Not ALL Good People go to Heaven

Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard, but not the pipeline? That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions. My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bullspend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to linkedin.com slash campaign terms and conditions apply. When you die, where are you going to go? Well, maybe you think if you're good, you're going to go to heaven, and if you're bad, you're going to go to hell. But what if you're not a saint, but you're not a monster, and you wake up in purgatory? Well, purgatory is the mysterious place where your soul goes to wait and to be cleaned in a flame that burns, but it doesn't kill you. And the family that you left behind, well, they're praying you out of it in real time while you're still there. And over a billion people today, they claim to believe in it, in Christian theology, but there's just one problem. That word, purgatory, isn't really in everyone's Bible. Well, today we're walking through this idea that helped tear Christianity in two. It funded one of the most beautiful churches on earth and was actually part of igniting the reformation. Some people see it as a waiting room. Some people see it as like a mini version of hell, and others describe it as a divine highway, a hike up to heaven. So where do Catholics get this idea? Where do Catholics get this idea of purgatory? And what is it really supposed to be? And what actually happens while you're there? Well, today we're going to find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp. What's up, dude? And welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Marc Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from all over the world. I'm Marc Gagnon. I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. religion from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here in this very tent, is I try to figure out what everyone believes. Everyone on this planet has got a different relationship with God. Some people have none. And it's crazy to me that I walk around all day meeting people and not knowing how they orient their lives. What do they understand about ethics, about morality, about where we came from, or about where we're going? And that's what I do here, is I try to figure out what's brilliant and interesting and fascinating about every religion around the world. On top of that, I try to find all the cool stuff that I like and apply it to my own life. And this episode, well, we're going to get very personal. Because this, as a Catholic, someone that grew up Catholic certainly, and went to a Presbyterian school, I had many arguments and debates about this word, purgatory. Now, before we jump in, I want to say a few things. First, I want to say thanks to you, dude. Yeah, I want to say thanks for tuning in. Every time you click, comment, like, interact with the content in any way, you tell the Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Facebook gods that we're good guys. And we're doing good stuff over here. And we're trying our best. And you help the show grow, you know, you help guests come on, you help keep the lights on at the tent, and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, I also want to say thanks to the pal right beside me. He's the Greek freak. He's the Orthodox legend. And his name is Christos Kalamakabekadopadavastos. How are you? Are we on Facebook? Well, I think we are. I think I saw some clips there. I don't even know if we're posting them. It might be one of the good camp folk here at the campsite. God bless them. All right. Now, Christos, you completely diverted me there. Okay. I was I was planning on talking about purgatory. Now you got me thinking about algorithms and business. Okay, so this is this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. You always get me off track. I'm just joking, Christos. I'm glad you're here. Now, let's talk about purgatory. All right. People have heard the word before. And a lot of people get it wrong, including a lot of Catholics, let the record show because no one really that if you talk to like the average person, they don't really know what it is like all the Protestants in the world would be like, yeah, dude, this is like non biblical Catholics are out, you know, doing what Catholics do not reading the Bible making stuff up. And if you talk to Catholics, they're like, no, it's mini hell. And it's in the Bible. But the books got taken out by Martin Luther, it's a whole thing. So let's just try to break down line by line to understand everything that's going on with this word. Now, if you are not Catholic, maybe you are Catholic, you probably hear this and you're like, okay, hell light, right? It's like a waiting room where you're basically waiting, and just kind of chilling until judgment day. Technically, neither of these things is what the Catholic Church teaches at all. Here's the actual definition according to the catechism of the Catholic Church, which if you don't know, that's basically like the church's official like rulebook. Again, it's like pulling elements of the Bible and explains the church's doctrine all into one specific book. It's called the catechism. And it basically calls purgatory, the final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. So that last part is pretty important, entirely different from the punishment of the damned. So what does that mean? What is entirely different? Well, it means that everyone in purgatory is saved. Yeah, that's good news, right? Give it up for us. Hit the sounds, Christos. Thank you. I thought you had a soundboard, but that'll work also. Everyone in purgatory is going to heaven. Every soul in that place is a guaranteed ticket to heaven. They made it, all right? The verdict's in, their name is in the book of life, and the gates are open. They're just not ready for it. No. And so don't think of like a prison or like a waiting room. You got to, you could picture it like this. Imagine you've spent your whole life covered in mud, all right? You're not evil. You're not a monster. You're just dirty. You're covered in the grime of being a flawed human being. And now you're standing at the door of a room that is perfect. It is blindingly clean. So clean that you can't walk in while you're still filthy, right? If you walk in there covered in mud, you're going to track in dirt. Purgatory is like the mud room of heaven. Up in the Northeast, we have a lot of these things. It's like a boot room. It's like, okay, you got the house and you got the outside. Then right before you go into the house, there's like a room that's kind of attached to the house that like you take your boots off. That way you don't track mud in everywhere. And it's basically where you go to get cleaned up before you're allowed inside. Now, let me just be clear. Not all Christians believe this. This is specifically like Catholic doctrine, okay? And the technical word for this cleanup is a process. It's called sanctification. The idea is basically this. God saves you. Jesus Christ saves you. But that doesn't mean that you are immediately made perfect. And that is the whole journey. And nothing imperfect can survive standing in front of a perfect and holy God. It'd be like staring into the sun. So first, you have to be made ready. And that getting ready, the final scrubbing of the soul, that is purgatory. Now, the name itself comes from the Latin, pugare. It literally means to purge, to cleanse. And now to be clear, it's not like a separate final destination. Your destination is still heaven, okay? But it's like the hallway. It's like the walkway before you get to heaven. Nobody is born there. No one stays there forever. And this is pretty key. No one in purgatory can slip up and fall into hell. There's only one exit, okay? And it opens into paradise. That's pretty good. That sounds nice, right? But the church teaches that not everybody has to go to purgatory. So saints, like truly holy people who have died in a state of purification, they go straight to heaven. And on the other end, the damned who never accept Jesus Christ, they blaspheme the Lord, they commit unforgivable sins, they're going not to heaven or purgatory. No, they're probably, unfortunately, going to be damned to hell. I'm sorry. Purgatory is for everyone in the middle, right? The people who died in friendship with God, but with a little bit of dust and dirt still on them, not clean enough to walk right in, but not, you know, nearly too far gone or lost to be damned. So purgatory is for everyone who dies in this kind of middle state that needs purification. Now, how many people is that? The church never claims to know. But at the very beginning, purgatory, wasn't the name of a place at all. The whole concept was more of like, it was like an adjective. And here's what I mean. The early Christians talked about a purging fire, getting you ready for heaven, a purifying flame. Purgatory was a process. It was a thing that was going to happen to you, not the place that you go. And it would take more than a thousand years of church history before the adjective would then become like a noun, like a literal place. So for a process to be, you know, understood as a place takes a lot of time, and that leaves a lot of questions. So purgatory as a place technically isn't in the Bible, probably not the Bible, especially if you're evangelicals, no, we're even found in like the Protestant Bible. So where does this idea come from? How does the church land on this? And why do Catholics to this day, still believe it? Now, there are a couple core kind of impulses behind this idea of purgatory. And I don't want to be like, up here evangelizing for the Catholics. Okay, obviously, you know, shout out to all my Catholics out there. But I'm trying to give this in the most like unbiased sort of neutral way that I can. And I'm going to try to lay it out the good and the bad. Okay. The first idea behind purgatory is that the soul needs purification. And we kind of talked about that we'll go into more detail in a second. But the second is the idea that the living can do something to help the dead. And both of these concepts, mind you, are actually older than Christianity. So before the church, the Greeks and the Romans were already praying for their dead relatives, and we're already imagining them in some type of like in between zones. So Plato, for example, you've heard of him, right? He's a philosopher, and he wrote about souls being purified after death. And another Greek thinker described a kind of like holding area in the sky for these departed souls. So this notion that death might not be like an instantaneous thing, and it's like die, bang, heaven, hell, that idea that there's like a middle step before eternity is already kind of floating around. And so then by the late Second Temple period, Jewish scripture also gives us something crucial. In the last few centuries, like BC, before Christ, some Jewish thinkers were imagining an intermediate state for the dead as well. And this is where you get the single most important text that we're going to be drawing from the entire episode. And it comes from a book found in my Bible. Let me put it that way. We'll get into more of this and how all of this came to be. But in the Catholic Bible, there's a book called Second Maccabees. And in it is a really important story from Jewish history about a battlefield. And this is sort of how it goes. There's a Jewish army led by a commander named Judas Maccabeus. And he had just won a pretty brutal fight. Now they're walking the field, collecting their own dead to basically, you know, bury them. These are devout men. They died fighting for God. And as they are lifting the bodies, they find something horrifying tucked under their tunics. They find pagan amulets. They've got pagan idols, little idols, tokens of forbidden gods looted from an enemy temple. And they're secretly being warned by these men who are supposed to be faithful only to one God. Now, these soldiers had died basically like with the sin still on them, like a hidden sin. So what does their commander do? Does he say like, oh, man, we got to curse these men. We got to leave them in the field. We got to write them off. These guys are pagans. We thought they were fighting for us. We thought that they were fighting for the one and only good monotheistic God. But turns out they're pagans. Get rid of them. That's not what he did. Judas Maccabeus took up a collection from his surviving soldiers, like a big collection. And he sent the money to the temple in Jerusalem to pay a sin offering, an offering for men who were already dead. And the text spells out exactly why. So that the dead might be delivered from their sin. What? So pause on that for a sec, because we'll think about what that actually means. It literally gives a prayer and a sacrifice offered for the dead on the assumption that this idea can even still benefit them. It means that the living can do something like pray, give offerings, et cetera, that can actually reach a person who's already gone. So if the dead can be helped, then there has to be somewhere that they go, right? Like, are these people going to hell? And then they're going to die. Are they getting pulled out of hell through these offerings? Like, how exactly does that work? And it's that seed that plants this idea of purgatory. And remember, this comes from a Jewish text, which for Catholics is inspired scripture. And we'll talk about the discrepancy in a second. But once early Christianity starts to show up in like the 100s, the 200s, the greatest thinkers of the time start building on the idea. So, for example, in the 100s, 200s, early church fathers like Tertullian imagined the martyrs going straight to bliss while everybody else is waiting in a realm of the dead. That stages that basically has like a staging area to pass through. And then came a guy who really lit all of this on fire. And his name is Origin of Alexandria. And around the year 230, he took the Old Testament's imagery of divine fire and fused it to a line from the Apostle Paul about being tested by flame. And basically out of that synthesis, he became one of the most influential early Christian thinkers to develop this idea, the idea of spiritual fire that doesn't destroy you. But actually cleanses you. So this is going all the way back to like the early church fathers. And this idea basically being that it burns off the dirt and the junk that leaves the real you standing there the way that like fire would purify gold. And it's a really like kind of beautiful, low-key, terrifying image. And it becomes the foundation of how the early church understands purgatory going forward. Now, we'll pause for a minute and give a second for the skeptics' point of view. Origin obviously was a genius. But the church eventually decided that some of his ideas were perhaps too much. Some ideas like the notion that, you know, eventually everybody gets saved, even the devil. Later, you know, that got branded as like, you know, like a formal heresy. Some other ideas associated with like origin were condemned for centuries after his death. But the church kept this idea, this idea of like the refining fire, that purification theme endured. And then around the year 400, one of the most famous church fathers in Western theological history comes onto the scene. And his name is Augustine of Hippo. Hippo. We'll say Augustine. I get it. I'm going to go with Augustine. Anyway, Augustine helped crystallize the distinction between two kinds of fire. So a fire that consumes you, you know, a fire that consumes the wicked forever, the bad fire, and a fire that saves you. The fire that purifies the ordinary, the decent but, you know, flawed believer. Because Augustine's point was that most people aren't saints. And most people aren't monsters. Most of us kind of land in like the mediocrity of the middle. You know, we do some good stuff. We do some bad stuff. We die. And in Augustine's words, neither so good. That we should shoot up to heaven or go to hell forever. We die maybe good but dirty. And so he says that the prayers of the living still count for those who are not beyond all hope. So by the year 400, all the ingredients are kind of on the table. We got purifying fire. We got a population of dead people that are helpable based off of the, you know, second book of Maccabees. And you have like the in-between state. It's all there. There's just one thing missing. And it's a concept. No one has actually built the process or the place yet. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to talk to you about getting old. I turned 30 this month. Yeah, it's sad. And my body is not responding the way that it used to. I could feel exhausted all day and then I get into bed and then now I'm suddenly wide awake. I'm not recovering as quickly. My motivation is kind of inconsistent. My gym habits are not as sharp as they were. And it felt like a bunch of unrelated problems. But the one thing that I can connect to all those issues is cortisol. It's my body's stress hormone and it's supposed to rise when I'm under pressure and then come back down. The problem is between work and podcasts and stand up and answering emails and meetings and trying to raise a family and being a dad and staring at screens all day and doom scrolling. My stress response is constantly activated. And that's why I've been taking Mars Men. You can hear it. This bottle is basically empty because I legit take this every single day. And they sponsor the episode and I love them. Mars Men uses natural ingredients designed to support healthy testosterone production while helping your body manage. There's no weird stimulants or synthetic hormones and what I like about it is that it doesn't feel like I'm just ripping a cup of coffee and like my heart's going to go crazy. It's designed to support a more consistent energy and stamina and sleep and recovery. It's also made in the USA. It's third party tested and now available at GNC nationwide. Plus it comes with a 90 day money back guarantee and over 91% of users report higher energy levels. All the ingredients are fantastic and natural if I mean you can just buy all of these things separately, but that's going to take a while. You can get a ton of time and be super expensive or you just go to men go to mars.com and you can get all of it packaged into one simple supplement stack that's going to give you everything you need and for a limited time to listeners of this show we're going to get 50% off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts when they go to men go to mars.com that's men go to mars.com for 50% off and three free gifts at checkout and after you purchase tell them the Mark and Christos sent you now let's get back to the show so this all takes us to a room in Rome this is just like a few minutes from the Vatican you can still go see it and this is where the dead have been buried. So let's get back to the show so this all takes us to a room in Rome this is where the dead have been buried. split by a giant wall. And on one side were roaring flames and unbearable cold where souls were suffering. And on the other side over the wall was a meadow where there was light and rest. And you have two zones, a border and the first map of this in between. And it's over these years with these teachings and these visionary experiences that cause purgatory to slowly turn into a real place with terrain and weather and with borders that you could like hypothetically walk across. And then around the turn of the millennium, the West got a day in the calendar to literally sort of commemorate this, All Souls Day, November 2nd. And the observance spread outward from monastic centers like Cluny and then eventually across the entire Western church, an entire day set aside to think about the souls that are gone, but not yet in heaven. And some of which are in heaven, but some of which that are in purgatory, literally it's all the souls. So purgatory in this sort of framework isn't a theory. It was being treated like a official and accepted part of a soul's journey. But keep in mind, even at this point, it's not fully defined in church theology. People are just treating it that way. And now that basically was, you know, being treated like a real place. Humanity is now looking for a door, right? Like medieval Christians become convinced that there was like a real physical entrance to purgatory hidden somewhere on earth. The most famous one of all sat on a tiny island in the middle of like a cold lake in Ireland. And it's literally called St. Patrick's purgatory. You can go to it. It's on a place called the, it's, I don't, I don't speak Gaelic, so forgive me. It's Loc Derg. Now, according to the legend, Christ himself showed St. Patrick a cave on the island and basically like a pit in the ground that was the literal gateway to the other side. So if you climbed into that dark, as the story goes, you would see the souls being purified with your own eyes. And as a result, it became one of the most like grueling, most feared pilgrimage sites in all of medieval Europe. People would come from all over Europe, like Hungary and Italy and France across entire continents in a time where travel is extremely difficult to basically go inside a cave for 24 hours. And they would fast and they would pray and they would just be in there alone in the black, just like darkness of like this cold cave, basically, according to their testimonies, like facing purgatory, but while they were still alive. And it was so famous that for a while, it was the only site in Ireland marked on some of the maps of the whole world. Now, St. Patrick himself, he doesn't really mention the place. The whole legend latched onto the island in like the 1100s, right as the Latin word purgatorium was being written in theological text in Paris. But for the pilgrims, it didn't matter to them. The door is real and they wanted to experience purgatory, at least see it. And they kept on going for like a thousand years. I mean, some people are still going there to this day. But now at this point, purgatory has a theology, it has a name, and in many ways, it even has a door. Now, the only thing that's left is official church teaching. And the church is about to make it so right before the entire thing kind of blows up. So for about a thousand years, purgatory was kind of growing wild, right? There was visions from monks and there was poems and folklore and pilgrimages to go to a cave in Ireland to go see it. Now, the church had to basically make a decision, like, what are we doing? And they did it with a series of councils. And this is literally where like all the big dogs of the church come together and go, OK, what do we all believe? And they basically hammer out what it means to be Catholic. Now, the first big one was the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. And by this point, post-mortem purification and the ability of the living to assist the dead had received a major formal conciliar formation, so to speak, basically like, you know, like, hey, we believe this. And at Florence and at the Council of Trent, they would go on to define the teaching even further. And they came to a few points. So point one is the idea that some souls can get purified after death. Point two is that those souls can be helped by the prayers and the good works of the living. And that second point is going to become a very dangerous sentence for Christianity. And here's why. You can see how people are drawing this logic. OK, if purgatory is temporary, if it is an after-death sentence that you measure in time, right, it is based on this time scale, based off of how much purification you need. And if the living can shorten that time with prayer and good deeds, I mean, that's great. Is there a way that you can shorten that time with prayer and good deeds? Is there a way that you can actually help your loved ones to get out of purgatory early? Can you do something, something concrete that you can actually measure to help the souls out of this purifying fire even faster? And here's where doctrine and practice got unfortunately kind of tangled up. The church taught that certain acts of devotion could remit what it called the temporal punishment due to sin. So punishment for sins whose guilt had already been forgiven. So, you know, prayers and pilgrimages and good deeds, all these things could be applied to the dead. And that remission kind of had a name and they called it an indulgence. And some indulgences kind of, you know, worked with almsgiving, so donations. So in theory, and, you know, this is unfortunate, but kind of wrapped in very careful theology, an indulgence was never meant to be buying forgiveness or buying salvation, right? The guilt is already forgiven by Jesus Christ. This was about the leftover purification, right? Like you were saved by Christ, but there's nothing to be purified. But in practice, human beings ruined it. Fundraising campaigns made that very careful theology look to very ordinary people, terrifyingly close to kind of buying time off of purgatory. And it turned into, I guess you could call it a racket within like the medieval Christian church. Now, this is where a villain will actually come into the story. His name is Johann Tetzel. He was a Dominican friar in Germany in the early 1500s. And he was, sort of like a traveling salesman, so to speak. The church needed enormous piles of cash. You see, Pope Leo X was trying to fund the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, which is one of the most ambitious, most expensive. Cut the bullspend. Go to linkedin.com slash campaign. Turn sick conditions apply. Churches that you could even dream up at the time. So they kind of sent guys like Tetzel out to promote indulgences to the public. And Tetzel didn't preach about them with like a nuanced, you know, sort of down the middle theological kind of framing. He sold them kind of like a carnival roll into town, gather up a crowd and just get to work. So he would, you know, talk about their dead parents. He would talk about their mothers and their fathers. And he'd be like, your father's screaming in the flames of purgatory. And he would look at their kids and the kids would, you know, cry out. And, you know, the kids in purgatory are saying, why won't you help me? Like you have the money in your pocket. Why are you leaving me here to burn? And so then, of course, all the people that are watching this are like, wait, we got to do something. This holy man, a Dominican friar standing in front of me telling me that my family members are burning in purgatory. We got to do something. And then there's a slogan traditionally associated with this campaign, one that historians are still quoting like 500 years later, as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. So like you drop a coin in the box, you hear it clink. And in that instant, that's what the pitch was basically promising that their loved one's soul would fly up out of the fire and into heaven. Now, don't get me wrong. As a Catholic, this is not good. Okay. I don't know. I don't know any Catholics that are like ardently defending like the practice. Just like manipulating people's emotions and grief and trying to turn into a business model. But it worked. And as a result, the money poured in, but not for long, because in a German town called Wittenberg, there was another monk. He was intense and anxious and very devoted to theology. And he was getting sick of watching Tetzel and others basically preying on the poor and on the desperate and on the grieving people of the world, selling them paper promises about their deceased family. And his name is Martin Luther, not King. King Jr. That's a different guy. Martin Luther. And on October 31st, 1517, Luther took a document that he had written a bunch of complaints and arguments and hammered them to the basically the door. According to the story, it's difficult to verify how true this is. But the story is that he nailed it to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Now, keep in mind, Martin Luther is effectively a holy man. He's a he's a priest at this point. And he has 95 complaints. These are the 95 theses. And by all accounts, he's not trying to start a revolution. He thought he was basically kicking off like a, like a debate, like, hey, the church is doing something wrong. And this is what I think we got to fix. And his words basically tore across Germany in a matter of weeks and across the rest of Europe in a few months. The fight that he had picked, starting with whether you could even pay cash to shorten someone's time in purgatory, amongst many other things, did not stay an academic argument. It became the spark of what they call the Protestant Reformation. And, you know, indulgences were the spark. But the fire that followed became a much bigger argument about justification, about scripture and tradition, about how much authority the church has, how much authority the pope has, and ultimately, who has the authority to define Christianity itself. Now, decades later, at the Council of Trent, in direct response to Luther, the church dug in, and it reaffirmed that purgatory is real. It is a real thing and that praying for the dead is good and true. But it also ordered its own bishops to basically knock it off with like the, you know, the specific details. So no more Tetzel, no more Carnal, carnival style, like fire and brimstone, sales pitches, no more manipulating people with, you know, their dead relatives. And after basically like a thousand years of monks piling on, you know, these vivid horrors of purgatory, the church basically was like, hey, guys, this is crazy. We got to rein it in. But unfortunately, by that point, the damage was done. A huge portion of Christianity had already kind of walked out the door. They had been disillusioned. They had seen what Martin Luther was saying. They had gotten aware of his theses due to the printing press coming into Vogue right around the same time. And now people are reading for themselves. They're like, wait a second, I gave the last like hundred bucks I had, whatever amount of money, you get what I'm saying. I gave the last hundred bucks I had to help my father and my mother get out of purgatory. And it turns out like that wasn't exactly true. Like they felt like, oh, I got, I was manipulated. And at that point, thousands of people had already walked out the door and just become Protestants, which leaves the obvious question. The money thing was the spark, but what did Luther and the other people do? What did they do? What did they do? What did they do? The reformers find so deeply wrong with this idea. Like, I mean, Martin Luther at this point, he is a Catholic priest, right? Like he is like a member of the church. So what did he see that everyone else at the time was kind of missing? Like, did they just not like how the Catholic church was treating purgatory? Did they disagree with the idea altogether? Now, again, this is not going to be an entire episode just on the reformation. We should absolutely do that episode. But talking specifically about purgatory, Protestants believe in something that they call grace alone. In Latin, this is called sola gratia. This is the idea that, I mean, you can't earn your way into heaven. You can't be good enough. You can't buy, you can't work for it. You don't deserve it. The, what do they say? The wages of sin are death. Like there's salvation is a free gift paid for completely, totally, and finally by Jesus Christ dying on the cross for your sins. The bill is settled in full and forever. Nothing you can do can change that. It is just a free gift given by Jesus Christ. Now that teaching, you kind of hold it up with, you know, purgatory and purgatory says like, yeah, you're saved, but you're not cleansed. You still have to go through purification. You can't just go straight into heaven with all the sins still on you. And to a Protestant, that little condition, that little like purification thing goes against their entire grace alone teaching. So to the reformers, purgatory quietly insults the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Literally the biggest moment in all of Christendom, they say this purgatory thing is undermining the path of Christ. And so they say, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't power of Christ. It implied that Christ's death was like a down payment, but not the whole price. So it got you most of the way there. And if you were doing the right stuff, you could go all the way. But, you know, for most people, you have to cover the rest yourself in this mini sort of refining fire. And that, they said, is just not true. It's just unchristian. Now, a Catholic would reject that description completely. Catholics also teach that salvation is a gift of grace, and it is from Christ alone, and it can't be purchased or earned. And to them, purgatory isn't the sinner paying off the unpaid part of Christ's bill. It's Christ's grace finishing its work in you, not you completing what Jesus failed to finish. Christ already paid the whole thing. Purgatory is that price being fully applied. Luther, though, put his side about as bluntly as someone can. In his catechism, he leaned hard toward praying for the living. Pray for your enemies and away from the elaborate Catholic system built around guilt and trying to pray the dead out of purgatory. So, the reformers sharply rejected the whole, like, apparatus of purgatory and satisfactions, though Luther's own comments on praying for the dead were actually more complicated than just, like, a universal ban. Luther had a lot of stuff that are more in line with, like, Catholic teaching. You can look into him. Again, we should do a whole episode on Martin Luther. But regardless, there's a second problem here, and this is a scriptural one. Remember how we talked, like, hey, praying for the dead and, you know, offering things for the dead is biblical. Second Maccabees, the story where the guy, like, offers up the prayers and the payments for the dead soldiers that have, like, the pagan sort of, you know, like, like, idols on them. Well, that book isn't in every Christian Bible. Yeah, the reformers rejected what is called the deuterocanonical books. Sometimes the Protestants will call this the Apocrypha, and this includes Second Maccabees. And so, they said that this was actually not equal canonical scripture. Early Protestant Bibles often printed them separately as this Apocrypha, and Catholics, on the other hand, continue to receive and read them as divinely inspired scripture. And this means that the single most important proof for the entire doctrine of purgatory isn't even in the Bible. So, again, well, half the people that identify as Christians, the evangelical Christians, will be like, hey, we don't have any context of this because the reformers basically said that these books were never supposed to be in the Bible in the first place. Now, Catholics will read and be like, hey, this is in my Bible. So, you have a fundamental disconnect about which books are even canonical due to the reformation. Now, the reformers continue to hammer away at that point relentlessly. So, for example, John Calvin argued that purgatory wasn't supported by ancient writers. It wasn't supported by scripture or any solid argument, and it snuck through on a technicality, on a custom, on tradition, but not truth. So, for example, the Church of England's official articles of faith wrote it off in a phrase that's pretty harsh. They say it is a fond, thing, vainly invented. Basically saying like, hey, this whole purgatory thing, it's made up. It's human beings trying to grab onto something, and it's not in the Bible. And they had one proof text of their own that they pointed to. It's the scene of Jesus on the cross dying between two criminals. And you probably know the story. One of them repents at the very last second and asks Jesus to remember him. And Jesus answers, truly, I tell you, today, you will be with me in paradise. Today, not in a couple of weeks after you've been scrubbed down. Through purification today, a convicted criminal, a guy with a lifetime of sin. And up until that point, about zero hours left to make up for any of it. He goes straight to paradise. No waiting room, no fire, no layover, no purgatory. So to Protestants, that one line defines their whole argument. Salvation is immediate. You ask Christ to save you, to remember me in paradise. And Jesus says, hey, today, you're going with me. You're dying saved. You're going home. Now, as you can imagine, Catholic defenders will have an answer for all of this. They argue, that certain things that Jesus said about the age to come imply that some sins can still be dealt with after death. So they point out that praying for the dead is ancient, that you can find it scratched into Christian tombs from like the 100s AD, long before any of the medieval kind of guilt or money grabs came in. And they insist that purgatory doesn't insult the cross at all. They'd actually, they see it as the cross finishing its work. Now, it's also worth noting that the Bible says faith and works. And so, for example, in James chapter two, verse 17, faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. And then it goes on to say, you see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. So again, Catholics will look at this and say, well, faith and works are important. Of course, Jesus Christ saves you. But the work that you do still on earth is a manifestation of that. And even pulls on Abraham and says, Abraham truly lived his faith. He was doing what God was asking him to do. He brought Isaac up onto the mountain to sacrifice him and then didn't. But it was this faith. It was this action. It was the manifestation of his faith. It was the works that go along with the faith that ultimately prove that he was doing the work of God. Now, again, this is just what a Catholic would say. Whatever, wherever you land on this, at the end of the day, the point of purgatory was never to be a squabble over cash or indulgences. It was a genuine disagreement about what Jesus's death actually did and how much works are even important, if any of them at all. And what you could expect to see after you died. But here's what almost no one outside the church realizes. The deepest split over purgatory isn't even necessarily Catholic versus Protestant. There's an entire third giant branch of Christianity that we haven't even talked about yet. And they have a version of the afterlife that is so different and vivid and in some ways frightening that it kind of makes the Western concept look like, you know, a day at the park. So while the Western church is busy building, you know, the purifying fire, the Eastern church, the Eastern versions of Orthodox Christianity, like my good pal Christos over here of the Greek affliction, they had a totally different sort of direction. Now, officially, the Orthodox church rejects the Western word purgatory outright. They, of course, don't like the whole Latin thing, right? It comes from Rome. And, you know, like the legal ledgers, the sin accounting, the idea of like a physical fire with like a count. That's for results. So I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bull spend. Down clock, all that stuff. So when East and West actually sat down together and tried to reunite at the Council of Florence in 1439, part of a story that we actually told in the episode on the Great Schism, this concept was actually one of the deal breakers. The Greek delegation fiercely contested the Latin formulations. One of the delegates, a guy by the name of Bessarion, eventually became one of the strongest voices for reunion and later became a Catholic cardinal. But the best known opponent was a man named Mark of Ephesus and basically refused to sign on to this whole reunification thing at all because the East had its own idea about what happens to your soul in the hours after you die. And it might be one of the most terrifying afterlife beliefs in all of Christianity. They call them the aerial toll houses. So here's how it goes. And again, I'm not Greek Orthodox. I'm not. any type of orthodox. So if I get some of this wrong, forgive me. But my understanding is that the second you die, your soul doesn't peacefully just go towards the light. Instead, angels arrive to escort you and your soul starts to rise up through the air, up through the sky, basically climbing towards heaven. But the sky in this belief is not empty. It is occupied and it is full of demons. Yeah. So as your soul rises, you get stopped again and again at a whole series of checkpoints, like literally toll booths, roughly 20 of them stacked one on top of another all the way up. And at each one, a specific crew of demons is waiting for you because each toll house is assigned to a specific sin. There's a toll house for lying, one for theft, one for gluttony, for pride, murder, adultery, on and on, basically in a rising ladder of accusation. And at every single station, the demons produce their evidence against you. They read your record aloud, every lie that you've ever told, itemized at the lying booth. Basically, it's like an interrogation. They accuse you and they try with everything they've got to drag your soul out of the sky and into hell with them. Now, the most detailed account we have of this comes from a text from the 900s describing a woman named Theodora, who supposedly died, passed through all these toll houses and came back to describe every terrifying level of the climb. Now, this belief is genuinely contested within the Eastern Orthodox churches themselves. This is not a settled, universal, every Eastern Orthodox church believes this, some Orthodox saints and theologians defend the toll house idea fiercely as authentic. And they say it's very ancient teaching handed down from the founding fathers of Christendom. But other major Orthodox thinkers reject them, basically with the same ferocity. They call the whole thing superstitious or non biblical or even heretical. So if you ask, do the Orthodox believe in like these aerial toll houses? The answer is, some do passionately and some absolutely do not. And it is still a very live argument to this day. But here's what's fascinating. If you pull back the imagery, right, the demons, the booths, the terror in the sky, and you look at the bear idea underneath it all, it's a soul after death in a state that's not heaven and isn't hell. It's being sorted and tested and tried and accounted for sin by sin before it's allowed to enter paradise. So it's similar in a way to purgatory. One Orthodox writer put it this way. He described the toll house ordeal as basically the Byzantine cousin of the sort of Latin Roman purgatory, just in his words, minus the fireworks. So even setting aside the fact that these toll houses are a contested tradition rather than official Eastern doctrine, it's pretty striking that two enormous branches of Christianity and up until the Reformation, really the holders of Christendom, they have this kind of overlap, right? They're split apart for, you know, a thousand years at this point. But yet, there's imagery. There's an image of Christendom. There's an image of Christendom that keeps circling the same haunting kind of feeling. That between this life and eternity, there's something in the middle. Which finally brings us to the most beautiful version that anyone ever thought of. Because one man took the whole dark, terrifying idea and turned it into one of the greatest poems ever written. So everything that we've covered this far has been pretty dark, right? You got fire and demons and caves and screaming souls and the whole thing. But in the early 1300s, there is this exiled Italian poet named Dante Alighieri. And he basically looked at this poem and he said, you know what? I'm going to read it to you. He basically looked at Purgatory and saw something that no one had really thought about before. He saw hope. So in his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, Dante takes an imaginary journey through the entire afterlife. And he goes down through hell, up through Purgatory, and then finally into heaven. And his vision of that middle part, the, as he calls it, Purgatorio, basically rewired how the whole world pictured this place. And he didn't just do it for Purgatory. I mean, Dante's vision of hell is kind of how all, I shouldn't say all, but most medieval Catholics, like, understood hell. It was really from this one work known as The Divine Comedy. Like the layers of hell, all that stuff comes from Dante. Now Dante, maybe more than any pope or council or any theologian, painted the picture that's still in our heads today. And here's the thing. Almost none of it is church doctrine. Dante just kind of made it up, right? Like he didn't picture a cave or a pit or a dungeon buried under the earth. He pictured mountains, like enormous mountains rising up out of the sea, on the far side of the world. And here's the genius of all of it. Hell, in Dante's telling, is a descent. So you spiral down into the dark, level after level, each of them getting worse and worse. But Purgatory is the opposite. It is a climb. You go up. Every single step gets you closer to the light. So this mountain that he's describing has seven terraces, ringing it, basically like these stacked rings. And each terrace is dedicated to purging one of these seven deadly sins. So as the soul climbs, it works through each of them, one at a time. The heaviest sins are dealt with down at the bottom, and the lightest sins are dealt with at the top. And the soul is basically getting lighter and freer and cleaner and more purified with each level that it climbs. But here's the most profound idea that Dante puts forward, is that on this mountain, the suffering isn't punishment. It's not torture just for the sake of torture, like God or the angels or. No one's taking glee in this torture. It's like rehab. He pictures it like a physical therapy, even just like therapy. He basically is just like, each terrace is a place where the soul faces and reflects and corrects a specific flaw, a specific sin that you were dealing with. And it's maybe uncomfortable. It's probably painful in the way that rehab or therapy probably is. But Dante saw a sin as a love gone wrong. It was a love or it was a good intention aimed at the wrong thing, or maybe too much of one thing, or maybe too little. He saw purgatory as a place where the broken basically finally gets set straight. So yes, the souls on the mountain are suffering, but they're suffering the way that you suffer through an injury, right? If you pull your shoulder, you got to heal that. And it hurts to do the work, but every ache is basically putting you back together. And what's astonishing is that Dante says that the soul actually wants to be there. The soul embraces the pain. Maybe they can feel that it's healing. Maybe they know that they're on their way to an eternity in paradise. Maybe it's like working out when like, you know, after you work out, if you're not doing it for a while, like you feel really sore, but it's almost like a good kind of sore. And the longer you stick with it, the more you start to see the gains and the pain doesn't stick around so much. You know, it's like you start to see the results. Now for Dante near the very top, right before a soul can reach the summit, there is a final barrier. This is a literal wall of fire that every soul has to walk through, literally walking through the fire. And Dante says that in this flame, there may be pain, but there is no death. And it's kind of a last echo of all the old imagery, all the stuff we've been talking about, this purifying fire that we mentioned. But now it's not a place where you stay. It is the doorway. It is the threshold into paradise. And then at the summit, Dante says there are two rivers. The first one is called Lethe. And when a purified soul drinks from it, it forgets. It forgets every sin and all the shame and the pain of every wrong thing that it ever did. It's just completely washed away. But Dante believed that erasing the bad isn't enough. That would just basically kind of leave you empty. So then he added a second river. Now, again, let me just be clear. This is not in the Bible. This is not like something that it's in the Catholic catechism. This is Dante's interpretation. But Dante adds the second river, one that's entirely his own invention. He calls this river Eunoe. And it's basically when the soul goes to drink from it, the soul remembers, not the sins and not the, pain of reality, but the good, every kind act, every moment of grace, every good thing that the soul ever did. And all of it is restored. So one makes you forget. The other makes you remember all the good things. So the soul finally steps into heaven whole. It faced all of its sins. It corrected all of the worst. And it basically filled itself back up with all of the best. All the shame gets emptied. And now it is full of light. That is Dante's version of purgatory. It's not a place where you can just drink from it. It's not a place where your soul is to burn. It's a place where you go to heal. It is a hospital to get better. It is a rehab facility. And at the very end, only the good basically remains with you. The best that was with you the whole time, that's what stays. And it's a very gorgeous picture that kind of makes you forget where we started. The place in Rome, the burnt handprints behind the glass, all that stuff. You see this version, you're like, oh, that's actually pretty nice. You can see why Dante was popular in his time and even to this day. Before we close it all out, let's go back to those places, right? Because those two visions of purgatory, the terrifying one and the beautiful one, have kind of been at odds with each other for like thousands of years. And this is like, you know, the real reason that the idea survived at all. Every schism, every scandal, like all of it comes down to these two visions and kind of which one you reach for. Because at the end of the day, the word purgatory, as we know it, is not like perfectly laid out in any scripture, right? It's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, just right there. Like there's elements that people pull onto, some of which might not even be in your Bible. But the most important sort of illustration found in scripture was rejected by many Christians after the Reformation. And it got so tangled up in greed and corruption and kind of human beings ruining stuff that it actually really changed how the church saw itself and really caused the Reformation in many ways. But yet, over a billion people still believe that there is a version of it today. And I think there's probably many reasons. I think one, you know, purgatory is an answer to a question that can't just go away, right? Like a question that every single one of us, whether you're a believer or a skeptic, you have to face is that, okay, I think about someone that I lost, like, you know, they were a good person, they liked Jesus, but they also did a lot of terrible things. Like, are they worthy of heaven? And then, of course, you think about your own death, right? You're like, okay, was I i perfect on earth i did a lot of terrible things but i love jesus like is that good enough and of course no one's good enough right like no one is perfect like we're all flawed but human we're all dirty and we want to you know have some type of eternal life with jesus christ if you're a christian so that's constantly with everyone so when you try to picture where your loved ones are right now you kind of run into this problem that purgatory is trying to solve because it feels wrong to imagine like a good ordinary person getting you know damned to hell for eternity just because maybe they didn't know the name of jesus christ like that seems not fair but also maybe are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard but not the pipeline that's bullspend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions my boss asked for results so i opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric i had impressions cut the bullspend see revenue not just reach you on ad spend of major ad networks advertise on linkedin spend 250 on your first campaign and get a 250 credit go to linkedin.com slash campaign turn sick additions apply maybe it's just too easy to picture them like strolling through perfect paradise completely unchanged still dragging all the dents and like flaws that they have with them and purgatory in many ways kind of solves it right it kind of bridges the gap kind of literally it says hey you don't have to be a saint you don't have to be a monster but it also doesn't mean that you were merely like almost good enough in catholic theology if you're in purgatory christ has saved you the verdict is in purgatory is the final work of grace that makes you perfectly ready for heaven there's a place where the saved but not yet spotless finally can get cleaned up and rehabilitated but there's also another reason why it's lasted this long and the reason is that it really gives comfort to grieving people for thousands of years and it still does because purgatory means that the dead are not beyond your reach that you know heaven and hell those are sealed those are final nothing can go in or out but purgatory has like a little bit of a crack a little bit of a highway to heaven and it says that your love still matters after someone's gone that there's a prayer that can still cross the divide that there's still something that you can do while on earth to help your mother or your father or your child and you can still somehow reach them and help and that's why those people in rome that's why they were participating that's why they were doing this in many ways right like they were you know they weren't just cataloging like spooky things they were desperate to believe that their mothers or their fathers or their husbands or wives were still out there in the world close enough to reach back close enough to you know in the case of this one museum the you know the museum of souls and purgatory could literally burn a hand in our actual world and leave a mark it makes you go like oh wow they're still there and what i'm doing on earth is actually worthwhile in helping them and you know i think all of us kind of understand this because if you don't believe a word of this theology maybe you're not even christian there's a version in this that we all kind of do right like we keep like a deceased relative's watch in a drawer and it's something that like you would grab if your house caught on fire like you would you know visit a grave and talk out loud to someone that passed away just because it makes you feel good and you don't have any idea how that you know these words could reach that person or if it even matters you might keep a voicemail of your grandma the last voicemail she ever left you and you listen to it because it just makes you feel close and none of that survives like a skeptical cross-examination but we all kind of do it because love and the love and the grief that we all feel doesn't accept that we're not alone in this and we're not alone in this and we're not alone in this it's just done that the door is closed like we want to believe that there's something else and that there's a way that what we're doing on earth can can matter you know and maybe it's dante's version maybe it isn't maybe it's in the catechism maybe it's not but the question underneath all of it doesn't change right like what happens to the people that we love when they were good people and we know that they were good but they weren't perfect maybe they were good but maybe they didn't really like rock with christianity they didn't rock with jesus maybe they were an amazing person of a different religion like are they destined for hell and i think the most surprising thing that i take away from this and like really deep diving into purgatory and trying to understand something that i was kind of raised to always believe it's not like the demons or the fire the sinfulness it's the hope that it offers so many people at the end purgatory means that your journey and the journey the people you love isn't over and it means that there's still more to go and that there is a light waiting for you as dante would say at the top of a mountain and that ladies and gentlemen is a brief synopsis of the history of purgatory it's a fascinating thing something that i don't know if you've heard of but it's a fascinating thing it's a fascinating thing dealt with a lot as a kid because you gotta understand i was raised by super catholic parents my mom the most catholic woman i ever met so as a result this is something that i just believed she was like yeah you know like for example like we all have original sin and so like if a child dies in early childhood before they're baptized they're not able to get cleansed of their sin and so they also are too young to know the name of jesus christ they can't accept christ to be their savior so if they were to die where do they go my mom would always bring this up as a purified by the you know by jesus christ they didn't accept jesus as their savior so what happens to them and i'd be like well i guess by that logic they go to hell and she's like but that doesn't seem fair right like how is it fair that like a two-day old child that doesn't get baptized goes to hell it seems crazy i'm like well okay they go to heaven she goes but they're still in a state of sin they're not purified so how do they go to heaven i go mom i'm seven years old i don't know what's going on what are you talking about and she'd be like purgatory it's in the bible look it up second maccabees and i've opened up my bible it'd be an niv and i'd be like mom it's not in the bible she's like where'd you get this bible from i'm like oh my goodness because you gotta understand i went to i didn't go to catholic school i was homeschooled and then i went to presbyterian school so now i go to presbyterian school and we're having these debates and i'm like yeah you know they go to purgatory and all the kids are like what's that and i go guys you guys are barely christian you don't know about purgatory and they'd be like point to in the bible and i'd be like my mom already brought this up it's not in there and so it sent me on this big rabbit hole trying to like if i had to pull myself out of you know my upbringing and my biases it's like a helpful thing to you know put people into a category where it's like all right some guy lives on a faraway island no missionaries ever went to him he never heard the name jesus christ he believes in like his local gods but he lived a good life he took care of his family his friends he never murdered he tried to do what was just where does he go he dies maybe in like a horrific uh you know spear juggling accident he's juggling spears gets pierced bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang he dies what happens to him he goes to heaven he never knew jesus christ never repented for his sins he was worshiping false gods the whole time he gets to go to heaven that seems crazy but he can't go to hell i mean he was a good guy he tried his best so i think evangelicals i think protestants again i'm kind of assuming here i think they say he goes to heaven because the covenant's written on the heart he did what was good based off his own accord and that's good enough but it's like if you're saved by jesus christ he didn't he didn't know jesus so what where does he go i think catholics would be like he can't go to heaven he can't go to heaven he can't go to heaven he can't go to purgatory and most of us probably do do go there now the catholics never say that they know who's in heaven i think the saints are like their understanding of like who was most likely in heaven and all people in heaven are saints but we only know of a select group that we believe are saintly enough on earth that we have like a 99 uh confidence that they're in heaven anyway i hope this wasn't too technical i hope this gets the point across and if all the catholics out there i hope it didn't i did a good enough job of explaining where this comes from and why and the rails and you've never heard of this before i hope that you understand where catholics come from and why they believe it based off of catholic scripture and some of the books that were taken out in the uh deuterocanonical texts as you guys call them the apocrypha which feels feels like a slur you know the apocrypha deuterocanonical i like that better chris what do you think are you ready to go to your aerial toll booths well i was just about to talk about that so it's not it's only really accepted by eastern orthodox people who go by the old calendar oh yeah i didn't know that so modern ones don't really believe in that interesting have you ever heard that term before the aerial toll house yeah not in english how do you say it uh it was pronounced somehow in my greek school i just don't remember how but was it taught to you it was taught as something that we don't really believe in anymore that's hilarious but it is like an awesome video game mission kind of thing yeah it's like gta but heaven it's like answer to listen and then answer to listen how does no one made that video game that's pretty cool it's a great idea wait let's cut this yeah yeah cut this and we're gonna get rich off this video game idea that's right what do you guys think if you grew up catholic what is your understanding of purgatory what is there anything i missed in my uh attempt to try to be unbiased sorry if i did but please correct me in the comments if you're protestant evangelical the church of england anglican lutheran whatever what are your thoughts on purgatory does it like the the hypotheticals i brought up about like the guy on an island never knew jesus or like the child that dies at one day old where do they go and how does that sort of fit with your theology and if you come completely outside of the christian paradigm if you're muslim jewish hindu whatever how do you understand this like does your religion have a similar kind of thing like sort of like a purification station so to speak how does it work for you guys these hypotheticals of like an innocent child that dies where do they go what how do you understand it is the power of allah great enough that they just get brought in have they not done any sins so there's nothing to account for how do you understand it i would love to know what everyone's thoughts are please drop a comment youtube spotify i read all of them i don't get back to every single one but i do read them and if i don't get back i'm sure someone else will and uh also a couple other camp bulletins let me say if you like history content like deep diving on crazy historical stuff we have history camp if you like deep dives on mysteries conspiracies of the modern day well great news camp canyon the main channel that's for you also we have a secret society yeah patreon.com camp gagnon it's the place where you can go to to hang out with me and the zooms we do episodes that never got to the public early release on episodes and every episode of this show and all the channels all completely add free. And if you just like to rock with the religion vibe, well, great news. You're in the right place. This is Religion Camp. We drop these episodes every single Sunday. So thank you guys so much for tuning in. I appreciate you all immensely for being here. God bless. Go to church or Gurdwara or mosque or temple, whatever you do, just believe in something. And I'll see you guys next time. Peace. Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.