve’s answer is that the change happens instantly and painlessly, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” The Catholic answer is that it happens through a purification after death. Both agree that a change must happen. The disagreement is about its nature, not its necessity.
The Catholic case deserves to be heard in its strongest form, and its strongest form is not the one Shreve rebuts.
First, the official teaching denies that the purification is vengeance. The same paragraph Shreve quotes (CCC 1472) says the two punishments of sin “must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin.” Venial sin, on this account, leaves an “unhealthy attachment to creatures” that must be purified. The Catechism also states that the souls in Purgatory are “assured of their eternal salvation” (CCC 1030). They are not on probation. Read charitably, the doctrine is a teaching about the completion of sanctification, not about the repayment of a debt.
Second, the most thoughtful Catholic voices describe the pain as the pain of love. Catherine of Genoa, in her fifteenth-century Treatise on Purgatory, described souls who were content in their purification, whose only suffering was the delay of union, and whose joy was exceeded only by that of heaven. Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi (2007), proposed that the purifying fire is the encounter with Christ Himself, and that the duration of this “moment” cannot be measured by earthly clocks. Shreve treats Benedict’s suggestion with incredulity. But it is very close to Shreve’s own position, which I will return to below.
Third, the intuition is not only Catholic. C. S. Lewis, no friend of Rome on most questions, wrote in Letters to Malcolm that he believed in Purgatory. He rejected the punitive version of the late medieval period, but he reasoned that a soul would want to be cleansed before entering the presence of God, and would choose it even if it hurt. The Protestant philosopher Jerry Walls has defended a similar “sanctification model” at book length. The Eastern Orthodox churches pray for the dead while rejecting Purgatory as Rome defined it at Florence.
Fourth, prayer for the dead is ancient. The formal definition came late, as Shreve says. But the practice it was built on did not. Tertullian, around AD 200, mentions offerings for the dead on the anniversary of their deaths. The account of Perpetua’s martyrdom (about AD 203) records her praying for her dead brother. Rabbinic Judaism developed a tradition of a limited period of purification after death and the mourner’s Kaddish recited in that period. Some interpreters also read Paul’s prayer for Onesiphorus (2 Timothy 1:16–18) as a prayer for a man already dead, though the text does not say so.
None of this proves the doctrine. But it shows that Purgatory did not arise from nowhere. It grew from a true perception that sanctification is real, that it is often incomplete at death, and that love wants to do something for those who have gone ahead.
Where Shreve’s Argument Is Weaker Than It Needs to Be
Shreve’s conclusion survives these points, but his argument would be stronger without them.
He contradicts himself on the intermediate state. Early in the article he grants, from Luke 16, that the Old Testament righteous went at death to a temporary place of comfort called Abraham’s bosom. Later he writes that an intermediate sphere of existence “cannot be found anywhere in the Bible.” Both cannot stand. Scripture does describe an intermediate state. What it does not describe is an intermediate state of penal suffering for the redeemed. That is the claim he should have made.
He dismisses Benedict XVI without noticing that he agrees with him. Shreve scoffs at the idea that the purifying fire is Christ Himself. Yet a few paragraphs later he describes Christ at His appearing as a “refiner’s fire” (Malachi 3:2) who purges His people of the dross of the lower nature. That is Benedict’s proposal. The remaining dispute is whether this purging takes any duration and whether it involves any pain. Benedict himself said its duration cannot be measured in earthly time. On the central picture, the two men stand closer than Shreve allows.
He softens 1 Corinthians 3:15. Shreve rightly places the testing on “the Day” and rightly says it tests works. But the verse does not say only that a man’s works burn. It says the man himself “shall be saved; yet so as by fire,” and that he “shall suffer loss.” Something happens to the person, not only to his record. A reading that reduces the passage to a reward ledger misses the most sobering words in it.
His instant-perfection model carries the same moral hazard he charges against Purgatory. He argues that Purgatory lets Catholics tolerate venial sin because “Purgatory will take care of that.” But if every imperfection simply evaporates at death without cost, a believer could equally reason that glorification will take care of it. Scripture does not allow that reasoning either. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body (2 Corinthians 5:10). John warns believers to abide in Christ so that they will not be ashamed before Him at His coming (1 John 2:28). The New Testament treats what we become in this life as carrying forward. A model that makes it vanish is not more biblical than one that makes it a debt.
His Maccabees argument overstates one point. His strongest point is correct: Judas is praised for faith in the resurrection, and Purgatory is not mentioned. But his claim that the soldiers certainly died in mortal sin goes beyond the text. Judas evidently did not regard them as finally lost, or he would not have prayed. That shows a Jewish practice of prayer for the dead in the second century BC. It does not show Purgatory, but it should be acknowledged rather than explained away.
His closing charge is out of proportion. To call Purgatory “one of the most tyrannical ideas” in Christian history, used by the devil to chain billions in fear and self-loathing, is stronger than the evidence he offers. Many Catholics hold the doctrine as a consolation, not a terror, and many pray for their dead out of love. A real error deserves a firm answer. It is weakened, not strengthened, by a charge larger than the case behind it. The same applies to his claim that the doctrine leads people to tolerate venial sin: it may, but he offers no evidence that it does.
Purging at the Threshold, Not Purgatory
Both Shreve and the Catechism argue as if God watches our lives from outside and then rules on them. I begin from a different premise, and it changes the question. God lives our experience from within. Nothing exists outside Him; in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). Every choice a man makes is felt by the God in whom he exists. We are not God, and we do not share His authority. But He is not a distant judge reviewing a file. He is present in every resentment we nurse and every kindness we give. That is why we keep His law: not to earn standing, and not out of fear, but because He feels what we do.
That premise changes what the incompleteness of a believer is. It is not first a debt on a ledger. It is a disorder that God Himself is living through, inside His own child. Three things follow.
First, the liability is gone, but the disorder is not automatically gone. In my essay on the necessity of the Son, I drew a distinction the tradition already holds. Christ bore our liability: the sentence that our disorder had earned was laid on Him (Isaiah 53:6). He did not contract our disharmony, the actual disorder in a soul. The liability was settled once for all at the cross. The disharmony is canceled as each part of it is brought into alignment with Christ: confessed as ours, released, and replaced by His order. That alignment begins at reception and continues through a lifetime of repentance. This is what Scripture calls sanctification. Shreve rightly insists the first is finished. He does not account for the second.
Second, the threshold is real, and only what is clean passes. In the argument of that essay, the created order is held by the Son as a sheltered domain within God, where free creatures can choose. Its exit opens onto the unveiled presence of the Father, in whom there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). At that threshold the Son applies the credit of His death to the believer’s account, and the debt is gone. What remains of the person is what was actually conformed to the light: the love he really learned, the character he really formed. What was only accommodation of the flesh does not pass through. It is not punished; it is consumed. Every man’s work shall be made manifest … and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is (1 Corinthians 3:13). The man is saved, yet so as by fire, and he suffers loss.
That is a purging. It is an event at a gate, administered by Christ, not a sentence served in a place. Its cost is loss, not payment. Nothing we offer for the dead can shorten it, because it was never a debt. The credit Christ generated is a pattern applied, not a stock drawn down; nothing can be added to it. Whether it takes any duration, Scripture does not say, and I will not guess. Whether it is felt as pain, Scripture only hints: whatever a man loved more than God he will lose there, and losing what one loved is felt.
Third, this is why holiness in this life matters, and why it is not fear. If God lives our lives with us, then what we become is not merely our own concern. A resentment kept for forty years is forty years of disorder that the Father lived inside His child. The purpose of sanctification is not to shorten a future sentence. It is to give God now, in this life, the experience of a son who loves Him. What we become here is what we bring through the gate. What we fail to become is lost there. Neither the Catholic system of suffrages nor Shreve’s instant transformation makes that point clearly, and it is the point that matters most for how a man lives on Monday.
This account is my hypothesis about the mechanism. The fact it rests on is settled and does not depend on my reasoning: Christ died for our sins and rose, and in Him the believer is reconciled to the Father. If the mechanism is wrong, the cross stands.
Why the Concern Remains Plausible
Having said that Shreve overstates his closing charge, I want to be equally clear that the concern behind it is reasonable. A charitable reading of the doctrine does not erase the history of how it has been used.
The doctrine was joined to money. The sale of indulgences in the early sixteenth century, most famously Johann Tetzel’s preaching in 1517, is what provoked Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. The abuse was serious enough that the Council of Trent itself condemned “evil gains” connected with indulgences, and Pope Pius V cancelled indulgences tied to financial transactions in 1567. Yet the custom of offering a stipend for a Mass said for a departed soul continues under church law today. When a doctrine about the dead becomes linked to payments by the living, the incentive to teach it vividly does not depend on anyone’s bad faith.
The system still runs on the accounting model. Today, 2 November, is All Souls’ Day. In the first week of November the Church grants a plenary indulgence, applicable to the souls in Purgatory, for visiting a cemetery and praying for the dead under the usual conditions. Whatever the Catechism says about vengeance, the practice teaches the ordinary believer that his dead are somewhere suffering, and that what he does can shorten it. That is the debt model, and it is what most people actually absorb.
It sits in tension with the plain sense of the promises. A believer reads today thou shalt be with me in paradise and absent from the body, present with the Lord, and is then told that his saved mother may still be suffering. The intuition that something is wrong with that picture is not mere Protestant prejudice. It is the ordinary reading of the words.
Fear is a real outcome for some. Many Catholics describe the doctrine as a comfort. Others, including many former Catholics, describe a childhood of anxiety about how long they would burn. I have no reliable way to measure how common either experience is. But a teaching that produces the second in a significant number of people deserves the scrutiny Shreve gives it.
So the concern is sound even where the rhetoric runs ahead of it: a doctrine that turns sanctification into a payable sentence will, over centuries, tend to produce fear, commerce, and a diminished confidence in the cross.
Conclusion
Purgatory, as a place where the redeemed serve out a remaining sentence that the living can shorten, does not exist. Shreve is right about that, and right that the cross leaves nothing to be paid. But the Catholic tradition was right to sense that an unfinished person does not simply wake up finished. Scripture describes a fire on the Day of the Lord that tests what we built, a loss that the saved can suffer, and a judgment seat where we receive the things done in the body.
The answer I offer holds both. The debt was paid entirely by Christ and is applied by Him. The disorder in us is canceled as it is brought into alignment with Him, and whatever has not been aligned by the end does not pass the threshold. That is not punishment; it is the nature of a holy presence. And because God lives our lives from within, the work of becoming holy is not insurance against a future fire. It is what we give Him now.
Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure (1 John 3:2–3).
— Thomas
Sources and Their Limits
- Mike Shreve, “Purgatory — Does It Exist?”, To Catholics with Love, 12 October 2024. Includes the full text of CCC 958 and 1030–1032, and 1472.
- Thomas Abshier, “Reconciliation of Man with the Father” and the one-page Premise Change Handout, Renaissance Ministries.
- On Pius V (1567) and Trent’s condemnation of indulgence abuses: Wikipedia, “Indulgence” and Hawaii Catholic Herald, Fr. Kenneth Doyle, citing The Catholic Encyclopedia.
- On the November plenary indulgence for the dead: CatholicCulture.org, quoting the Enchiridion of Indulgences (4th ed., 1999).
- Also referenced from standard editions, not re-checked for this essay: Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi §§45–48 (2007); Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory; C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm (1964); Jerry Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (2012); Tertullian, De Corona 3; The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity.
Limits. The scriptural argument rests on the King James and New King James texts and on my reading of them; Catholic exegetes read 1 Corinthians 3 and Matthew 12:32 differently, and their case is presented here only in outline. The historical claims rely mostly on the mainstream record, including Catholic sources, which could understate how the doctrine was used in practice. The claim that the doctrine produces fear in some believers rests on firsthand reports, which I treat as real but have not measured. The mechanism of the threshold in the fifth section is my own hypothesis; the fact of reconciliation through Christ does not depend on it.