David Taylor to Bread of Life:
"No this [Matthew 5:25-26] has nothing to do with Purgatory. That is reading into the passage.
You gave examples that have nothing to do with what you claim they do. Purgatory is a false doctrine from a false church."
Ah, the right time for me, a Pentecostal United Methodist, to come to the defense of my Catholic brothers.
A. "Come to terms quickly with you accuser [the Spirit of God working through conscience] while you are on the way to court with Him, or your accuser may hand you over to the Judge [God] , and the Judge to the guard [Satan], and you will be thrown in prison (Gehenna). Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny (Matthew 5:25-26)."
There are 7 grounds for applying this saying of Jesus to Purgatory:
(1) This text makes no sense if taken literally because Jesus would be telling his criminal disciples how to beat the rap.
(2) When Jesus uses the solemn expression "Truly I tell you," He always applies it to our relationship with God and never to secular cases like a court case over debt.
(3) Matthew 5:25-26 is consistently taken in a spiritualized sense in the early church rather than in a literal sense.
(4) Jesus uses the word "debt" for "sin" in the Lord's Prayer (Luke 11:4). Indeed, in Aramaic "hob" (= "debt") is a standard word for "sin."
(5) In late antiquity "prison" is a standard image for Hell.
(6) Luke 12:57-59 places the same saying in an eschatological context that is appropriate for a discussion of our postmortem fate.
(7) In the Parable of 2 Debtors Jesus says something similar in a context that clearly applies to a sinful debtor's post-mortem purgatorial fate:
"In anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay all his debt (Matthew 18:34)."
B. "If the work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as by fire (1 Corinthians 3:15)."
The application of this Pauline text to Purgatory can be defended on at least these 3 grounds:
(1) In ancient rabbinic Judaism, the expression "saved, yet so as by fire" refers to postmortem purifying fire in Gehenna that prepares sinful Jews for their ascent to Heaven (for examples, see Strack-Billerbeck 4.2:1043-1049). Metaphoric expressions derive their meaning from their cultural context; so Fundamentalists have no grounds for construing the expression in the weaker sense as a metaphor for "saved by the skin of their teeth." Higher levels of Gehenna serve as an image of a state later labelled as Purgatory.
(2) Like his Jewish contemporaries (e. g 2 Enoch 8:1-3; Apocalypse of Moses 40:2), Paul locates Paradise in the third Heaven (2 Corinthians 12:2, 4)." Paradise is the preferred point of postmortem arrival for the redeemed (Luke 23:42-43). Its location in the 3rd Heaven establishes the concept of levels of Heaven and raises the question about the nature of the first 2 Heavens. In Jewish conception the 2nd Heaven is described as fiery realm reminiscent of Purgatory.
(3) As Evangelical apologist C. S. Lewis famously said, "the gates of Hell are locked from the inside." In several places the New Testament teaches the possibility of graduation from Hell, a concept that is neatly compatible with the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. I will document this teaching in my next planned post.