Debate: Is Purgatory Biblical? (White vs Sungenis)

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Welcome to tonight's debate. The moderator tonight is Kelly Reed. He has received his bachelor's degree from San Diego Christian College, double majoring in Bible and Theology, and music with a minor in Psychology.

He received the highest honor awarded from the school, a faculty award the year he graduated. He holds a master's degree from Biola University in Organizational Leadership and will graduate in the spring with his Master of Divinity from Liberty Theological Seminary with an emphasis on Christian leadership.

Kelly?

You guys are in for a very special treat tonight. We have these two lovely gentlemen that I'll introduce to you in one second. But the debate tonight is Purgatory is a Doctrine of the Christian Faith and is supported by the Holy Scriptures.

And Dr. Robertson Jennis takes the affirmative on that and Dr. White will be opposed. Dr. Singenis is to my right, your left, and he is the president of Catholic Apologetics International, an international evangelistic organization dedicated to teaching and defending the Catholic faith, which you can also check out online at www .catholicintl .com.

He has his bachelor, master's, and doctorate in religious studies from Westminster Seminary. He's written 12 books on Catholic apologetics. There's one that you can grab in the lobby during the break time.

This is just one of them, How Can I Get to Heaven? He's been on EWTN, CNN, BBC, Defending Catholic Doctrines. He's a father of 11 children. His wife is a saint to have 11 children. I just have to say that.

This is recorded, right? We'll make sure that she sees that. Dr. James White, to my left, is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization. The author of more than 20 books.

This is one of his out in the lobby, Scripture Alone, that you may want to look at, thumb through, and pick up. James is a professor, accomplished debater, and an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

James also hosts the Dividing Light podcast at www .aomin .org. Are you still at Phoenix Baptist? We'll find out soon enough. He's been a professor at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. Other than that, we will begin.

The basic rules for the audience, for you guys, is kind of audience etiquette, if you will, is to keep your applause until the very end of the conclusion and closing comments, as well as don't shout out anything, don't boo, piss.

I don't know if you would, but just to allow these gentlemen to share with you, I would encourage you also to dig into your Word if you brought your Bibles with you as well, and there's also going to be an opportunity where we will be able to actually write down questions that you have for either of these gentlemen to ask.

So, it should be a very stimulating night. Can I pray to start the night open? Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, I just thank you for these two men and the opportunity, Lord, to dig into your Word on a subject that many of us may not even know the definition to, Lord.

But God, I pray that tonight, that as we examine your Scriptures, Lord, I also pray that we would do this with any subject in your Word, God, that we would dig into your Word, taking away our own biases or our experiences or things that may cloud our ideas, Lord, that get in the way of your Word.

So, Lord, allow your Holy Spirit to truly penetrate hearts tonight as we desire to grasp such a subject. We pray this in your beautiful Son's name. Amen. So, Dr. Roberts and Janice will begin with an opening statement.

It will be about 25.

Minutes, so. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay. So, we're here to talk about Purgatory, a Catholic doctrine. I think the place to start with this topic is why Purgatory? Why does the Catholic Church believe in Purgatory?

And as I go through my opening statements here, I'm going to keep asking that question, why, and give you the answer. Granted that Purgatory is not directly accessible in many passages of the Bible. It's not overflowing in Scripture, and that kind of trips many people up, because Bible believers, and I'm a Bible believer just like you are, want to see very explicit teaching in Scripture, and you find it in any book of the Bible kind of thing.

Well, you're not going to get that with Purgatory. There are many people, and I don't think James is among them, who believe in infant baptism. But there's actually not one verse of Scripture that talks about infant baptism.

That doctrine is believed by those denominations, Protestants, because after a thorough analysis of all of the Scripture, an analysis of what salvation is all about, an analysis of how God treated the people in the Old Testament, you put this all together, and in their view, you come out with infant baptism.

Now I happen to agree with that view. That's another doctrine that Catholics believe that we extract from a total sum of passages in the Bible in principial analysis. There's no direct passage that teaches infant baptism.

Purgatory is like that. You have to take a whole ball of wax, and you arrive at this doctrine, Purgatory. However, there are specific passages that we can point to that lead us in that direction, and then I'm going to go through those with you right now.

For example, one of those is the Apocalypse. Some people call it Revelation. I call it the Apocalypse. Apocalypse 21, verse 27 says, nothing impure will enter the kingdom of heaven. Nothing impure will enter the kingdom of heaven.

Now if we take that literally, and not just a figure of speech, and the reason I say that is because there's a lot of things in the Apocalypse that are symbolic, that you don't take literally. This is one of those passages that we do take literally.

Nothing impure will enter the kingdom of heaven. No idolaters, no whoremongers, and he goes on and on with his list of sinners. Now Protestants have a particular way of arriving at this pure state, and they say that Christ's righteousness covers their sins, to be very casual about that analysis.

I know there's much more to it than that, but that's the basic idea, that Christ's righteousness covers your sin. When God looks at you, he doesn't see your sin because Christ is covering it. He's looking at Christ.

I understand that. I was a Protestant for 18 years. I understand that concept. The Catholic says that the way we are made pure to enter the kingdom of heaven is intrinsically. God makes us pure, as if he washed us in a washing machine, and we came out pure, and then we are ready to enter the kingdom of heaven.

It's not like we are, it's this big black mass of coal, and he puts a white garment over it, and that is allowed to go to heaven. Catholic says, no, he changes us, the ball itself, he changes that from black to white, and that's made pure, and it can go to heaven.

So you have two different concepts working here. Now, the way we support the doctrine of purgatory is, we first make this principal statement. When we sin, and are justified, as Paul talks about being justified in Romans 4, for example, the guilt of sin is taken away, but not the temporal punishment of that sin.

The guilt of sin is taken away, and when that's taken away, then there is no eternal punishment, because you're not guilty for that sin anymore. The eternal punishment is taken away, because, as Paul says, for any sin, you're eternally damnable.

So the guilt of that sin is taken away, so you're not eternally punished, but the temporal punishment remains. Now, how do we prove this? Well, there's many examples in the Bible. First of all, in Romans 4, Paul talks about David being justified from his sin, and his sin, as he recalls for us in Psalm 32 and Psalm 51, is that he committed adultery with Bathsheba, and then he murdered her husband, Uriah the Hittite.

In the Catholic Church, we call those mortal sins, deadly sins, because those two sins will send anyone to hell, murder and adultery. And you can read about Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11 and 12, and you can read about other sins that David did.

For example, in 1 Chronicles 21, verses 1 -24, David took a census of Israel, because he didn't trust God to be with the armies of Israel, and he wanted an exact count of how many soldiers he had, basically, to see if it was worthy to go out and fight.

And God took that as a sign that David didn't trust God. It was a big sin, because David was basically rejecting God. And in that passage, in 1 Chronicles 21, God gives David a choice of three punishments.

For three years, there will be famine in the land, for three years. For three months, he will be chased by his enemies. Or, the third one is, for three days, he will be in the hands of God, and God will determine the punishment.

And David figures, well, okay, I will allow God to punish me, because I trust him, and he will be lenient. And so he does. So what does this tell us? Why am I going through this? Well, it tells us that David's sin of adultery and murder were forgiven.

The guilt was taken away, and David was still going to go to heaven, but he was still punished for those sins. He was punished when he committed adultery with Bathsheba, because God said, I'm going to take the son that's born from that union.

And David was very upset about that. And not only that, but all your daughters are going to be raped, and they were raped by, all your wives, rather, are going to be raped, and they were raped by his own sons.

So that's a very, very fierce punishment. David didn't get away with anything. The guilt was remitted, but not the temporal punishment. Same thing with the census. When David took the census, God forgave him of his sin, but the temporal punishment remained, and he went through it.

And as a matter of fact, we can even say that David received an indulgence at this time, if you know what Catholic indulgences are. Because when God administered the punishment, he killed 70 ,000 Israelites.

And even God was so alarmed at the punishment that it says he was grieved at what was going on, and told the angel to come down and stop the punishment. And David saw the angel come down, and he says, please don't come down anymore.

And the angel went back up to heaven, and the angel told David, well, if you don't want me to come down anymore, I want you to go off for a sacrifice. So he goes to Arunah, and he pays him 600 shekels to buy animals to sacrifice to God.

And once the sacrifice is made, then the angel goes all the way up to heaven and doesn't come down anymore. So here David pays an amount of money, he sacrifices, and he has a confirmation from God that the punishment is over.

So in that sense, we have an indulgence, you see. So the principles are there in Scripture. The question is, do these principles carry over from our life into the afterlife? That's the next question we have to answer.

Do the principles carry over? Well, Matthew 12, 31 -32 gives us information that it does carry over, because in that passage, Jesus is talking about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, and he says that that sin will never be forgiven, either in this world or the other world.

Some say the next world, some say in the next age, it depends, because that Greek verb there, melati, is very ambiguous. But the idea is there, that if it's not going to be forgiven here or there, that implies that there are some sins that will be forgiven.

Otherwise, it would be superfluous for Jesus to say, it's not going to be forgiven here or there, this one particular sin. So that's where we start with this idea that there is another place where sins are taken care of.

Now, this is the same reason why Christians prayed for the dead, and I think James will admit that Christians did pray for the dead, at least that's what he says in his book. James, if you remember this book, The Fatal Flaw, he wrote that many years ago, but it's one of my favorites that he's written.

On page 77, he admits there that Christians did pray for the dead, so he knows that it is a tradition of the church. And it's the same reason why many church fathers taught about purgatory and prayers for the dead.

For example, Tertullian, Cyril of Jerusalem, Ephraim, Ambrose, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Epiphanius, Chrysostom, and the great Augustine, all believed and taught in purgatory and prayers for the dead. So we do have a pedigree in history of the church fathers.

Now, this is interesting, too, because if you study her church history, you know that the church was very strict on heresies at these times. In the first four centuries of the church's history, the church was very cautious about doctrine, and that's when she made the Doctrines of the Trinity, and the Incarnation, and the Holy Spirit, and all those very important things that we still hold to today.

The church condemned all heretical ideas surrounding those doctrines. So we would figure that if the church thought that purgatory and prayers for the dead was heretical, she would have condemned it a long time ago.

Not only did she not condemn it, but she actually enforced the teaching of the fathers in 1220 -24 at the Council of Lyons, in 1439 at the Council of Florence, and 1563 at the Council of Trent, made them dogmas of the church.

And it's for the same reason that Augustine taught that 1 Corinthians 3 .15 teaches the doctrine of purgatory, and this is going to be the passage I spend most of my time on, and if you have a Bible, turn to that with me, and I'll exegete it for you.

Now, let me just preface it by saying, in the Corinthian church, they're having problems. Paul begins his letter by pointing out a problem, and that is that he hears from Chloe's people that there are quarrels and divisions among you, in verse 11 of chapter 1, okay?

And he finds out that the Corinthians are boasting against one another. Some say, I'm a Bapalos, I'm a Cephas, I'm a Christ, blah blah, back and forth, and he says, in verse 3 of chapter 3, that there is jealousy and strife among them, and then in the latter part of chapter 3, he says, let no one boast against another, so on and so on.

This church has a lot of problems, okay? So, in the midst of this, he comes and talks about this building of the temple, building of the, something with gold, silver, precious stones, and wood, hay, or straw, in verse 12.

So, we know that there's a division of building materials here. Gold, silver, precious stones imply that these are the good material, and wood, hay, and straw are, of course, the bad material. And then he says, each man's work will become evident, and I'm reading from the New American Standard Bible, in case you want to know, for the day, but he doesn't tell us what the day is, okay?

It could be any day, but he says, day will show it, because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man's work, okay? So, there's a testing here of what they're building with.

Part of this is metaphorical, obviously. We have to know what the metaphor applies to. It applies to building of the church. What that implies is that it applies to how they preach the gospel, how they live among one another.

Jealousy and strife, for example, would not be a good way to live one another and build a temple of God, okay? Preaching the gospel, Christ crucified, as he says in chapter 2, would be a way of building with gold, silver, and precious stones, okay?

And then he says, the fire will test the quality of each man's work, each man, individually. And then it says in verse 14, if any man's work which he has built upon it remains, he shall receive a reward.

Now, this reward could apply to heaven itself. It could apply to a personal reward. He doesn't say. It could apply to both. The fact is, he's going to receive a reward if he does good work. Then in verse 15, he says, if any man's work is burned up, and he's still talking, a little metaphorically here, he shall suffer loss, but he himself will be saved, yet so is through fire.

Now, here's the crucial passage. It's a little difficult to understand, because Paul seems to shift back and forth between metaphor and reality. And it's actually through the whole passage he does this.

And then in verse 16, and I'll come back to verse 15 in a second, and verse 16 says, do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwells in you? If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him.

The temple of God is holy, and that is what you are, okay? So here, let me start from verse 17. Verse 17 is very ominous. If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him. Well, that doesn't sound like purgatory, does it?

If God's going to destroy someone, that sounds like hell itself. That's the normal way these words are used in scripture. So we have two opposing ideas here. One in verse 14, where he receives a reward, and we all know what that reward refers to.

It refers to a personal reward in heaven. Well, that means he's in heaven, okay? So you have heaven given in verse 14. You have hell, because I can't find any other description for this verse, in verse 17, okay?

So what do you have in between? Well, you have an in-between state in verse 15. If his work is burned up, in other words, he has partially destroyed the temple, because he's filled it with wood, hay, and straw.

But not sufficiently enough where God says, okay, because you've done this, I'm going to destroy you. No, it says his work is burned up, and he will suffer loss, but he will be saved, just as the man in verse 14.

And here comes the crucial passage, yet so is through fire. So what does all that mean? Yet so is through fire. Now, in order to get to that, I'm going to have to critique what Dr. White has said about this passage.

Dr. White, in page 194 of the Roman Catholic Controversy, that's this book right here, Dr. White says this. This judgment, referring to the judgment of 1 Corinthians 3, verse 15, is not a judgment relative to sin, but to works and rewards, okay?

Now, that's a premise that he's made. That's a presupposition. Before he comes to the passage, that is his basis for interpreting the passage. Now, he must do this in order to have this whole passage jive with his theology.

He has to separate sins from works, okay? But if wood, hay, and straw are what we would consider bad works, where does the Bible distinguish between bad works and sin? Okay, we definitely have two different kinds of building material here.

Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, and straw. And it's so bad that he who builds with wood, hay, and straw, to the point that it destroys the temple of God, God says, I'm going to destroy him, in verse 17.

Now, if that's not sin, what is it? How could God destroy him for building with wood, hay, and straw if it wasn't sin that he was committing? And again, the question would be, where does the Bible distinguish between bad works and sin?

I know of no passage that makes that distinction. Okay, so that's the first thing. If sin is not in view, as I said, why is God destroying this man in verse 17? If sin is not in view, why does 1 Corinthians 3, verses 1 -4 speak in the context of jealousy and strife among the Corinthians?

For example, in verse 3, it says, you are still fleshly, for since there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly, and are you not walking like a mere man? Well, jealousy and strife, aren't they sins?

Isn't that the context of this passage, jealousy and strife? And why does 1 Corinthians chapters 1 and 2 begin with Paul referring to the Corinthian divisions? I hear from Chloe that there are divisions among you, quarrels among you, okay?

Are they sins or not? Okay, well, he carries it over right to chapter 3. Jealousy and strife among you, you're boasting, you're picking men to follow, you're carnal, okay? Well, are they in sin or not?

1 Corinthians chapter 5 speaks of the great sin in this church, the sin of incest. Chapter 6, verses 9 and 10 warn against fornicators and indulgers. 1 Corinthians 11 -29 says they sin against the body and blood of Christ, and because of that, some of you are sick and have died.

1 Corinthians chapter 10 warns them against their sin and compares them to the people of Israel and says, look what they went through. They went through the wilderness, they were baptized into Moses and the cloud and all this, and many died in the wilderness, and only actually two of them made it to the land of Canaan after a million and a half left Egypt.

That's pretty dead, don't you think? So, yeah, there's a lot of sin involved here, and that's what Paul's comparing these Corinthians to. Now, in 2 Corinthians chapter 13, verses 2 -5, Paul says, when he comes back the second time and writes this letter, he says, many of them did not repent of the sins he had warned them about in his first two letters.

They have sinned and not repented, and he's going to come to them and chastise them. So we know there's sin all over this church, okay? So for Dr. White to say that 1 Corinthians 3 is just dealing with works, but these aren't sins, well, I don't think the text supports that.

On page 193 of the Roman Catholic Controversy, Dr. White says, the passage does not say the person goes through fire, is punished, or suffers to make atonement for sin, okay? He says he does not go through the fire.

But if you look at the Greek word here in verse 15, the New American Standard has yet so as through fire. Now this is the Greek adverb koutos. Koutos means likewise, or in this way, or in this manner, okay?

What it's doing is comparing one statement of fact with another. In other words, it's saying, if any man's works shall be burned up, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved likewise as going through the fire.

Well, what went through the fire prior to him? Well, his works went through the fire. And this man is also going to go through the fire, likewise, or in this way, in the same way, is the way that Greek adverb can be translated.

So, he does go through the fire. Dr. White says he is not punished. But if you look real close at the other Greek word here, it says he will suffer loss. Now that's the Greek word zemiaho, and that can mean suffer loss.

But it can also mean punishment. As a matter of fact, the preponderant meaning of zemiaho is punishment as it's used in the LXX. As a matter of fact, you can go to Bauer, Art, Gingrich, and Danker, and you can look up zemiaho, and it says this in the first definition, to inflict punishment or injury, to sustain injury.

And the second definition, it says be punished, and he uses 1 Corinthians 3 .15 as his citation to prove that it means be punished. This comes from one of the most famous lexicons that is used in the Protestant and Catholic world.

It's on page 338, 4th edition. So, yes, we can say that the passage talks about punishment. In other words, we could say, if we wanted to use the variant of this word, if any man's work is burned up, he shall suffer punishment, likewise as going through the fire.

Now, Dr. White also says that he does not suffer to make atonement for sin in this passage. Well, that's rather convenient, I would say, because if you already dismissed the passage of sin by saying that the bad works are not sins, well, of course he's not going through any atonement here for sin, because you've taken sin out of the passage.

Okay? But if you take, if you put sin in the passage and say that those that destroy the temple, or those that build with wood, hay, and straw, are sinning when they're doing these things to the temple of God, well, yeah, there is an atonement going on here for sin, you see.

So, I would beg Dr. White to take another look at that. Dr. White says, in the same paragraph on page 94 of his Roman Catholic Controversy, quote, it is no blank matter to stand before the judgment seat, or the judgment throne of Christ, in relation to 1 Corinthians chapter 3.

Okay? Well, that means that Dr. White is connecting 1 Corinthians chapter 3, verse 15, to 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 10, and what does that passage say? That passage says this, listen to this, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may be recompensed for the deeds of his body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.

Okay? So, if Dr. White thinks that 1 Corinthians 3 is talking about the judgment seat of Christ, well, right here, Paul says that that judgment seat consists of good and bad works that are going to be judged.

So, there's no way that you're going to say that there's no sin in 1 Corinthians 15, unless you can prove from the Bible that bad works are not sins. And then we have a whole host of passages, John 5, 28 and 29, there's going to be a resurrection of the just and of the damned, based on their good and bad deeds.

We have Romans 2, 6 and 8, says the same thing. God will judge them based on their deeds, good or bad. Those that have done good get eternal life, those that have done bad get God's wrath. Many, many passages like that in the scripture, and I think my time is up.

Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. St. Janus. Dr. White?

Thank you for being here this evening. It is an important subject that brings us together, the very subject of the gospel of Jesus Christ itself, and this evening we will be discussing the subject of purgatory.

I wish there had been a little bit more of a definition of purgatory given. I'm not going to have time, really, to go through all of that, but hopefully a lot of that will come up in the discussion this evening.

This topic illustrates the vast difference, I believe, between a God-centered biblical gospel and a man-centered, non-biblical system of salvation. I want to present three areas of discussion in the brief moments that I have.

First, how did this dogma come to definition? I will provide a brief and I think somewhat troubling history of its background. And then, the number of texts cited by Rome in defense of purgatory are few, as we saw, but must be examined carefully.

We will look carefully at them. And then thirdly, what are the ramifications of belief in purgatory? How does it impact the gospel itself? Those are the three areas we will try to get into this evening.

The sole Jewish source that is cited, even by the 1994 Catholic Catechism, and the Second Maccabees Call, 39 -45, where we read of a group of Jewish fighters, all of whom were idolaters. They carried pagan idols under their clothing and God struck them down as punishment.

This uninspired book, rejected as canonical by such notable early fathers as Melito of Sardis, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, Jerome, as well as Pope Gregory the Great, and at least 50 other major ecclesiastical writers up to the time of the Reformation, including Cardinal Cajetan, the prelate who interviewed Luther, says that the Jewish leader sent money for the offering of prayers and sacrifices for these dead soldiers.

It seems that any connection at all with the dead is sufficient at this point, for obviously, since idolatry is a mortal sin, and would not send one to purgatory, but to hell itself, this passage is hardly supportive of the doctrine we examine tonight.

At the very best, it would have to be said that the passage indicates an error in thinking on the part of the Jews, but given its highly unusual nature and the fact that no canonical scripture supports it, its very use begins to illustrate to us the highly questionable nature of purgatory as a dogma of Christian faith.

When we come to the earliest centuries of the Christian Church, we find no doctrine of purgatory. What we do find fairly early on are prayers to the dead, often cited, as they just were, as evidence of at least an implicit concept of purgatory.

Yet, as historians such as Lagoff point out, these primitive prayers are actually contradictory to the modern concept of purgatory. They pray for their loved ones that they might have refrigerium, refreshment, and yet this is couched in terms of the pleasures of paradise, a state defined as peace and light.

Now, what's important to recognize there is, for example, as Mormon points out, among later Christian writers, refrigerium is used in a general way to denote the joys of the world beyond the grave promised by God to the elect.

And Neal, likewise, upon collating and studying ancient liturgical sources, concluded, one, that prayers to the dead have been from the beginning the practice of the universal church, and two, this without any idea of a purgatory of pain or of any state from which the departed soul has to be delivered as from one of misery.

The ease with which modern apologists for Roman Catholicism point to these prayers without taking serious note of their character and the lack of a meaningful context by which to make them truly supportive of their case should give us reason to examine their claims more carefully.

Indeed, Tertullian, upon making reference to making oblations on the anniversary of someone's death, frankly admitted, as you see on the screen, if you look in scripture for a formal law governing these and similar practices, you will find none.

It is tradition that justifies them, custom that confirms them, and faith that observes them. What a strange, strange statement if, in fact, the passages Roman Catholic apologists cite are, in fact, relevant.

Evidently, Tertullian recognized this was merely a practice, not a doctrine, let alone a dogma. How time transformed this simple practice into something wholly different. The chief architects of the earliest concepts that led to purgatory only decrease our confidence in the doctrine.

In the East, we have Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Both wrote extensively, and much of what they said would not be believed by anyone here this evening, Catholic or Protestant. Both engaged in allegorical interpretation that was devoid of meaningful exegetical content, and while Origen did know both Greek and Hebrew, his view of scripture as having all sorts of levels of meaning led him to ignore the historical grammatical meaning and focus upon allegedly higher or spiritual meaning.

Both, likewise, were influenced more by Plato than by Paul, leading to a strange and, in fact, unorthodox theology. Both men were led into wild speculations, especially in regard to the idea of a corrective, punitive cleansing of the soul.

This idea came primarily from Greek philosophy and dualism, surely not from scripture itself. At the same time, non-canonical Gnostic-influenced works, such as the Apocalypse of Paul, likewise presented a concept of the afterlife derived not from the Bible, but from Greek philosophy.

These works, despite their non-canonical status, deeply influenced the rise of purgatorial thinking in the Middle Ages. In the West, we find Augustine giving credence to a concept of purgation as well, though, as he likewise believed in predestination and election, and the idea that saving faith is a gift of God, he melded these concepts into a strangely inconsistent whole that led him to believe that such sufferings would only avail the elect and none others.

He was influenced in his thinking by his mother's dying request to be remembered in his prayers. But most importantly, we find a full half millennia after the founding of the Church, Gregory, Bishop of Rome, known as Pope Gregory the Great today.

This man's theology was a mess. He was, at best, a semi-Pelagian who gave tremendous weight to the idea of merit and works. He did not believe man was dead in sin, but only wounded or sick. He was ignorant of both Greek and Hebrew, and knew absolutely nothing of biblical backgrounds as well.

He would not have made it out of any decent undergraduate Bible program today. Yet, he wrote extensively, putting his manifest ignorance on paper. One of his works, completed after he became Pope, was a work on Job, filled with the most inane and silly allegorical interpretation.

Schaff gives us an illustration of Gregory's thinking in this work. Notice what he says. The names of persons and things, the numbers and even the syllables of the book of Job, are filled with mystic meaning.

Job represents Christ, his wife, the carnal nature. His seven sons, seven being the number of perfection, represent the apostles, and hence, the clergy. That's part of his interpretation. His three daughters, the three classes of the faithful laity who are to worship the Trinity, his friends, the heretics, the 7 ,000 sheep, the perfect Christians, the 3 ,000 camels, the heathen and Samaritans, the 500 yoke of oxen and 500 she-asses, again, the heathen.

Ironically, this same work contains Gregory's rejection of Maccabees as a canonical work. But it was another work of Gregory, the Dialogues, that is of importance to us tonight. These dialogues between Gregory and Roman Archdeacon Peter abound, as Schaff says, quote, in incredible marvels and visions of the state of departed souls, end quote.

Gregory admits that he is transmitting hearsay only and did not himself see any of these alleged visions. This is the work, however, that becomes foundational to the development, in the Middle Ages, of the doctrine that became dogma at the Council of Florence, yet 900 years in the future.

And so, we have the beginnings of what would eventually become the modern dogma of Purgatory. Scattered references from Origen, the allegorist, who believed even Satan himself would be saved, and who likewise believed in preexistence of souls.

Tertullian, who became a Montanist. Augustine, who was deeply influenced by his mother's request, and whose exegesis of Matthew 12 ignored the simple parallel passage in Mark 3 that, as we shall see, renders Matthew 12 irrelevant to its use by Rome today.

We've already had it used this evening. And, most importantly, Gregory, who could not even read the original languages, offered allegorical interpretation in the place of true exegesis, and who passed on hearsay stories about visions of the afterlife that became central to the development of the concept of Purgatory during the Middle Ages.

Indeed, did not Peter warn us about what happens when untaught and unstable persons distort the scriptures? Time precludes delving much into the development of the actual dogma of Purgatory, primarily in the 12th century, and its elevation of the status of dogma by the Council of Florence in the 15th century.

A council history shows to have been political in nature, one that can hardly be said to have seriously considered anything of an exegetical or biblical nature. Indeed, Florence spent more time arguing about where to put the chairs to the seating of the Greek delegates than it did on the study of the Bible.

As a council of reunification, it failed completely. Yet, the modern Catholic Church views Florence as the 17th ecumenical council, and the modern catechism relies upon Florence and Trent to define Purgatory in section 1031.

I don't know about you, but such a history does not recommend it to my thinking as something worthy of my faith and assent. I cannot help but think of the words of Scripture. To the law and to the testimony, if they speak not in accordance to this word, there is no light in them.

And so we now turn to the few passages that have been pressed into service by Rome to substantiate the dogma that is Purgatory. There are really only two texts to examine, both have been presented to you already, when it comes to the alleged biblical support for Purgatory.