rarndt01:
But nowhere in scripture is there any text that implies that Christians are purified AFTER death from venial sins or are in a place having this done to them. Nowhere! And I might add, no early church father wrote of Christians undergoing purification of sins after death in a place of fire either. The doctrine came into being AFTER the councils of Florence and Trent. See your CCC par. 1031.
You demonstrate nothing by making false claims.
Are Christians purified after death before entering Heaven? Certainly. See Matthew 5:25-26 (cross reference with Matthew 12:32). Here’s what Tertullian, someone who qualifies as an early Church father, said about the matter circa A.D. 210: “
[T]hat allegory of the Lord . . . is extremely clear and simple in its meaning . . . [beware lest as] a transgressor of your agreement, before God the Judge . . . and lest this Judge deliver you over to the angel who is to execute the sentence, and he commit you to the prison of hell, out of which there will be no dismissal until the smallest even of your delinquencies be paid off in the period before the resurrection.”
Tertullian also wrote: “
A woman, after the death of her husband . . . prays for his soul and asks that he may, while waiting, find rest; and that he may share in the first resurrection. And each year, on the anniversary of his death, she offers the sacrifice.”
We can also consider the words of Gregory of Nyssa from circa A.D. 382: “
If a man distinguish in himself what is peculiarly human from that which is irrational, and if he be on the watch for a life of greater urbanity for himself, in this present life he will purify himself of any evil contracted, overcoming the irrational by reason. If he has inclined to the irrational pressure of the passions, using for the passions the cooperating hide of things irrational, he may afterward in a quite different manner be very much interested in what is better, when, after his departure out of the body, he gains knowledge of the difference between virtue and vice and finds that he is not able to partake of divinity until he has been purged of the filthy contagion in his soul by the purifying fire.”
Or Augustine in his City of God (c. A.D. 419): “
Temporal punishments are suffered by some in this life only, by some after death, by some both here and hereafter, but all of them before that last and strictest judgment. But not all who suffer temporal punishments after death will come to eternal punishments, which are to follow after that judgment.”
Or Augustine’s Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love (c. A.D. 421): “
That there should be some fire even after this life is not incredible, and it can be inquired into and either be discovered or left hidden whether some of the faithful may be saved, some more slowly and some more quickly in the greater or lesser degree in which they loved the good things that perish, through a certain purgatorial fire.”
Regarding the Councils of Florence and Trent, those councils
formulated, or explained, the doctrine of Purgatory. Formulated means “to put into a systematized statement or expression.” Those councils did not invent it, and to suggest otherwise is simply wrong.
Catholic doctrine about Purgatory asserts three things:
(1) That a purification after death exists.
(2) That it involves some kind of pain.
(3) That the purification can be assisted by the prayers and offerings by the living to God.
Other ideas, such that purgatory is a particular “place” in the afterlife or that it takes time to accomplish, are
speculations rather than doctrines.
– Mark L. Chance.
