From: nlt@gboro.glassboro.edu (N. L. Tinkham)
Subject: Purgatory, grace, and dandelions
Organization: Computer Science Department, Rowan College of New Jersey
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 05:31:07 GMT

     I'm Episcopalian rather than Roman Catholic, and I think of Purgatory
more in terms of purgation than in terms of strict legal payment, but perhaps
I can make some comments on Purgatory that will clarify some points in the
discussion.

     There are several senses in which Christ saves us from sin, because
there are several ways in which sin affects our lives.  The most common focus
(especially in Protestant thought) is on justification, the forgiveness of
sins:  Christ removes our guilt for the sins we have committed, enabling us
to be in communion with God and to receive eternal life.  But there are other
senses in which sin is present in our lives besides the experience of guilt;
in particular, the sin itself, our stubborn tendency to sin, is part of our
lives and our characters.

     In my own life, I find that there are some sins to which I am especially
prone.  I can fight them, and think I've conquered them, and then they pop up
again unexpectedly.  Or maybe I do actually conquer one of them -- and then I
turn around and find I've been caught in some other sin that I wasn't even
paying attention to.  (I won't turn this into True Confessions, but it's
mostly the attitude sins that persist this way in me -- envy of others'
accomplishments, excessive attention to how good I look to others, and a
collection of others.)  I sometimes think it's like digging out dandelions in
a yard -- you pull up one weed, and another, and the yard looks clear, and
then you turn around and there's another one looking up at you.

     God's redemptive grace is present with me in this lifelong fight against
the spiritual weeds; together, we make progress bit by bit, and some sins
do get successfully uprooted.  But I don't think I'll ever get all the weeds
out in my lifetime; there's too much distance between my present state and
perfect righteousness.  And I do, eventually, want to be perfectly righteous.
My salvation doesn't depend on what I do -- my sins have already been
forgiven, and my salvation is assured through the death and resurrection of
Christ -- but I still do eventually want to be made perfect.

     And that is where I picture Purgatory.  I know I won't be perfected in
this life, but I don't want to continue to sin throughout eternity.  I want
God, at some point, to finish the work of cleansing within me, to remove from
me not only the guilt of sin but the actual sinful nature itself, so that I
will be righteous not only in name but in fact.  I call this final cleansing
Purgatory -- the purgation of all sin remaining in me.

     I can only speculate about what the nature of this cleansing might be.
My guess is that it will be different for different people, that it will be
whatever a particular person needs.  Maybe for some it is suffering; for
another, it might be the pure experience of God's love; for another, it might
be confronting the harm done by a pet sin that seemed harmless.  As I said,
this much is guesswork.

     But whatever this cleansing is, it is grace.  It is the undeserved
love of God acting in our lives, through the work of Christ, to finally and
completely free us from sin.


     I know that many Protestants will disagree with my belief in a purgative
process after death, or will prefer to call it "sanctification" -- and that's
fine.  But the articles contrasting Purgatory with grace have been very
strange to me, because I see Purgatory as an instance of grace.  It is
a cleansing from God that I need precisely because I am unable to save myself
from my sin.

_____________________________________________________________________________

"The good which I want to do, I fail to do;          Nancy Tinkham
 but what I do is the wrong which is against         nlt@gboro.glassboro.edu
 my will."			- St. Paul

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