Purgatory Matters

I recently listened to an event from one of the evangelical churches I went to growing up on the topic of other religions. The pastor was asked whether Christianity should be considered a ‘religion,’ to which he responded that, no, it shouldn’t, because “religions are about things that you can do to please God or achieve salvation.” His claim being that ‘religion,’ with its rituals and sacrifices and everything else that has defined it historically are about the placating of the divine through ‘works,’ by which we can have no ultimate assurance of salvation, whereas Christianity is a religion of grace, in which our salvation is assured not through anything we have or can do but through the work of Christ.

This is a particularly Protestant view of the idea of religion, something that grants a convenient view not just of religion as a whole but even of other parts of the church. Thus, when I was growing up in the evangelical church, Catholicism was generally referenced with a deep suspicion as a “religion of works” or even a “cult” with all of its rituals and performance, and within certain parts of the evangelical church, one might even find fellow Protestants such as Anglicans are met with a slight eyebrow raise and a suspicion that with their incense and robes they may not truly understand the religion-less religion of grace.

Besides the many problems with this view, which we will get to, there are some things about it that are nonetheless emphatically positive. One of the central facts of Christianity is the idea of a radical acceptance, that no matter who a person is they are and can be embraced by the love of God and the community of a church because of Christ’s single redemptive act, that at conversion the gates are flung open and the prodigal is welcomed home. For all I remember the suspicion towards other parts of the church growing up, I also remember the compelling message of grace expressed in many of the most famous Protestant hymns, and of the sense to which it casts God’s love as something that we do not scrabble towards in the hope that we might do enough, but that it is wholly given and unconditional. It is hard not to stand in a church where “Tis mercy all, immense and free; For, O my God, it found out me” is boomed across the rafters and not feel moved by its affirmation of the gospel as the free gift of underserved eternal righteousness.

Yet the fact is that in many evangelical churches today you won’t hear these words boomed across the rafters. In fact what you are far more likely to hear are worship songs in which the theologically rich affirmations represented by the Methodism of the Wesley brothers has been replaced by a ‘relationship’ vocabulary by which God essentially becomes akin to the romantic other in a Taylor Swift song. A critic of Protestantism might argue that the lack of distinct moral grounding in the salvific notion of grace has entertained and made common the idea of ‘cheap grace,’ in which God does not unchain us from the weight of our sin but flatters us with how much he loves us already. Rather than God redeeming the goodness within our nature, grace becomes a kind of ‘it was you all along’ type analogy of romantic love that is emotionally shallow and theologically inept.