Name: Stephen T Ferrari Question: First, Gob blessed me when he led me to your website. I am a retired computer engineer and always struggled with my lifelong logical/scientific mind and while I always believed in God the Father and Christ our Savior I always struggled with science vs Scripture. They seemed in conflict. After following your Bible studies, I finally understand they are not and my faith has been significantly strengthened. Anyway my question. Is there any biblical support for the concept of Purgatory? Thank you in advance.
Answer: It’s great to hear you found our site, and that it’s helped you with your faith. Thanks so much for sharing that!
Purgatory is a church tradition, there is nothing in Scripture to prove it. Quite the contrary actually.
Ecclesiastes 12:7
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
Once we pass away, our spirit returns to God, period.
2 Corinthians 5:8
We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.
There we have it again, in the Old and New Testament. If our spirit does not reside in our body, then we are back with the Lord. I would like to remind you about Lazarus and the Rich Man as well, (see: Is Hell Forever?). Also, there is a gulf in Heaven, but again, it’s in Heaven, so no purgatory.
Not sure if Stephan has read this in the forum but in case he does I think this could be of help to his inquiry as well.
The early church of the first few centuries was extremely familiar with corrective judgment in the age to come. Origen was most responsible but many other of the early leaders/teachers were of the opinion that most if not all would eventually be saved.
After Constantine made Christianity the official state religion politics came into play and the institution began to be influenced by power and monetary gain. Purgatory was used if not designed from already established ideas how judgment, correction and glorification what ultimately take place. They just figured a way to monetize it as well as use it to weld superiority over the masses.
As with many or most of the traditions that developed in the first 1000 years or so, they usually took a grain of truth and distorted it with all sorts of manmade details ultimately for the benefit of the organized and institutionalized church system.
Just another perspective that might help answer your question.