Dialogue on Purgatory and Indulgences

In this electrifying episode, Jimmy Akin joins Austin Suggs (Gospel Simplicity) for a deep, respectful dialogue on purgatory and indulgences! Jimmy masterfully unpacks sanctification vs. satisfaction views, reveals surprising common ground between Catholics and Protestants, traces beautiful doctrinal development, and even dives into ghostly apparitions from purgatory. Fun, insightful, and full of joy—you won’t want to miss it!

 

TRANSCRIPT: 

Coming Up

Recently, Austin Suggs of Gospel Simplicity did a video about a logical problem he identified with purgatory and indulgences.

I responded in Episode 82 of the podcast, and—being the kind and thoughtful gentleman he is—Austin invited me to come on his channel for a discussion about purgatory and indulgences.

And by his kind permission, I can share that interaction with you.

As we interacted, Austin and I found we agreed on a lot of things, despite the fact that I’m Catholic and he’s Protestant.

That would surprise many people from both perspectives.

So what surprising common ground did we find?

Let’s get into it.

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Howdy, folks!

We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast

And now, let’s get into the dialogue.

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AUSTIN SUGGS: Jimmy Akin, thanks so much for joining me on the channel once again.

JIMMY AKIN: Hey, it’s my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

AUSTIN: I’ve been really looking forward to this. I don’t know what number conversation this is at this point, but people who watch the channel might know that we did a dialogue somewhat similar to this on sola scriptura some point in the past where I made a video, you responded to it, then we sat down and talked about it. I thought that was really productive. And now we’re here again having a kind of similar situation. So I talked about purgatory and specifically kind of like purgatory’s intersection with indulgences. It was a logical critique of it. You made a really great response and we said, “Hey, this would be fun to just have a conversation about it. “ So thanks for doing this and thanks for engaging so thoughtfully with those videos.

JIMMY: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. I really appreciate the work that you do on your channel. As I was mentioning to you before we got started today, yours is one channel that deals with apologetics that I watch not just for engagement purposes, but because I think you’re a thoughtful guy and I’m interested in hearing what you have to say, even if it’s not on a subject I’m looking at engaging with apologetically. It’s just I appreciate quality sources of perspective and information regardless of who they’re coming from and you’re a source of quality information and reflection. So I appreciate what you do.

AUSTIN: Well, thank you very much and right back at you. I very much enjoy your channel, enjoy engaging with your work and also just listening to it. And it’s somewhat ironic getting into this conversation because the last video I made was about a little pet peeve of mine with some Catholic apologetics and none of that touches on what you do. And I think this conversation will actually dovetail with that one in some interesting ways, but all that to say, really enjoy your work.

JIMMY: Yeah. Well, thank you. And I actually saw that video that you did and I found myself agreeing with it. You had several different pet peeves and some of them, especially towards the end, I might’ve phrased them a little differently, but I was in agreement with the substance of what you said and I was even thinking about, and I may still do it, I may make an interaction video where I use clips from your video and basically say, “I agree with this. “ And I might towards the end say, “Well, here’s how I’d put it a little differently.” But you were pointing out some real problems that apologists, including on the Catholic side, have and there are much better ways to approach it. And I thought that that video would provide an excellent perspective for people to look at and absorb because a lot of apologetics, well, it’s kind of like Theodore Sturgeon’s law.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon. He wrote the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek series among a couple others, but he had a saying, and I’m going to use a slightly tabooed word, but he said, “Yeah, 90% of science fiction is crap, but then 90% of everything is crap.” And that’s true of apologetics too. 90% of it is crap and that’s true regardless of the perspective it’s coming from, whether it’s Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, anything, there’s a lot of substandard stuff. And so I appreciate it whenever someone points out ways that it can be improved because I think that does a service to the broader community.

AUSTIN: Oh, well, thanks. And total agreement on the quote. I think that’s really good. And one thing that people pointed out with that video is like, this could be said of Protestants as well, which is absolutely true. As the quote says, it could be said of just about anyone. Alas, if you end up engaging with that, I look forward to seeing it, but I’ll turn our attention to purgatory today. So I’ll have the videos linked below in case people aren’t up to date on kind of the back and forth. I won’t rehash the whole thing, but I think maybe one place we could start would be what I think was maybe the crux of the disagreement. I think you timestamped it something like that, the crucial disagreement or the center of disagreement, something akin to that. And one of the claims I made in my video on purgatory was that I think the wording I used was for a fully fleshed out traditionally recognizable definition or account of purgatory, we would need both a, I used the words juridical and therapeutic, which was somewhat unorthodox perhaps.

And I think you labeled them as kind of a satisfaction theory of purgatory and a sanctification theory. So we can maybe flesh out a little bit what’s meant by that, but I sensed in your video that one of your disagreements was actually we might not need both. Maybe I’ll pause there before I give too much preamble. Is that a fair kind of recounting of maybe where the center of some of the disagreement is?

JIMMY: Yeah, I think it is. Now one of the things that St. Paul stresses in the pastoral epistles is that we shouldn’t fight about words and he says it a couple of times, but basically we shouldn’t fight about words because it only ruins the hearers and people who are interested in fighting about words have a morbid sense of what to focus on that’s not spiritually appropriate. And I’ve really tried to take that to heart in my own apologetics, including back before I was Catholic. I look for areas of common agreement and so my attitude is if we agree on the substance, then you can call it whatever you want. Different language communities have different uses for terms and nobody’s is uniquely right and uniquely wrong. So if someone agrees with me on what the underlying substance is, then they can express that however they want. And I think there are a couple of benefits from trying to identify where do we actually agree.

One of them is it shows a good faith effort to try to understand another person’s position. You’re not just getting hung up on your own terminology, you’re really trying to understand and sympathize with the other person’s position. And then secondly, once you’ve identified areas of common agreement, even if we use different language, well, then you don’t have to fight about the stuff you agree on anymore. So that helps clarify the parameters of the discussion.

So just based on my own native inclination, when considering, well, okay, can we agree across the Protestant-Catholic divide that there is such a thing that could be called purgatory, even if someone doesn’t want to use that term, could we agree on the underlying principle, which is that there’s a postmortem purification to get you ready for heaven? Well, I think, yeah, we can agree on that. I think we do agree on that. I think if you ask a typical Protestant, “Well, are you going to be perfectly pure at the last moment of your life with no temptations to sin?” Then say, “Well, are you going to be perfectly purified in heaven where you won’t be tempted to sin in heaven?” They’ll say, “Oh yeah, I’m certain I’ll be. “ And so, well, if you’re not perfectly pure at death, but you are perfectly pure in heaven, then something must happen between death and heaven that makes you pure and that a postmortem purification is what Catholics refer to as purgatory.

Now, that leaves tons of questions unanswered, but in terms of the core doctrine, I think we actually do agree. It’s just many people on the Protestant side don’t have the concept as part of their intellectual tradition and so they often don’t think about it. But when they do think about it, I think we’re actually in agreement here. What your video then did was explore ways of understanding and articulating how that purification works and you correctly identified the two major ways that it’s been understood that you called them the juridical and therapeutic aspects of this purification. They’re classically called the satisfactional and sanctificational theories and they are two ways that this has been understood where I would disagree and thus I think this is kind of the core of where we’d have a difference is I don’t think they are both necessary for purgatory. I think that if you look at the trajectory of Catholic teaching on purgatory, it has very strongly moved in the sanctificational direction to the point that recent popes have not even employed the satisfaction language when articulating the concept.

And when they have discussed the satisfactional language of a generation or so back, they emphasize that the former language of satisfaction needs to be understood in terms of sanctification. So you see this trajectory from a position where satisfaction language is being understood on its own terms to a position where satisfaction language is being understood in sanctificational terms to a position where purgatory is being explained in terms of sanctification without even using the satisfaction language anymore.

Even though I’m a big fan of the Catholic both and I think this is one place where you don’t need the both and to understand this concept. Now, I just said a bunch there and I need to give you a turn to talk, but if you’d like me to explain the sanctification and satisfaction concepts a little more, I’m happy to do that or you could do that

AUSTIN: Yeah, I think it would be good to maybe give some specificity here because I hope some people have watched both videos or they’re familiar with some of these terms, but I imagine people will be coming into this cold as well and just want to see us talk about this. So when we talk about satisfaction and sanctification, maybe would you mind kind of putting some examples to this? What type of language are we talking about? What family of ideas are we getting at with these terms?

JIMMY: Yeah. So satisfaction language is associated with the concept of justice. You satisfy the demands of justice. Satisfy it comes from Latin roots. Satis means enough means to make, so to satisfy is to make enough. And so ideas like compensating someone or bearing a punishment that is sufficient, it’s enough to satisfy the demands of justice, to make enough justice. And this mode of thought became … I mean, it’s there in the Bible. There is satisfactional language in the Bible, including both in connection with our lives on earth, like God is going to punish you if you keep worshiping those idols or in regard to our eternal salvation, hell is depicted as if it’s a punishment that’s inflicted by God or someone. And so you do see this language in the Bible and then in the Middle Ages it became very common in Europe to explain the atonement of Christ in terms of satisfaction.

Now there had been other models like Christus Victor, the idea that Christ is the victor, he’s triumphing over the powers of darkness on the cross, or that he’s recapitulating our experience as the new creation and thus making it possible for us to become part of the new creation. So there were other theories of the atonement, but following St. Anselm of Canterbury, it became very common to explain Christ’s atonement on the cross in terms of satisfaction, that the basic idea, you could put it this way, he wouldn’t have put it necessarily this exact way, but you could put it like this and say, “Well, hey, look, we’re finite creatures, but we’ve sinned against an infinite God who has infinite honor and infinite goodness.” And so our sins take on an infinite quality and being finite creatures, the only way we could pay an infinite amount would be to suffer in hell for all eternity, for an infinite amount of time.

And so what Christ did being God himself and thus an infinite person, he was able to pay an infinite price on the cross and thus we now don’t have to. And so that’s a vicarious satisfaction view of the atonement that he made satisfaction for us so we don’t have to. And that was very popular in the Middle Ages. Now you notice all the language that’s associated there. It’s about justice and paying prices and punishment and honor and things like that. And that’s all wrapped up with the thought world that people in the Middle Ages were using because they had a class-based society where the gravity of an offense depended on who you committed it against. So if you’re a serf at the bottom level, you’re basically a slave who’s tied to a particular patch of land rather than a particular owner, but if you’re a serf and you commit an offense against another serf, let’s say you punch him in the nose, it’s not as bad as if you have the local Lord, the local nobleman and you punch him in the nose, that’s a much worse offense.

And so you’re going to, in their idea, justice would require that you have a heavier punishment if you offend against the greater person. And then it’s a logical extension from that to say, “Well, God is greater than any human noble. So any of our sins against an infinite God are going to be of infinite gravity and therefore would require this infinite price to be paid in order to satisfy justice.” Well, okay, so this was a very successful theory of the atonement in the Middle Ages and people also started thinking about not just the atonement that saves us from hell, but also what about this postmortem purification, this postmortem thing that happens between death and heaven. And it was understood at the time as involved a purification, that’s what purgatory means. It means place of purification, or today it would be understood as state of purification, and the Latin purgare means to purify.

So they had this postmortem purification. They were trying to figure out how can we articulate this? How can we understand it? And they thought, well, the atonement that Christ made can help us here because if he satisfied the eternal debt of our sins, well, we might also have a temporal debt, one that’s not eternal that we also need to satisfy in order to get into heaven. And so this way of articulating purgatory in terms of we have this temporary or temporal debt of justice caused by our sins in addition to their eternal debt, that needs to be satisfied before we enter heaven. And so that’s the satisfaction theory of purgatory. The other theory based on the idea of purification, purgare, to purify, is different. Instead, you don’t have this language if you’re articulating purgatory this way, you don’t talk about it in terms of a debt or a punishment or offenses.

Instead, you talk about flaws like temptations and tendencies to make bad choices and we need to be purified of those so that we’re not in God’s presence continuing to make bad choices or being tempted to make bad choices or being distracted from the glory of God by our base desires. And so we need to be purified of all those and that language corresponds to the biblical language of sanctification or growth in holiness and the metaphors here tend to not be payment but healing or cleansing or purification like being covered in mud and you need to be purified. And that also is a set of metaphors that is found in scripture. So you find both satisfaction language in scripture and sanctification language in scripture for a long time both have been used with purgatory but since the Middle Ages with more accent on the satisfaction theory, but now the way the church’s teaching authority has articulated it, that language has been partitioned in such a way that it needs to be understood in terms of sanctification.

So for example, the catechism of the Catholic Church talks about how purgatory is meant to purify our disordered desires and it says, and this is what is referred to as the temporal punishment. So it takes that old language of temporal punishments and says, “Interpreted in this new way of being purified.” And you see a trajectory where in the course of, like for example, in John Paul II’s reign, when the catechism came out, both the catechism and John Paul II used the older language of temporal punishments, but they interpreted them in terms of sanctification or healing or cleansing. And then by the time of Pope Benedict, when he articulates purgatory, it’s all in terms of healing or cleansing or sanctification. He doesn’t even use the older language and that’s been the tendency ever since then.

AUSTIN: Very helpful sketch there. And I’ll put just kind of like a footnote as far as how this conversation relates to the last to say in the video I made, it was kind of purely, I’d say, like a logical critique, but this does get us into kind of the history here, which might be helpful. And it leads to one of the questions I had based on watching your video, which I was saying this to you before we started recording. I’ll put it on the record now. I actually think we agree a whole lot on these things.

JIMMY: I agree too.

AUSTIN: There’s a great deal of overlap and we might even find more over the course of this conversation. One thing I wasn’t quite so sure about when I said it required both aspects, both the juridical and the therapeutic or the satisfaction and the sanctification to be traditionally recognizable and fully fleshed out, I’m curious if you would say that the modern kind of rendition of purgatory, how we explain what it is, how it would fit with that kind of traditionally recognizable, because I think what I want to affirm in that is one, I think the sketch of how this has developed strikes me as accurate, which I wouldn’t expect anything less. And two, I think I’ll say for whatever it’s worth, I really like the trajectory it’s on. I think Spe Salvi — I mean, there’s probably not a ton of great competition, but I’d say the best 21st-century papal encyclical, I think it’s absolutely wonderful, but I do wonder if it would be recognizable to like Suárez or Aquinas or people in the Middle Ages that are working with what seems to me to be like very heavily satisfaction.

And so I guess the question there is, yeah, do you think they would recognize that? And even if they didn’t, that might not be a problem depending on how we think of doctrinal development.

JIMMY: Yeah. So you just raised the two points that I would make in regard to that. The first one, it’s going to depend on what you mean by recognizable. If you mean would they recognize that the elements of the sanctification view are found in their understanding of purgatory? I would say, yeah, they recognize you’re not going to be tempted in heaven, you’re not going to be making bad decisions in heaven. So they would recognize the sanctificational elements, but they would also say, “But what about this other stuff? And should we understand this other language about justice or satisfaction? Is it you’ve reinterpreted and then dropped that and is it okay for you to do that? “ And that leads to the second point, which is, well, this is how doctrinal development works. There’s typically a core idea in a doctrine that is accurate, but it’s often been surrounded by other ideas that are not as certain or not as accurate and then those get peeled off over time.

And we can see a similar trajectory not with purgatory but with hell here because if you go back into the past, even a hundred years, people on both sides of the aisle, Protestants and Catholics are likely to understand hell not as the way it’s commonly articulated today as a definitive exclusion, self-exclusion from God, where you cut yourself off from the source of goodness and satisfaction and thus you’re frustrated and unsatisfied, but instead as a literal pit of flame that God takes people and throws them into it in order to cause them pain as an intentionally inflicted form of suffering where God is like the torturer in chief and Christians of every stripe historically have tended to conceptualize hell in that way and certainly folks in the Middle Ages would have understood it that way and folks at the time of the Reformation understood it that way.

But as Christians have reflected on it in the last few centuries, it’s been hard to square that image of God as all loving with the image of God as a torturer in chief who is literally torturing people, especially through physical means like physical fire affecting their resurrected bodies. And so instead the view has developed that with hell it should not be understood or this imagery should not be understood as applying literally that hell is not going to be a literal lake of fire that people are thrown into to burn their resurrected bodies for all eternity. Instead, this imagery suggests the state of profound suffering that is entailed by people cutting themselves off from the source of all goodness and happiness. And so hell is a thing that’s self-imposed. It’s not that God says, “Aha, you sin. I’m going to pluck you out and torture you forever.” And so we see the same kind of development from hell as a literal place of literal torture with literal fire into this is a statement about what humans do and what the logical consequences are of their choices.

If you choose to utterly refuse communion with goodness, well, then you’re going to be unhappy because you don’t got any goodness that you’re in communion with. And in the same way, we see the same trajectory with purgatory from a literal place of torment like kings in the Middle Ages would have and that image was used for God to a, this is a natural outgrowth of the consequences of your choices. If you’ve chosen to foster disordered desires, let’s say you watch porn a lot, well, okay, you’re going to have more purification needed than someone who chose not to watch porn. And so you’re going to have to have a more intense purification before you’re ready for heaven than a person who made different choices. So we see the same trajectories in both here and I don’t think it’s a problem from a Catholic perspective. You’ll note a lot of magisterial documents talk about the church’s living tradition, living aspect referring to the growth and doctrinal development that occurs.

And I think that these both represent legitimate doctrinal developments, both on how to understand hell and on how to understand purgatory. And they’re both endorsed in the catechism of the Catholic church. So to me, even if Aquinas might have felt a little uncomfortable with, what about these other satisfaction elements? Well, he lived 800 years ago. So I wouldn’t expect him to articulate things in modern ways and he might be a little uncomfortable with a modern articulation, but I don’t think that’s a problem because I believe the Holy Spirit has been guiding the church for the last 800 years. And so I would expect some ideas that are genuine to maintain continuity but have unnecessary elements peeled away from how they’re articulated and expressed.

AUSTIN: Very helpful. And I have to say again, referencing the last video I made, for consistency’s sake in that video, I was kind of expressing the fact that I’d like when I’m engaging with kind of certain Catholics online for them to not downplay what the current or more recent magisterium has said in relationship to Protestantism and whatnot. And so for consistency, I think I should say, yeah, Catholics should follow what the most recent magisterium has taught on this. And that’s a good thing. And there’s this temptation I think from the Protestant side to want to like pin Catholics to past articulations of certain doctrines because, well, without psychologizing it too much, I can say in my own experience, as I’ve argued against things, sometimes I find it easier to argue against something from the past than from the present. And so for apologetics purposes. Now I’ll say as far as I can tell in myself, that wasn’t my goal in this video.

One of the things that came up in that video, which I’ll just make a plug for it here, I was engaging with Dr. Brett Salkeld’s wonderful little book, the cover, Don’t Judge it by its cover. Paulist Press could have done a little better with that, but Can Catholics and Evangelicals Agree about Purgatory and the Last Judgment?. His take was that I think it would be somewhere between where you’re at and maybe where I was at in that video was that you do need both, but we can reinterpret the satisfaction language with more sanctification language and it sounds like you’re proposing that the most recent magisterium has actually kind of dropped the satisfaction language entirely in favor of that. Okay. So that’s just kind of a note on where we … Oh, did you want to say something there?

JIMMY: Yeah. Well, two things. The first one that you commented about how sometimes people can want their apologetic interlocutors to hold positions that were held in the past and that happens with both sides, just like Protestants want Catholics to, “Oh, well, Robert Bellarmine said this and I’m going to hold you to what Robert Bellarmine said.” And the same thing happens with Catholics. Well, John Calvin said this and I’m going to hold you to what John Calvin said. So this is a both and thing, but I have noticed it and I’ve been meaning, I’m kind of gathering examples. At some point in the future, I want to do an episode of the Jimmy Akin Podcast where I talk about this and I call it the bad old days fallacy

Where there’s this nostalgia for the bad old days when both sides were really at each other’s throats. And instead of saying, “Hey, there’s been progress. We now agree on this. We don’t have to fight about this. We’ve clarified terms. There have been new insights from biblical studies. They, whoever they are, whether Catholic or Protestants, they don’t hold the position that was held in the past so we can be happy. We’ve made progress. We’re now in agreement. Instead of celebrating that, there’s this nostalgia for the bad old days when it was easier to attack positions that today would be straw men. And at some point I want to do a whole episode of the Jimmy Akin Podcast on that, but I need to gather enough video examples to show it being used in order to critique it. So if you run across examples like that, let me know because I’m in the market.

Yeah. And in terms of the second thing you said, I think that just by doing, and I don’t know when the gentleman you mentioned wrote his book, I don’t know how recent it is. So I don’t know if he’s as up to date on this as I am, because I tried in my video to bring it all the way through to Pope Leo’s reign. So he may have been writing at a slightly earlier stage where the whole pattern I sketched hadn’t yet played out. But I do think that even though the magisterium is understanding and articulating purgatory in terms of sanctification and is not even recently using the older language, hasn’t for several decades, that I don’t think that purgatory is mandated to be understood in a way that necessarily excludes the older view.

Just because the magisterium has articulated it one way doesn’t mean there aren’t other complementary views. So if someone is really wedded to a satisfactional model of purgatory, I’m not going to say he’s violating Catholic teaching. I think there’s room for different theological opinions here. And I’ve even devoted a little bit of thought. I haven’t fully done this yet, but I’ve devoted a little bit of thought to, well, how far in the satisfactional direction could you go? And like for example, I could imagine someone saying, and this is the first time I’ve ever tried to articulate this out loud, so if I’m clumsy at it, forgive me, but someone could say, well, you do if you’ve committed some sin. Let’s say you broke God’s window and so you owe God $300 for the window in addition to the eternal sin that Christ is forgiven.

Well, okay, what the book of Hebrew says is that God disciplines us for our benefit so that we’ll grow in holiness, but it uses the language of discipline including whipping. I mean, the actual word that the author uses in one passage means to whip or flog. When the author says, God disciplines every son he receives a little more literally, that would be God whips or flogs every son he receives. So pathetically, I could imagine someone saying, “Well, you broke God’s window at, let’s say, at the temple or something, and so God’s going to whip you and that is what will cure you of the disorder desires that led you to break his window.” So he’s using punishment as active punishment as a way of accomplishing the goal of sanctification or growth and holiness. I think you could still hold that view. Now that’s not the way the magisterium is articulating it, but as long as you’re making it clear that the purpose of whatever you go through, even if it’s actively inflicted punishment, the goal is growth and holiness.

I think you could still hold that as a permissible opinion, even though it’s not what the church is saying. It’s also not my preferred opinion. It wouldn’t be my opinion, but I think it would be permissible under principles of Catholic theology. I also think a lot of other positions are permissible too. And if you want to, and if we have time, maybe we can talk about ghost encounters and how those fit into all this, because there’s some really interesting stuff there that goes back to the very early church. But I guess that’s what I would say about the two points you just mentioned.

AUSTIN: I’ll let that hang in the air for a second to keep people around towards the end of the video. We can try to get back to ghosts. So it would be a fitting episode with you, Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World if we can get ghosts involved in this conversation. Well, I agree that it wouldn’t be my preferred way of describing purgatory and however, connecting it to Hebrews, I think it’s one of those things like I don’t love it in Hebrews, but it’s there so I’ve got to do something with it, right? And so fair enough. It strikes me, and feel free to weigh in on this because you’ll know this better than I do, that it might be something of an intramural Catholic debate as far as how minimalist we can go with our kind of defining of what purgatory is. So in terms of what the catechism teaches, in terms of what’s been defined at ecumenical councils, there’s not a lot.

You can get a pretty minimalist definition of purgatory that I think you and I could agree on. And I would just footnote real quick for people who are listening who say like, “Austin, your Anglican doesn’t the Thirty-Nine Articles say something about that. “ I think when it says- The Romish.

Yeah. I think there’s room to say it’s not every conception of purgatory possible. Anyway, we can talk about that if we want, but it seems to me that there’s some Catholics who want to say, “Wait, but if the church believed a pretty heavily satisfaction view for so long, if they had all of these kind of trappings alongside of it, are we not bound to it? Does that not equal something like a quasi universal teaching of the church?” And then I think others, and it seems you might be in this camp, would be willing to say, “Actually what’s dogmatically defined is pretty minimal. And we can allow for the essence of the doctrine to be pretty small, the accidents around it, the way it’s been expressed, the kind of metaphors, imagery, speculations about time, place, all of these things. They might be pious or impious opinions to hold, but they’re not bound.

Anyway, it seems to me that I see some Catholics today maybe in more traditionalist circles wanting to say like, wait, we can’t just have a minimalist purgatory. We’ve got to go back to the Middle Ages. Maybe can we just touch briefly on your case for someone who’s saying that, why we can have a little more minimal definition?

JIMMY: Yeah. So one of the things that I find, and for partly this is for understandable reasons, because in the middle of the 20th century, the Catholic Church had a big shock to the system, which was the Second Vatican Council and they’re needed, I would say, to be an ecumenical council in the 20th century, given all of the changes that were happening in the 20th century. I mean, if you look at the year 1900 and the year 2000, things had changed so dramatically in society. The church needed to address what was happening and so we needed an ecumenical council then, especially with dangers. I mean, we had World War I and World War II and we were looking at having a global thermonuclear war. So it’s kind of like, “Do you think the church might have anything to say today?” And so we needed this council, but at the same time, any ecumenical council tends to stir up a lot of problems because it unleashes things.

At every council, some people are going to think things went too far or things didn’t go far enough and all the way back to the first ecumenical council, which was First Nicaea that defined the divinity of Christ, the worst of the Arian crisis didn’t even hit until after the council had met. So every time you have an ecumenical council, it causes a bunch of problems. It’s also necessary, but it stirs things up in a way that takes a while. And when you’re in that period where things are stirred up, there is a nostalgia that many people will have for, “Oh, I wish we could just go back to when it was simpler.” And some people will even argue the council went too far and we should, we’re obligated to go back to preconciliar expressions. And so that’s a temptation and it’s understandable that some people would feel that way and that’s the case with many people in the traditionalist Catholic movement.

So I understand and I sympathize and personally, I’m a friend of tradition. I have no problem. For example, with the Latin mass, I want to see it celebrated generously. I want anyone who wants to go to it be able to have it. But one of the things I’ve learned by studying the tradition myself is many people today who identify as traditionalists don’t have actually a very deep understanding of tradition. They tend to know certain things like, well, Aquinas said this, but they don’t know the surrounding tradition of what everybody else said. And for example, now some people would know this, but purgatory is commonly pictured as if it’s a place of suffering and that’s what it is. Some authors even compared it to a temporary hell and even said, “Oh yeah, it’s the same thing as hell. It’s just you get out. “ Well, okay, that’s entirely different than Catherine of Genoa who was a mystic that had visions of purgatory involving great joy because yeah, you’ve got some suffering going on because you’re being purified, but you’re in greater union with God than you are in this life and you know for certain you’re going to be saved and enjoy the glory of heaven and that’s wonderful and that’s going to inspire joy.

And so you can have this completely different way of articulating it. It doesn’t mean there’s no suffering, but it puts the emphasis on a totally different syllable and so that’s something you become aware of if you know the tradition more thoroughly. And this is actually one of the reasons I wrote my book, Teaching With Authority. I think I sent you a copy of it, but if I didn’t, let me know because I’ll send you one. And one of the things it points out is there is just a difference between what has been infallibly defined and what is not. What has been infallibly defined, which is much smaller than most people realize, that’s what’s ultimately permanently binding. Anything that is not infallibly defined may be binding at the moment but is not permanently infallibly binding, otherwise it would be infallible.

So a lot of people have a nostalgia or even a belief that we are bound by things in the past that were actually not bound by. And the church in the Middle Ages and at the time of the attempted reunion councils with the Eastern churches wanted to keep purgatory minimal because they didn’t have purgatory as a standard part of the Eastern tradition and they wanted to put the church back together. So it’s like, what’s really essential here? And that’s why purgatory, the definitions about purgatory and even Trent was an attempted reunion council. So the church has been very careful and very minimal about what it’s said on purgatory in a way that’s ultimately binding and this is actually recognized in the tradition. There’s a book about purgatory. It’s published by TAN Books.

It was written by a priest in the 19th century named F.X. Schouppe — however you want to say it. And James White loves to quote this book because it has a bunch of vivid stories that he can exploit in it. But when you actually read the book, Schouppe — however you say it — right up front, he says, “Here’s what the church has taught definitively.” It’s like two points about purgatory, like there is a postmortem purification and the living can somehow help and that’s it. And he acknowledges nothing else about purgatory has been set in stone. The rest is all matters of opinion and he’s acknowledging this in the 19th century well before Vatican II. So I think there has always been a recognition that a lot of the way purgatory is understood and articulated is subject to debate and is flexible and the church hasn’t settled it even with authoritative teaching, much less infallible teaching.

So I think the deeper … One of the things that I’ve discovered is the deeper in history you go, the more options you see that have been historically entertained and that have not been condemned and the more flexibility you tend to see the deeper you go. So I guess that’s what I’d have to say in that regard.

AUSTIN: I like this as a, not to put words in your mouth, but when you say the deeper in history, you go, obviously I heard- Oh, Newman quote there. Yeah. So I like this as maybe a potential different option. The deeper in history you go, the greater number of options you see or something of that. And I think that quote aside, I think Newman actually saw this. I think this is why he’s talking about development because he recognizes that, wait, there’s a history to these things and because of that it’s wrapped up in some of the contingencies and messiness of history and we want to kind of track what’s happening and the notes of development that we get from all of that. One other thing I just wanted to highlight from what you said, Catherine of Genoa, Pusey, famous friend, at least for some of his life of John Henry Newman, Oxford movement Anglican once said that if Catherine of Genoa’s vision of purgatory is the one, then Anglicans and Catholics can agree, to which I would say like, yeah, I think so.

And if we took a minimal definition, again, maybe I’ll just end up titling this video, Jimmy Akin and I agree about a bunch of stuff.

I think in the end, if you pray for the dead.

JIMMY: Yeah. And even if you do title it that, well, it’s still a useful exercise to like, let’s specify our common ground, what we don’t need to fight about. Discovering points of agreement is a cause for joy.

AUSTIN: It really is. Yeah. And yeah, I was just going to say, I think within Anglicanism specifically, since you have prayers for the dead in the liturgy and you have the basic idea that people in heaven will be fully purified, I think you could get to that idea of some type of purgatory. I think where there might end up being disagreements would probably be the more you press into the satisfaction model and the more you talk about temporal debt, but in so far as we’re in the sanctification model, I think it’s actually pretty amenable, not just Anglicans. I think other people could get there as well. I wonder though if we might bring indulgences into the conversation, because that’s one area we haven’t hit on as much. And for me, in my experience of thinking through these things, it was somewhat the intersection really of purgatory indulgences that made it a bit trickier for me.

I’ll say on the satisfaction model, indulgences seem to make a bit more sense initially. They seem to belong to that conceptual world in so far as one, if we think about purgatory as a place with a duration, then all of a sudden we have kind of a set of concepts that I think work together in which we are trying to say we can lessen the duration of these things.

So if there’s a time portion to this, indulgences could come in to lessen time, that makes sense. I think there’s issues you run into, one being that’s not how we talk about purgatory today and two, time just generally how that works with purgatory is a little bit trickier to conceptualize. And then I think the third thing that gets a little tricky for me is that it seems to work with a definition of justice that is like proportionate, that purgatory is necessary, that you’d even see in the tradition at some points like this sin merits this amount of time and purgatory, and then we have to deal with that time. And then indulgence is coming in seems to maybe make things a little tricky. Anyway, so that’s kind of just setting up that thought world of it. I guess my thing I would want to say with that side of things is that I think that’s going to be harder for Protestants and Catholics to agree on.

Would you agree with that so far, that it’s just going to be a bit more ecumenically troublesome if we go with that side of the tree?

JIMMY: Well, I agree that we’re going to have to do a little more work here because Protestants already have the concept of sanctification, they’ve already got the concept of heaven. All you have to do is ask the right questions and they’re going to see, yeah, there’s going to have to be some final component to sanctification that makes us ready for heaven. So you don’t have to do a lot of work there to get to the core idea of purgatory. Indulgences though are something that is just not part of the Protestant tradition. And so there is going to have to be more work done on the concept, but I think we can still get to agreement. Now one of the things that has to be done is we’ve got to clarify like you used to have indulgences, it would be like, this indulgence is a 60 days indulgence and people understood that on the popular level as meaning, oh, you get out of purgatory 60 days earlier because of this indulgence, and that is actually not what it meant.

What it meant was this will help you hopefully because all application regarding purgatory is by way of the church’s prayer. So it’s up to God whether he answers this prayer positively or not. It’s not magic, but what people were trying to do with a 60 days indulgence was the equivalent amount of help to someone here on earth having to do 60 days of penance, but how time works in the afterlife is something we don’t know a lot about. In fact, the medieval theologians, not just Aquinas, but actually a bunch of them believed that in the afterlife, souls experience a different mode of being that is different than what we experience as time. They actually had a name for this mode of existence. They called it aeviternity because it shares some qualities of eternity, which is pure timelessness, but also some qualities of time. It’s kind of a middle state.

And this was an opinion, not a teaching, but an opinion that was proffered by a bunch of medieval theologians and it was around at the same time these indulgences were. So obviously there’s no strict correspondence between a number of days on an indulgence and what’s going to happen in purgatory. And there are other ways of understanding what happens in purgatory. Maybe purgatory is instantaneous from an earthly perspective. Benedict the 16th more recently has said that it can’t be calculated in terms of earthly time. So you could conceive of it as instantaneous just the way we’re all going to be instantaneously transformed on the last day. If you’re not already where you need to be, you’re not going to have to hang around waiting to get into heaven. God’s going to do it for you instantaneously. And if he can do that then, he could do that for you now.

So it may be instantaneous, but God could still help you as you’re being instantly purified. Maybe it will be more intense or more painful, even if it only lasts the same instantaneous moment, it may not involve as much suffering. And so you can still help people even with instantaneous or fixed time processes. Where I think the real work needs to be done though, other than clear in a way misunderstandings is just pointing out the principles that indulgences involve. This is something I did in the video in my video and when you do that, well, we end up agreeing on them all. One is that, well, when you sin, God may still forgive you, but you may have to deal with some consequences.

If you steal somebody’s auto and wreck it, well, God will forgive you, you won’t go to hell, but you need to pay the person back. So there are some consequences that are left to be done. Another principle is one person can please God and that’s clear. Some people please God and other people don’t. And another principle is, well, some people who please God can ask him to help those who are still dealing with the consequences of their sins. Like let’s suppose your brother is an alcoholic and he’s trying to go cold turkey to get off the alcohol. Well, he’s going to suffer bad effects, but you, let’s say you’ve been a pious Christian all your life, you can say, Father in heaven, if I’ve pleased you and hopefully you have pleased him as a devout Christian, please help my brother with his withdrawal and God may answer that.

Okay. Well, that’s essentially a this worldly indulgence. So you could have the same thing with someone who’s in purgatory like on the Anglican prayers for the deceased. I mean, Anglicanism doesn’t specify how they help people, but they got to help them somehow. So if someone is in the process of purification, whether over time or not over time, an Anglican could say, Father, let’s say you have a deceased mother and so you could say, “Father, in heaven, if I’ve pleased you, please help my mom and her purification.” Okay, we’re 95% of the way, that’s an afterlife indulgence. The only thing it lacks is it doesn’t yet have church endorsement because you’re doing it privately. And here is where I think there is an often unnecessary confusion on the part of Protestants and Catholics, because in order to justify the church’s component of an indulgence, Catholics often appeal, and I think the appeal is correct, but they often appeal to the church’s power of the keys that Christ gave the church the ability to bind and loose and so they’ll articulate indulgences in terms of the power of the keys.

But even though I think it’s legitimate to do that, I don’t think you need to do that because even in Protestant churches, well, church leaders pray on behalf of the church.

I mean, you go to a service in any Protestant church you want, the pastor’s going to get up and say, “Father, we ask you X, Y, and Z.” And okay, well, X, Y, and Z could include, “And please help our beloved brother’s mother who is being purified.” So the church under the authority of its leaders or with its leaders acting as leaders praying on behalf of the church can ask God to help people be purified in the afterlife. That’s what an indulgence is. It is just as applied to someone in the afterlife. It is a prayer on behalf of the earthly church that God will help someone who’s being purified in the afterlife. And so all the principles are right there. What’s different is in the Catholic community, they’ve been put together as part of a regular devotional practice that has doctrinal underpinnings and in Protestantism, they haven’t been put together as a regular devotional practice, but all the principles are still there.

So I think we can agree in principle even on indulgences, it’s just they’re not actually used this way in the Protestant community. At least that’d be my perspective. What do you think?

AUSTIN: Yeah, I really liked the principled approach and if people haven’t seen your video, I would definitely … I commend the entire video, but I think that portion of it is particularly helpful where you lay out the principles of these. I was rewatching it this morning. I was kind of tracking through those principles and thinking like, yeah, I do think that we could probably agree in just about all of them, I think all of them. I suppose one of the difficulties for me in tracking through the Catholic conception of purgatory indulgences and a related concept, the treasury of merit, I think that kind of goes along with the keys and kind of the dispensation of these things is that it strikes me that in the tradition, at least there had been a tendency, or at least I interpret it as seeming a bit like extrinsic, a bit imposed at times that the language itself, the imagery of a treasury seems like a thing that we dispense that we’re kind of holding back and whatnot.

And I think at times purgatory seems to have been expressed in a way that feels almost like an imposition. We talked at the beginning of like God choosing to punish people actively for these things and instead what we seem to have had, which I think is a good development, is a bit more like intrinsic. Like this is just what happens by nature of sin if one wants to enter into heaven, sin by its nature has these effects, your soul needs to be cleansed and that cleansing might Christ himself might be our purgatory, our encounter with him might be that thing, it might happen instantaneously and that this is going to track with prayer as well, which was something that you brought up in your video that I thought was a point well made is just the nature of prayer that we pray for people. So I think as we move this into kind of a conceptual frame in which these things are just natural, it’s, “Hey, sin has effects, you need to be purified.

You can pray for people. Prayer does something.” That’s the Like indulgences and we don’t think of the treasury of merit as a dispensation of this particular thing as a mechanistic movement. I think it becomes a lot easier to swallow. I think it can be hard for me, but I’m trying to do it in real time to get over some of the kind of more mechanistic, more extrinsic and what seems slightly arbitrary at times, connotations of these things because that’s where I struggle personally with questions of justice as we get into these things of if we’re imposing this by choice and we actually would be God in this case, so I probably shouldn’t put myself in that we, although maybe we can think of that in a different way as well. In any case, if God was just like choosing to punish sins and he was choosing not to remit the punishment, but then sometimes he could be like cajoled or convinced into it, that begins to paint a picture of God that I find not compelling and I think probably morally problematic in some ways.

But if we think of these things as like the natural consequences and that the way that God interacts with those who are experiencing those effects like the person who has some type of addiction and is being cleansed of that, that it mirrors how it works here on earth, then I think all of a sudden it’s a lot easier to work with. So I guess if I wanted to wrap that all up into a kind of condensed statement at the end, I struggle with the more mechanistic picture. I like the less mechanistic picture and I suppose what I’m left wondering is were these images and ideas like the treasure of merits and indulgences inherently mechanistic and we’ve stripped that from them or are they a bit more neutral and we could take that in a mechanistic way or a non-mechanistic way? Yeah, I guess it goes back to that question of development and how we think through that.

Sorry, not the most coherent answer, but hopefully there’s some sense in it.

JIMMY: Oh yeah. No, that’s okay. Well, one thing that may help is the term treasury of merit tends to be a Protestant term. Now the term merit is frequently a subject of concern in the Protestant community and the idea is the way it’s commonly understood is, oh, Catholics believe in merit. They think you can earn your position before God. And actually that is not how Catholics understand the term merit. The term meritum in Latin refers to a reward and so the doctrine of merit is the same thing as the doctrine of rewards. And obviously people in the Protestant community, they believe in God gives rewards. The New Testament refers to that repeatedly. So even though the term merit has a negative connotation, I think we actually don’t need to be hung up about that, one, because it doesn’t mean what many people suppose it means. And two, because Catholics actually tend not to use the term treasury of merit.

Instead, the term that you actually find in magisterial documents is like the treasury of the church. And so this is a theological construct. It’s not something we find directly referred to in the Bible, but let’s think about the principles involved and see if it’s a reasonable theological construct. Well, the treasury of the church is held to be based on the actions of Christ and his saints that have pleased God. Well, okay, did Christ do actions that pleased God? Yeah. By God’s grace, did the saints do actions that pleased God? Well, yeah. Okay. So we’ve got all these actions that pleased God and they’re even in one point they’re depicted in the Book of Revelation under a collective image where John sees the church dressed in fine linen, which he is told or tells us is the righteous acts of the saints. So right there, you’ve got all the acts the saints did that pleased God as this beautiful linen that clothed the church in his vision.

So we’ve got this collective imagery for these actions that have pleased God. Now, will God help some people because of what other people have done to please God? You’ve already established that he will. We even see examples of that in scripture. Like when Paul in Romans 11 is writing to his audience and he says that the Jewish people are beloved for the sake of the patriarchs. So the patriarchs like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they pleased God and God has treated the Israelites and more specifically the Jewish people in a kinder, gentler way than if the patriarchs had not pleased God. So well, if Christ and the saints have pleased God and we know God can help some people on the basis of other people haven’t pleased him, then we’ve got the treasury of merits or the treasury of the church even if we’re not calling it that.

So I think that this theological construct makes sense in terms of the underlying principles. It’s just a question then of, do you want to put the principles together and give it a name? But I think the underlying principles are solid.

AUSTIN: Yeah. I think at that level they are rather solid. And I think one of the concerns that pops up for me is just slightly more pastoral and probably isn’t an argument against and fool, but is maybe just a question of how we apply this well. Something that came up in your response video wasn’t, I don’t even think it was a response directly to what I was saying, but you were talking through indulgences and how they work. And you were mentioning, I believe at this point it was about reading the Bible for, I think it’s 30 minutes a day.

JIMMY: Yeah. You can get a plenary indulgence for that.

AUSTIN: Right. But you made the distinction that you can’t be doing it from a calculating, material motivation.

JIMMY: It has to be a spiritual motive.

AUSTIN: Right. And so that strikes me as a good point and a good kind of guardrail around these things, but it does make me wonder whether or not these things kind of just inherently incline one toward thinking in a more calculating and material motivation type of way, because it seems to me as though one could say when one does good deeds, it pleases God. And because we are all linked up in the communion of saints, especially how Benedict kind of talks about this in Spe Salvi — like, we’re almost just intrinsically tied together what one does benefits others. I think we could put indulgences in that frame and say, “Okay, yeah, that makes sense.” Just as you do good things, it benefits others. However, when we begin to kind of codify this into indulgences, it does at least on the surface seem a bit mechanistic to me.

That makes it harder to not have that type of material calculating motivation. But maybe that’s just an example of, well, it’s a good principle that could be abused and what is it? Abusus non tollit usum. The abuse doesn’t take away the use of it, but I just wonder what you would make of that.

JIMMY: No, I think that you’re pointing to a real danger and I think it applies in more than one situation because anytime you try to specify the rules very precisely and put them together in a practical way, it can help because you’ve got a clear understanding of the rules and what you need to do, but it can also harm because yeah, I got a clear understanding of the rules and what I need to do, but now how precisely do I need to do them and what’s the minimum I can get away with doing and things like that. I’ll give a couple, three examples. You’ve already given one, which is if you’re thinking through the principles regarding indulgences, you can think of them too mechanistically as if this was magic and not without the spiritual focus on, “I want to please God and I want to ask God to help this person.” And you end up with some people saying, “Oh yeah, I sprang 30 souls from purgatory last month.

I got a plenary indulgence every day.” And it’s like, dude, you probably didn’t get a plenary indulgence every day. You probably didn’t meet the criteria and you probably didn’t spring 30 souls from purgatory. That’s presumption and you couldn’t even know if you had, so that’s a misapplication of the rules. Well, the same thing happened with Paul. So God’s law telling us, “Don’t covet, that’s a good thing.” But then people with that precise understanding of, here’s one of the things you shouldn’t do, Paul says, “Well, that became the opportunity for me to start coveting.” And so when you do articulate a rule clearly, it can have unintended consequences that are counterproductive. And today, to give a third example, there are principles about how to approach God and be saved and some people try to articulate them with the Four Spiritual Laws by Bill Bright and that can lead people to think, “Oh, all I have to do is put my faith in Jesus at one moment and I’m saved forever and I can never go to hell no matter what happens and I don’t need to be baptized.” And it’s like, okay, you got a clear articulation of some rules, but the problem with clear articulations is they tend to simplify and that simplification can lead people to focus on the wrong things and start thinking about what’s the minimum I can do rather than thinking about a process organically, whether it’s indulgences or spiritual growth so you don’t covet or salvation.

So I think you put your finger on a real threat that is there whenever you try to rigorously define and bring together a set of principles. There are benefits to doing that, but there are also dangers to do in that.

AUSTIN: Yeah. It does seem to me that maybe the great genius of the Middle Ages especially was being able to systematize things and give clear boundaries around things and some of the great maybe baggage that we hold from that time is also their ability to systematize things and put clear boundaries around things. And for what it’s worth, I think Benedict was really good at recognizing when it was helpful and when it wasn’t. I remember reading him on the liturgy and talking about like, yes, they were great at figuring out at what point in the liturgy was the consecration actually happening and trying to get really specific. And he’s like, “But sometimes we miss the forest for the trees. Let’s think about what the liturgy does as a whole.” And I think that happens in other areas too and perhaps what’s maybe at animating some of this concern about indulgences is if we get too specific, if we quantify it so much that we end up focusing on the rules of it absent the spiritual significance of it, then it does seem like things just become magic.

Yeah. And I think Luther called it like a crass marketplace or something like this, right? That it begins to kind of feel like something that is a spiritual exchange of goods, if you will. Like I do X, I get why and I figure out how to game that system. But it sounds like if we can agree it with some of the underlying principles of just how the communion of saints, if we can agree with the aspects of the way that prayer works within the community of saints, how the prayers of a righteous man avails much and how what one prays on behalf of another can do something, then we can have something building towards indulgences, but it seems that we’re going to be in this kind of tug of war of we want enough clarity to understand it, but not such focus on the rules and regulations that they become the thing we’re focusing on itself.

Is that fair?

JIMMY: Yeah. And to borrow an example from C.S. Lewis, he has a passage where he talks about the difference between learning to dance and dancing where when you’re learning to dance, you’re thinking all about the rules and where do I put my feet? And then you get past that point and you just start to dance to glide. You’re doing it natively without thinking about what your feet do. Well, I think there’s something similar here. Our goal needs to be the spiritual life. It needs to be the equivalent in this metaphor of actually dancing, not thinking about where can I put my feet and how can I game this system? If you’re doing the latter, you’re thwarting yourself in terms of the overall goal, whether it’s trying to get into heaven the easiest way possible with the minimum of purification and purgatory, or whether it’s how to get into heaven in the easiest way possible while still sinning as much in this life but counting on your fire insurance.

Either way you go, there’s a tendency for people to want to game systems to get the easy way and doing that actually ends up being counterproductive.

AUSTIN: And so this has been really helpful just so that we’re bringing it to the level of understanding for people and maybe putting some examples to it or just a little more flesh on the concepts if we take a sanctification model of purgatory in which purgatory is primarily about growing in holiness purity before entering fully into heaven and we add indulgences into that picture. It strikes me what indulgences aren’t about. We could rule some of these things out. They’re not specifically about time, at least they don’t have to be about time. They’re not about assuaging the anger of God. It’s not as though we’re kind of taking God’s anger away from us. Whatever it is that they do, there is still room within the sanctification model for it to be painful, I think. So we could say that perhaps they make it less painful or they … I mean, we have to be fully purified before entering heaven.

So it’s not as though it’s an increase of overall purity. The end goal is going to be there, but even if we don’t talk about time, we could talk about maybe just like somehow improving the experience of that. I don’t know. How should people be thinking about this? Because I’m thinking, especially for Catholics and non-Catholics, I suppose, who are listening to this and saying, “Okay, I like the kind of picture of purgatory that you’ve painted and I’m bound to believe in indulgences in some aspect and in so far as they seem like a good thing, I want to make that part of my spiritual life of gaining indulgences.” But what should people be thinking that indulgences are doing?

JIMMY: Well, they basically help someone who at least is applied to people in the afterlife. They basically help someone who is being purified, be purified easier, whether easier is understood in terms of how long it takes or how intense the experience is, it somehow helps and I would understand that in terms of making it easier. On the other hand, I can think, because I try to think outside the box on a lot of things and think about, well, what else could this mean that would be consistent with the fundamental principle? And on principle that I’m currently in the process of thinking about, and I have not commented on this publicly yet, but I’ll float a few thoughts here is so on principle that’s been part of standard Christian theology as opposed to church teaching, theology is a matter of opinion, church teaching is not, but as a matter of Christian theology is the idea that it’s impossible to do anything in a … I’m going to say this complex and then I’ll try to unpack it in regular language, but in order to merit, you have to be in a wayfaring state.

And what that means is in order to do something that pleases God such that he will give it a reward, you need to be alive.

And part of the basis for that is it is appointed as Hebrew says, “It is appointed to man once to die and then comes judgment.” So the idea is you’ve done all these things in life, good or bad, and now God’s going to judge you on them. And whatever you do after this life, well, you’re not going to do anything more that he’s going to reward. He’s going to give you a reward but only for what you did in this life. And okay, that’s the standard principle that’s used both by Protestant theologians and Catholic theologians, but how certain are we are that? That’s one of the questions I’m thinking about.

Maybe you can. I mean, maybe you can’t do anything that’s going to get you into heaven if you weren’t going to heaven already, but Paul says we’re going to judge angels and we’re at multiple places say we’re going to reign with Christ. Well, those actions are going to please God. We’re not going to be doing bad stuff. We’re going to be doing stuff pleasing God. How do you know you’re not going to get some additional reward in heaven? Maybe it’s like building a house here on earth. You can build the house and the more you build it, the further you get it towards completion, the better it is to live in. Well, okay, maybe God lets you into heaven and you get rewards based on what you did in your life, but maybe you can keep doing things that please God and that he’ll give you even an additional reward for that you couldn’t have dreamed of in this life.

This is kind of a further up and further in understanding of the afterlife where, okay, we’ve got over the hump, we’re in heaven now, but now what can we do? Let’s use our creativity in God’s service and that’ll please him and maybe he’ll give me some little extra reward. Not that I would care about the reward at that point, but maybe God gives it to me. So I would say that our prayers for the deceased imply at a minimum that they help the deceased in some way. Based on the idea that you can’t get additional rewards after this life, the most natural way to understand the help would be in terms of relief of suffering, either making the suffering shorter or making it less intense. But I actually think there may be additional possibilities here. Like maybe it’s if my mom has deceased, it’s like maybe praying for my mom and helping my mom will take the form not of may she suffer for less time or suffer less intensely.

Maybe it’ll be more like, “Dear Father, please help mom build a new wing on her heavenly mansion so she can enjoy it even more.” And so I think there are other options here. One of the things I’m sure of is we are not going to be sinned in heaven or even tempted to sin. And since we are at the end of this life, I think there is a postmortem purification, which the church calls purgatory. But in terms of our prayers and what we can be helping them with, I think there are more options potentially than have been commonly recognized. At least those are ideas I’m experimenting with at present. I’m not committed to all those.

AUSTIN: Sure. I think that’s fascinating though. It strikes me as we’ve previously thought of prayers for the dead, those in purgatory or I mean, we’re not really sure of the state of the people we’re praying for, but that we’ve thought of in terms of kind of taking away negative experiences or effects, right? But it sounds like what you’re saying is in addition to that, it could also have something to do about the positive effects of this. It might not just be a mitigation of bad experiences, but a promotion of good ones. Is that fair?

JIMMY: Yeah. Kind of like in this life, praying, “Father, please help my buddy have a really great vacation so he’ll enjoy it even more.” Well, we could pray the same thing with heaven as a long vacation. It could be the same thing. So I think that there are additional possibilities besides just the ones that have been common in discourse in this area and part of my vocation is, or my munus to use a fancy Latin term that just means what I’m trying to do is to try to think through additional possibilities for future exploration,

AUSTIN: To me, that side of it is the dancing of theology. I mean, we used this as a metaphor in a slightly different way of thinking about indulgences and how we’re relating to them. But I think that the Lewis analogy also applies to theology. At first we learned the steps, we learned the formulas, we learned the words, we learned the meanings, we learned the people to cite, and all of that is good and necessary, but there is also this aspect of doing the thing, thinking about God in a way that is hopefully glorifying. And also I like the word generative. I find those thoughts to be generative of more thoughts of what could this be? And I’ve said in the past, maybe I’ll say it more on the channel, I do think theology should be fun. I think it should be something that is awe-inspiring.

JIMMY: Oh no, I totally agree. One of the criticisms I often have of some YouTubers and other people I see is they’re so negative all the time. It’s like, okay, you’ve got this channel and all you do is criticize people. Don’t you ever just want to go on and say, “Here’s this cool thing I discovered,” or, “Here’s this cool thing I thought of, or wouldn’t this be neat?” And isn’t there any spiritual life and enthusiasm? Why does it always have to be criticizing somebody?

AUSTIN: Yeah. I’ll never forget, it’s been a very formative comment on my own kind of theological journey. When I was in my undergrad, we had a guest speaker come in for a conference and the professor who I admired most, his name’s Dr. John Clark, he was introducing the speaker and he described him as follows and I’ve never forgotten it. He said, Dr. Michael Reeves was the guy’s name, does theology like a seven year old on Christmas morning? And I’ve always thought like, yes, that’s how I want to do theology. Like a seven year old on Christmas morning, I mean the book he was talking about was Delighting in the Trinity and he really exemplified that. Doctrine should bring joy to us and we should delight in learning about God. And I think if we have that perspective, heaven actually sounds fun. Whereas if we don’t have that perspective, it’s like, what are we going to do all eternity?

This is going to be just kind of boring, right? But I think in that vein, as we begin to kind of wrap up here, in the vein of having fun with theology, ghosts, you kind of put that out there, purgatory and ghosts. And I imagine people have been on the edge of their seat wondering what you meant by this. I’m on the edge of my seat wondering. So as a kind of fun little side thing to get into at the end here, purgatory and ghosts, what did you mean by that when you brought it up?

JIMMY: Okay. Well, I’ll explain what I mean and I’ll give you a few examples and then I’ll give some additional resources where people can follow up with this. So the standard now Christians have always believed in ghosts. This goes right back to the 12 apostles. They twice in the gospels mistake Jesus for a ghost. The first time is when he walks on water and the second time is after he’s been raised and both times they think he’s a ghost and his response is not to say, “Oh, come on guys. Ghosts don’t exist.” His response is to say, “I’m not one of them.” And so he doesn’t correct their belief in ghosts. Now a ghost is same thing as a spirit. Geist is the German word. It means spirit to us and Latin and both of them mean that’s where we get ghost and spirit in English.

That’s why the Holy Spirit is also the holy ghost. Well, humans have spirits, so humans have ghosts. So they’re obviously real. The question is, do they manifest here on earth? And the answer is yes, they do. There are cases in the Bible where God lets a human spirit manifest on earth. Like Moses at the Transfiguration, he died, but yet he’s here at the Transfiguration. So we know ghosts appear. The question is, where are they coming from? Now in some cases like Moses, well, he’s obviously someone we would regard as being in heaven. So he would be an apparition of a soul from heaven. An apparition is just something that appears. That’s where the word apparition comes from. Something that appears is an apparition. So Moses is an apparition of a soul from heaven and hypothetically, you could imagine souls from hell appearing too and Aquinas actually thought that’s possible by God’s permission.

And a lot of people don’t realize this, but there’s an actual case to be made that many occasions of possession in the New Testament are actually damned human souls, not fallen angels because the idea of a demon as a fallen angel is more recent than people are aware of. And you study how the terminology was used in the first century, there’s an argument to be made there and certainly the apparitions of damn souls have been reported in history, but by far the most common understanding of where ghosts come from in the Christian age has been purgatory, that they’re individuals who are still being purified and thus it’s been common to pray for them, to try to help them. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, he had two apparitions of his sister after she died. In the first apparition, she appears to him and she says, “I need your prayers.

I’m not in heaven yet. I’m still being purified.” So he arranges to have prayers said for her and to have the liturgy set for her and she shows up the second time and says, “Thank you so much. I’m not being purified anymore. I’m in the full glory of heaven.” And he says, “Well, what about my two brothers, Landulf and Reginald?” And she says, “Well, Landulf is already in glory, but Reginald is still being purified.” And he says, “What’s going to happen with me? “ And she says, “You’re going to join us soon, but you’re going to get a greater reward than we are getting because of your labors for the church.” And this is a contemporary, this was recorded by Bishop Bernard Gui who was Aquinas’ younger contemporary. So this is a near contemporary report on these apparitions But in the first apparition, Aquinas’ sister was being purified so she was still in purgatory and that’s been the standard understanding of what ghosts have been down through Christian history.

One of my favorite books that relates to this is one of the major books in the Middle Ages. It’s Pope St. Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. Now he reigned around the year 600 and he wrote this four-volume set called the Dialogues because he’s in dialogue with a deacon named Peter. And what they do, and I’ve actually been working on a parapsychological paper on this, but what they do is Gregory reviews all of these paranormal experiences that have been reported primarily in Italy and he’s really good about naming his source. I got this from this bishop and this is the priest involved and this is where it happened and when it happened. And so he’s not just telling campfire stories. He’s actually naming his sources in a not entirely rigorous, but in a largely rigorous way. Well, multiple incidents that he reports involve ghosts who are being purified.

For example, he reports one, and I’m forgetting the bishop’s name, but the bishop was reporting about an experience that one of his priests had. Now back in the day, they didn’t have indoor plumbing the way we do. So they didn’t have showers and Bathrooms and bathtubs in their houses. So what you did was you went down to the public bathhouse to get clean and Going was kind of an experience going to a Roman bathhouse. Not only could you bathe or shower, they also had saunas so you could steam. They had exercise rooms, they had a little gym there so you could get exercise. They had a library so you could get a book and read the book or scroll as you’re soaking in the tub. Well, okay so this bishop’s priest is in the habit of going to the bathhouse like other folks and he notes that whenever he goes to this one bathhouse there’s this guy there who’s a bath attendant who is really helpful.

He really caters to all of the priests needs. You need a book, you need this, you need that as you’re going through your bathing process and this guy’s really on the job. And so he thinks how to do something nice for this guy.

He’s been very kind to me. I should do something kind for him. So he gets two loaves of bread and he takes him with them to the bathhouse and he does his usual bathing experience and then as he’s getting ready to leave, he says, “Hey, you’ve been so kind to me. I wanted to do something nice for you. So here are these two loaves of bread.” And the guy says, “I wish I could accept them, but I can’t because I’m not actually alive. I’m actually the ghost of the former owner of the bathhouse. And I’ve been sent here to, as part of my purification in essence, maybe he treated his bath workers badly so now he’s getting to experience what it’s like to be one and have to wait on other people. “ So he says, “If you really want to help me, take the two loaves of bread and use them to celebrate the Eucharist.

And you’ll know if it worked when you come back and I’m not here.” And so the priest does that. He celebrates the Eucharist using the bread for the intentions of helping this guy. He goes back, Guy’s not there anymore. Okay. This is one story among numerous stories from the early church. This is like from the mid 500s. I recently did an episode of Mysterious World on early Christian ghosts from before the year 500 where I talk about different ghost encounters and how they worked and how they’re related to heaven, hell and purgatory. I’m now doing an occasional series. The next episode in the series will be all about the ghostly encounters that Gregory the Great reports and then I’m going to move forward into additional ages in church history. But the dominant view has been that we’re not talking about a hoax or when someone just thinks a bumping noise is a ghost when it’s just a rat in the wall.

But of those apparitions that are genuinely supernatural, the standard Christian understanding has been that there are people from purgatory and it’s good to pray for them or have the liturgy said for them or things like that. So there is a definite connection between ghosts and purgatory. Now you might wonder, well, would purgatory be instantaneous if you’ve got this bathhouse owner repeatedly showing up at the bathhouse? And what I can say there is maybe from an earthly perspective, we can’t reckon how purgatory works, but if time is really different in the afterlife, then you could have a person appear multiple times from an earthly perspective, even if they from an other worldly perspective were purified instantaneously. So there’s a lot of room here and I don’t try to close off options for what could happen. Instead, I like looking at the data and say what’s been reported and not just dismiss things.

So I’ll mention that also coming up next Monday I have an episode where I talk about ghosts on the Jimmy Akin podcast and it’s a subject I’m interested in so I’ll continue to talk about this in the future on Mysterious World.

AUSTIN: Well, that’s fascinating. I think people will really enjoy that. It did make me think of one follow-up question that I wanted to ask you because I think it will come up for people. At least it’s something that I’ve seen come up in these kind of purgatory debates and it’s when people put forward a vision of purgatory that is more instantaneous or more sanctification oriented, sometimes people say, “But what about the saints who had these visions of purgatory that looked, let’s say, a lot more like Dante than what we have today?” What would you say to those people? I think this is kind of a variation of an earlier question about how we think about doctrine development and how people have thought about it in the past, but I think there’s a contingency of people who say like, “But if the saints saw it this way, why would we see it differently?” So maybe that would just be helpful.

JIMMY: Yeah. Well, okay so I’d say a couple things. One of them is the ghost tradition that I just mentioned has also been part of the historic Catholic tradition on this in addition to visions had by the saints. So you shouldn’t pit the two things together. They’re both parts of the tradition. The other thing I would say is, well, the church acknowledges that private revelation is conditioned by the consciousness of the seer and may include things that were imagined by the seer. Also, the afterlife is beyond our present comprehension because our present imagination is built around this life. We’ve never experienced the afterlife. So just like it’s hard to imagine what an alien would be like without just stitching together different elements of animals we have seen. I mean, Mr. Spock is a human with pointy ears.

We’re not really set up to imagine the afterlife right now. And so the church acknowledges that the images that are used both in scripture like a heavenly city that’s a giant cube with streets of transparent gold when gold is not a transparent metal, they’re meant to gesture at the greater realities they represent without limiting us to the specific image that’s being presented to us. I think that all such images are helpful, but we shouldn’t bet the family farm on them being exactly literal in all their details. I’ll give you an example from Pope Benedict XIV’s book — or book set — on the canonization of saints. One of the big issues in his day, there was kind of an argument between some different groups of visionaries who saw the crucifixion of Jesus and some visionaries would see Jesus crucified with three nails, one through each palm and one through both feet and other visionaries would see Jesus crucified with four nails, one through each palm and one through each foot.

So there’s this big debate. It’s like, well, this saint said that he was crucified with three nails and they’re a saint, but this saint said he was crucified with four nails and they’re a saint too. And so there’s this rivalry going on between the followers of these saints, they’re fans and Pope Benedict XIV’s solution was, “Dude, God is not showing a vision of the crucifixion for purpose of teaching how many nails Jesus was crucified with. He’s trying to show you the crucifixion so you understand what Jesus did for us and how much he loves us.” So that’s what’s being taught in these visions and focusing on the number of nails is like hearing a parable about two sons and their father and say, “Ooh, what were their names? What was their street address?” It’s like, “That’s the wrong question to be asking here.” So I would say that in terms of the more satisfactional presentations of purgatory that are present in some visions, well, they’re useful and helpful, but the details of the afterlife exceed what we can understand so we shouldn’t take them literally.

God is not showing such visions to teach us the literal details of the afterlife, which can be affected by the consciousness of the seer, anyway, and may not even be entirely accurate. And we’ve also got the complementary ghost tradition that says, “Hey, there’s other ways God can accomplish all these goals, which is equally a part of the tradition.

AUSTIN: I think that last note about there’s other ways and they’re equally part of this tradition is a nice kind of way of bringing this conversation full circle because if I look back to my initial video that I made that you responded to, I think the kind of linchpin idea of that video was that we had to have both the kind of satisfaction and the sanctification models and trying to figure out how they work together was one of the things I was struggling with. I think something that’s come out through your response video in this conversation today is that maybe that premise itself is somewhat flawed. And if it is, then I think the original video … I think it’s still helpful. I think it was a fun video to make. I think it’s interesting. And in so far as someone thinks that you need both, then I think some of the things hold up a little bit, but something that’s

JIMMY: Been helpful for me. And I think your video is helpful to people who are overly wedded to the satisfaction view because you point out genuine problems with that view.

AUSTIN: Thanks. Yeah. And so I think it’s been helpful for me to see though that if people are coming to the end of this video and they’re like, “This was all agreement.” I think we started with that idea of, is it necessary that they go together? And if it’s not, then I actually think a lot of the critiques I have don’t hold up in the same way and the vision of purgatory that we’ve laid out and the kind of principles of indulgence has seen in the teaching of, say, Pope Benedict XVI and others is something that I think we can find genuine common ground on. So hopefully we’ve done some of that today and this has been an absolute joy.

JIMMY: Yeah, it’s been a joy for me as well. Thank you so much for having me.

AUSTIN: Oh, absolutely. Well, thanks everyone for watching and God bless.

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Conclusion

So, that was my dialogue with Austin!

It was a real pleasure, I thought it was very productive, and I’d be more than happy to dialogue with him again—either on his channel or on mine.

Let’s all pray for further growth in mutual Christian understanding . . . and love.

* * *

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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time

God bless you always!

 

VIDEO SOURCES:

Talking to Jimmy Akin about Purgatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij63af89E0s