This is Catholic Answers Live, any question you have about the Catholic
faith, Jimmy Akin is here with the Catholic Answer. Rebecca, you're up next
in St. Louis on EWTN.com. Hi, Rebecca. Hi. Thanks for having me. Thank you
for your willingness to call and wait and come on the show, go ahead.
Alright, I have a friend who was raised Catholic and who's a very
faithful person, but she has some serious doubts about the Catholic faith, and she
is looking to leave the Church. Oh, no. Yeah. So the first big
hang-up she has that she told me about is purgatory. I was wondering if you had any
biblical tools that I could use to give her some basis for having a
reasonable faith in purgatory? I do, but first let me ask: are there
particular—has she expressed to you why she's having a concern about purgatory?
Because it may not be enough to just show her a biblical basis for it,
we also may need to answer a concern that she's feeling about it.
So has she done any of that? She said she doesn't see purgatory
in the Bible. Okay. Well, if that's her only concern, number one: not everything
has to be mentioned explicitly in the Bible. The Bible nowhere says that, and so
if she's approaching the Bible with that as a principle in mind—that in order
to believe something you have to see it explicitly in the Bible—that's itself a
problem. And so we have a lot of stuff at catholic.com that could help her with
that. You might want to go to catholic.com and type in "Bible alone," would be
one phrase you could use, or "sola scriptura,"
if you can remember that, because that's the principle she's applying at that
point. Now if it's just a matter of purgatory in particular, well if you look
in 2 Maccabees, there is a passage where you have
Judah Maccabee, he's a military leader and political leader in ancient Israel, and
he and his men come across the bodies of some other soldiers who had fallen in
battle, they died in battle. And they were fighting for God, so they're fighting
for Israel, on the side of the true God, but they had committed sin,
and this played a role in their falling in battle. And so what Judah does is he,
number one, takes up a collection to have a sacrifice offered at the temple in
Jerusalem for these people—and that signifies that in some way even in this
life we can help people after they've died—and he also has his men pray for
those who had fallen in battle, and so that also signifies that in some way in
this life we can pray for those who have fallen who are no longer alive and in
some way help them. And so that presupposes the existence of a state
where people's journey to heaven is not yet complete. They're on their way to
heaven, they fell asleep in righteousness, but they nevertheless can still be
helped by our prayers and and by having sacrifices made for them like the modern
sacrifice of the Mass. Now, depending on where your friend is at the moment, she
may or may not recognize 2 Maccabees as an actual book of Scripture,
because in the Protestant community it is not commonly recognized as a book of
Scripture. And so if she's been influenced by some who are in the
Protestant community, she may have doubts about "does this book belong in the Bible
or not?" And that raises a question: how do we know which books belong in the Bible?
And if you look at the situation carefully, it's clear that the canon of
the Old Testament includes some books that our Protestant friends don't
recognize as Scripture. In fact, if you look in the book of Hebrews in chapter
11, it even contains a reference to this very book of 2 Maccabees—not the
same passage, but the same book. And again, we have a lot of stuff at
catholic.com that can help you with that, if you want to explore that with her. You can go
there and type in "Maccabees," or you can type in "deuterocanonicals," or you can
type in "canon" and all of those will help pull up some resources on that.
Suppose, though, that she says "Well, I just don't want to talk about 2
Maccabees. I'm not willing to give that weight." Is there anything else you can show
her? Yes. Go to 1 Corinthians 3, where Paul talks about how everyone must
build on the foundation of Jesus Christ, but the quality of our work is going to
be tested by fire. And if we've built well, then what we
have built will survive the testing by fire and we will receive a reward; but if
not, if we've built poorly on the foundation of Christ, then what we've
built will be consumed, but we ourselves will still be saved, but it'll be like
escaping through flames, like escaping through a burning building. And so this
shows that after we're dead, after our salvation is already secure—because he
says this person will be saved, but like escaping through flames—after our
salvation is secure, we're still going to be tested based on what we did in
this life, and any remaining impurities are going to need to be purged. That's
also something she could simply infer from the fact that we're not going to be
sinning in heaven, we're going to be perfect, and that means all of the traces
of sin and all of the remaining kind of gunk that's clinging to us
spiritually after this life is going to need to be purged away.
The Church doesn't say it takes any particular amount of time—it could
happen in a flash—but that's going to be a transition we all need to have between
being impure in this life and being totally pure in heaven. One last thing:
Pope Benedict has an excellent discussion of this in his encyclical "On
Christian Hope/Spe Salvi," that's S-P-E, new word, S-A-L-V-I. I encourage you to go
look that up, it's awesome and you can share that with your friend too.
Rebecca, thanks for the call, That was a lot. you can check out the podcast 24
hours from now, or consult the Catechism for more biblical data. Thank
you, Jimmy. Thank You, Rebecca. This is our hard break, and we'll take it and come
back in a moment on
Catholic Answers Live.
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