Purgatory
연옥
Purgatory is the final purification which, the Catholic Church teaches, those who die in God's grace but not yet fully purified undergo before entering heaven. The Orthodox churches have not defined it as doctrine, and Protestant churches reject it.
The Catholic teaching
‘Purgatory’ comes from the Latin purgatorium, a place or state of cleansing. It is the Catholic Church's teaching about part of the intermediate state between death and the resurrection. The Catholic Church teaches that those who die in God's grace and friendship but are not yet fully purified are certain of their salvation, yet after death undergo purification so as to reach the holiness needed to enter the joy of heaven. Purgatory is neither hell nor a second chance, but the last stage of being made holy Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Catholics point to the holiness "without which no one will see the Lord" (Hebrews 12:14) and to the new Jerusalem, of which it is said that "nothing unclean will ever enter it" (Revelation 21:27), and they read Paul's words as a picture of that purification.
If it is burned up, he will suffer loss. He himself will be saved, but only as if through the flames.
1 Corinthians 3:15
They also note that the sin against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven "either in this age or in the one to come" (Matthew 12:32), as implying that some sins are forgiven in the age to come, and they point to the offering made for the dead in 2 Maccabees 12. Prayer for the dead goes back to the early church: Augustine tells how his mother Monica, dying, asked only to be remembered at the Lord's altar wherever he might be Augustine, Confessions, Book 9. The Council of Trent affirmed in 1563 that purgatory exists and that the souls there are helped by the prayers of the faithful and above all by the Mass, while warning against superstition and idle curiosity Council of Trent, Decree on Purgatory.
How other traditions see it
The Orthodox churches also pray for the departed and believe their prayers help them, but have not defined purgatory as the West has. When the question was discussed at the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century, the Eastern delegates objected to the Western account of a purifying fire.
Protestant churches reject purgatory. Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses of 1517 challenged the sale of indulgences for souls in purgatory Luther, The Ninety-five Theses, and the Reformation churches soon judged purgatory itself to have no ground in Scripture Thirty-Nine Articles, art. 22. Since "by a single offering He has made perfect for all time those who are being sanctified" (Hebrews 10:14), and "the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin" (1 John 1:7), nothing is left to be purged by suffering after death. Second Maccabees belongs to the Apocrypha, which Protestants do not receive as Scripture. Protestants confess that at death believers are made perfect in holiness by God's grace, and the Westminster Confession says of the two places for departed souls, heaven and hell:
Besides these two places for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledgeth none.
Westminster Confession 32.1
For all their differences, these traditions agree that without holiness no one will see the Lord, and that only Christ's grace can give it. See also the lesson Death and the intermediate state and What happens after death?
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Scripture quotations: BSB.