This is a guest column by Kevin Timpe, professor of philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University. His book Free Will in Philosophical Theology is forthcoming in November from Bloomsbury Academic.
A recent study suggests that belief in purgatory among Catholics in the United States is on the decline. But there is also reason for thinking that belief in purgatory is on the rise among Protestants. My own attraction to the doctrine comes primarily from the work of a Wesleyan philosopher, Jerry Walls. While Walls’ Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, 1992) is one of numerous extended philosophical treatments of hell, his Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (Oxford, 2002) is a rare book-length treatment of the philosophical issues surrounding heaven. Heaven also contains a chapter providing the best philosophical defense of purgatory that I’m aware of. Walls there argues that the Christian doctrine of “salvation must involve changing us to love God as we ought [for] the aim of salvation is to make us holy, and this is what fits us for heaven.” Walls completed his trilogy with Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford, 2011). It is dedicated to defending the doctrine of purgatory “as a rational theological inference from other important biblical and theological commitments … for those who take seriously the role of human freedom in salvation.”
At the heart of Walls’ defense is the following line of thought. Heaven is to be a state where all forms of impurity are excluded—a state than which no greater can be conceived, we might say. Heaven is, according to Walls, “essentially morally perfect. What this means is that it is impossible, in a very strong sense of the word, that there could be any sort of sin in heaven.” But in order for this to be so, all the inhabitants of heaven must be incapable of sin. And while this is an easy claim to maintain for God, the same is not true of human creatures, whose sinfulness is all too obvious. If we are to be fit for heaven, then we must be incapable of sin as well:
This is not to say that they are essentially good in the same sense that God is in his very nature, but it is to say that those in heaven must have at the least acquired a nature, or had their nature so transformed, that it is impossible for them to sin …. They must have a settled character that is good through and through, one that is no longer vulnerable to sin.
The need for such transformation is the foundation of the doctrine of purgatory that Walls constructs. Or, to put the point in a slightly different way, Walls shows how the need for purgatory arises out of the belief that the heart of the Christian gospel is the hope of sanctification, and not simply justification. As he lays out the options in the volume’s introduction, there are only two general ways that this could happen: “at the moment of death, God makes people holy by an instantaneous unilateral act, however imperfect, sinful, and immature in character they may be …. [Or] the sanctification process continues after death with our willing cooperation until the process is complete, and we are actually made holy through and through.” For those who, like me, are within the Wesleyan and Arminian traditions, Walls provides strong reasons for preferring the latter option to the former. Of particular interest on this score is his suggestion that John Wesley’s own reasons for rejecting purgatory are much more Reformed than one would expect from the founder of Methodism.
Purgatory is composed of six substantive chapters and a closing summary. The first chapter is a broad historical overview of the doctrine of purgatory, though the discussion in this chapter is significantly dependent upon the medieval historian Jacques Le Goff. Here Walls pays particular attention not only to the theological underpinnings of the doctrine but also to the social and cultural factors that played a significant role in its acceptance. Chapter 2 examines Protestant objections to purgatory, both historical and contemporary, showing how many of the objections are to the medieval abuses related to the doctrine rather than to the doctrine itself. Luther, for example, clearly endorsed some version of the doctrine in his famous Ninety-five Theses, despite his protests against the way clerical corruption had tainted the doctrine. The second chapter also includes a careful consideration of, and response to, the “quintessentially” Protestant objection that the doctrine of purgatory “lacks solid biblical warrant.” Here, Walls argues that
there is no direct way to settle the issue by straightforward biblical exegesis of isolated texts. But this hardly means there is no way to argue the matter theologically or to arrive at a biblically grounded view on the issue. For the question remains whether the doctrine coheres with things that are clearly taught in scripture, or can even be inferred from them as a reasonable theological conclusion. Such inferences must, of course, involve some degree of speculation, and should be held with an appropriate degree of modesty. But theology can hardly avoid such inferences, especially when dealing with eschatological issues, where explicit biblical data is often sparse.
Throughout the volume, Walls does an excellent job of connecting diverse views of purgatory with larger theological commitments.
The heart of the book is chapter 3, which contrasts two different approaches to the doctrine of purgatory: satisfaction models and sanctification models. Satisfaction models, which are exemplified by the 16th-century Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez, hold that the main, or at least a primary, reason for purgatory is so that “punishments can be applied to persons to satisfy moral and spiritual debts that they failed to pay in this life.” It should not be surprising that such models are unacceptable to most Protestants. In contrast, pure sanctification models are “entirely a matter of continuing and completing the process of sanctification, of making us truly holy so that we can be fully at home in the presence of God and enjoy his presence with no troubling shadows to darken our fellowship with him.” Walls argues that a pure sanctification model should be acceptable to Protestants, and that sanctification is the primary, if not sole, emphasis of much contemporary Catholic theology. (He adds that there can be mixed accounts which involve elements of both satisfaction and sanctification.)
The fourth chapter addresses a number of issues regarding personal identity that result from adopting a doctrine of purgatory. This chapter may seem strange to those who approach the book without a background in contemporary analytic philosophy, some of its basic positions regarding human nature (e.g., physicalism, hylomorphism, etc.), and the thought experiments that have become such an integral part of these debates. While the first four chapters are traditional in nature (though, I should say, perhaps not traditional in their coming from the mouth of a Protestant!), in chapter 5 Walls becomes more revisionist. Here he argues that the sanctification account of purgatory should be understood in such a way that it provides “postmortem opportunity to repent and be saved.” The wider context for this revision is, not surprisingly, the recent surge of universalism within the church. Walls thinks that the love of God extends what he calls optimal grace for reconciliation and healing to all individuals, including those who have already died. Walls is well aware that his account is revisionist on this score, arguing however that his “modification is not only true to the original impetus for the doctrine, but also a consistent outworking of this impetus that resolves certain tensions that appear in classic accounts of purgatory.” While Walls doesn’t go so far as to argue that universalism is true, and definitely doesn’t think that it is necessarily true, he does suggest that it could be true, for all we know, and its truth should be something that Christians should hope for.
Chapter 6 offers an engaging examination of C. S. Lewis’ thought on purgatory, with a particular focus on the tension between his “status as an arbiter of orthodoxy, particularly among evangelical Protestantism, where his influence is perhaps especially strong,” and his explicit acceptance of purgatory. While Lewis has done much to inform and motivate my own inclination toward the doctrine of purgatory, Walls’ treatment in this volume has done even more.
All in all, Walls’ book provides a contemporary motivation and “defense of purgatory not as a dogma, but as a theological proposal that resolves issues and questions that no developed system of theology can ignore.” He gives us a hopeful doctrine of purgatory based on the need for and promise of sanctification—one which he also shows is in broad consensus with the hope that led to the development of the doctrine in the first place. Do I think such a doctrine of purgatory is true? Well, I’m convinced by Walls’ treatment that it might be. But I also hope that it is, as it’s a beautiful doctrine—and one which Walls deserves credit for painting in such a striking light.
—Kevin Timpe
Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
