Gene Edward Veith points out a news story about Professor Jerry L. Walls, who teaches the idea of purgatory and has written about it in Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation. Walls apparently buys into the Catholic understanding of the purification of believers. As this article explains, followers of Christ must be purified even if they are forgiven of all their sins. Their sanctification is not fully accomplished by Christ’s work on the cross, but by some spiritual process between death and paradise. David Gibson of RNS states, “In recent years, the emphasis [for purgatory’s purpose] has swung from ‘satisfying’ the justice of God through painful reparations to one of sanctification, or becoming holy.

“’To suggest instead that Christians will enjoy a kind of express executive elevator at the time of death is to suggest that those who work hard on holiness in this life are wasting their efforts,’ John G. Stackhouse, Jr., a popular evangelical author at Canada’s Regent College wrote in an essay on Walls’ ideas in The Christian Century.”

This Catholic writer explains, “Catholic theology takes seriously the notion that ‘nothing unclean shall enter heaven.’ From this it is inferred that a less than cleansed soul, even if ‘covered,’ remains a dirty soul and isn’t fit for heaven.” But I guess Christ’s atonement does not accomplish this, so though we are fully saved by his grace, we must be fully purified by purgatory’s refining fire, which has been a big problem historically (not to mention the fact that the Protestant Bible doesn’t allow for even prayers on behalf of the dead).