A Big Shout Out to the Pope

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One more quick comment on penitential seasons. I do believe it is possible for good, sound Protestants to observe such seasons, provided they redefine everything and do something very different from what gave rise to the historical practice in the first place. But it seems to me this is done with success rarely, and when it is successfully done, the question “why?” naturally arises.

In my view, the impulse behind penitenitial-seasons-gone-wrong is the same as the impulse behind purgatory. But the gospel is all about free grace, free all the way, free down to the ground, free now. As the old gospel song puts it, “Jesus paid it all.” And the untenable nature of certain traditional customs and beliefs is becoming increasingly obvious in significant places. A recent writer makes this observation:

“More remarkable still is the view of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Building on 1 Corinthians 3, he argued that the Lord himself is the fire of judgment, which transforms us as he conforms us to his glorious, resurrected body. This happens not during a long, drawn-out process but in the moment of final judgment itself. By thus linking purgatory to Jesus Christ himself as the eschatological fire, Ratzinger detached the doctrine of purgatory from the concept of an intermediate state and broke the link that in the Middle Ages gave rise to the idea of indulgences and so provided a soft target for Protestant polemic. Whatever we think of that, it is clear that two of the most central, important and conservative Roman theologians of the last generation [Rahner being the other] offered a quite radical climb-down from Acquinas, Dante, Newman, and all that went in between”

This is really interesting, but it should noted in passing that it simply replaces one soft target with another — the magisterium is now in for purgatory, and it seems clear that radical “death by redefinition” is in process for the former as well as the latter.

The same writer, referring to the great last paragraph of Romans 8, says rightly it leaves no room for purgatory in any form. Who shall lay any charge against us? “And if you still want to say that Paul really meant ‘though of course you’ll probably have to go through purgatory first,’ I think with great respect that you ought to see not a theologian but a therapist.”

So my point is this — for those evangelical Protestants who are engaged in “going back” or “recovering” certain liturgical practices, it is important to make sure that we are not falling into a trap that previous generations of our Christian brothers undeniably fell into. Seasons of penitence, the way they have been practiced for centuries (by people who also believed in purgatory for similar reasons), are potentially deadly. Okay, so we found something really cool in the barn. Let’s just fumigate it thoroughly before we talk about bringing it into the house.

One last comment. I am not talking here about penitential seasons per se being equivalent to purgatory because in a very real sense this life is where the purgation is supposed to occur. In other words, there are numerous ways in which repentance, cleansing, sanctification, and so on are supposed to be an ongoing reality in our lives. What I am saying is that our liturgical and historical idea of what penitence in the course of a penitential season is supposed to look like was largely shaped by people who also thought that the sufferings of Jesus on the cross needed to be supplemented by us to get the job of our forgiveness done. That is what we need to ditch, and a big shout out to the pope for doing so.