Prayers for the Dead, and the Fire

This page takes no position, and that is deliberate. Two things usually get argued as one, and they are not one: whether Christians may pray for their dead, and whether there is a state of purification after death. The first is an ancient practice with clear early evidence. The second is a doctrine the early church did not agree about, and its central proof text was read four different ways before Nicaea was cold.

What the practice actually was

The oldest text anyone cites is in the deuterocanon, and it is plain: Judas Maccabeus sends money to Jerusalem for sacrifice "for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection," and the writer draws the conclusion himself, "It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins" (2 Maccabees 12:43-46).

Notice the reasoning, because it is not what either side usually reports. The argument is from the resurrection: "For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead." Praying for the dead is offered as evidence that the writer believed in resurrection, not as a theory about an intermediate state.

The Catholic account, stated as Catholics state it

The usual Protestant objection is that praying for the dead means talking to the dead, which Scripture forbids. That is not the Catholic claim, and it is worth hearing accurately. On that account the faithful departed are not dead in the sense the prohibition means; they are alive in Christ, abiding in Him, and asking a believer in heaven to pray is no different in kind from asking a believer beside you in the pew. The one body is not severed by death.

Whatever you make of it, the argument stands or falls on whether the departed in Christ are alive and aware, and not on necromancy, which everyone involved condemns.

The verse, read in its own paragraph

Everything turns on one sentence, and the sentence has a context almost nobody quotes with it. Paul is not talking about a believer's sins. He is talking about ministers, and about what they build on a foundation somebody else laid.

Read that as a paragraph and three things are hard to miss.

The materials are teachings, not sins. Every commentator on our shelf says so and none of them is Catholic or Protestant about it. Gill: the gold and silver are "the different doctrines advanced upon it... for their intrinsic worth and value," and the wood and stubble are "such trifling, useless, and inconsistent things." Clarke: "by gold, silver, and precious stones, the apostle certainly means pure and wholesome doctrines: by wood, hay, and stubble, false doctrines." The Pulpit: "erroneous or imperfect doctrines, which would not stand the test." Barnes: "If any teacher in the doctrines which he inculcates... The main discussion doubtless, has respect to the teachers of religion."

The fire tries the work, not the man. "The fire shall try every man's work." What burns is what he built. The Pulpit puts the character of it in seven words: "It is the fire of the refiner, not of the avenger."

And the loss is reward, not salvation. "He shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved." Gill: he loses "all that glory and popular applause he might expect from men." The Pulpit: "He shall not receive the full reward to which he might otherwise look."

None of that forbids the doctrine that was later built here. It does mean the doctrine is not what the paragraph is about, and the men who read it as being about a teacher's bad theology rather than a believer's unpurged sins are not being evasive. They are reading verses 10 through 14.

The fire, and the ways it was read

Before the fifth century the same sentence goes several directions at once.

Origen, around AD 230, reads it as a fire that burns away what a man has built badly: "The fire will try each man's work of what sort it is... But what work can be spoken of in these words as being burned?"

Cyprian, around 250, writing about penance rather than the afterlife, still speaks in the same key: "It is one thing to stand for pardon, another thing to attain to glory: it is one thing, when cast into prison, not to go out thence until one has paid the uttermost farthing; another thing" to receive the reward at once.

Lactantius, around 310, quotes the pagan poet Virgil on souls that "penal sufferings they endure For ancient crime, to make them pure," and then says something remarkable: "These things are near to the truth."

Chrysostom, around 390, preaching on this exact passage, goes the other way entirely. He takes the fire as the fire of judgment that is not quenched, cites "their fire shall not be quenched, and their worm shall not die," and presses "the eternity of the punishment," that sinners "shall pay the penalty of destruction, and that for ever." Whatever Paul's fire is, Chrysostom does not think it purifies anybody.

And there was a fifth reading, harsher than any of them. The Pulpit Commentary records that "some of the Fathers gave to this beautiful verse the shockingly perverted meaning that 'the workman would be preserved alive for endless torments,' 'salted with fire' in order to endure interminable agonies," and answers it flatly: "The meaning is impossible, for it reverses the sense of the word 'saved;' and makes it equivalent to 'damned.'"

Augustine also gives the practice its reason

Augustine is quoted below for suspending the doctrine, and that is the sentence usually reached for. He should be quoted for the other thing too, because it is the strongest paragraph on the Catholic side and leaving it out would be winning cheaply. Asking why the church prays for some of the dead and not others, he answers by describing a middle class of people in so many words:

For some of the dead, indeed, the prayer of the Church or of pious individuals is heard; but it is for those who, having been regenerated in Christ, did not spend their life so wickedly that they can be judged unworthy of such compassion, nor so well that they can be considered to have no need of it. As also, after the resurrection, there will be some of the dead to whom, after they have endured the pains proper to the spirits of the dead, mercy shall be accorded, and acquittal from the punishment of the eternal fire.

St Augustine, City of God XXI

Take the clauses one at a time. Regenerated in Christ, so not an unbeliever. Not so wicked as to be past compassion, and not so good as to have no need of it. Pains endured, then mercy, then acquittal. That is a described category with a described outcome, and it is doing real work: it is Augustine's explanation of why the church prays for the dead at all, which is the practice this page has already granted is early and undisputed.

And in the same book, asked who it is that "shall be saved, yet so as by fire," he does not rule. "Let us join them in their inquiry." He is investigating, and says so.

The East read the same verse and did not arrive where the West did. Chrysostom, preaching on 1 Corinthians 3 in Antioch, counts two punishments in it rather than a cleansing, and his last sentence is the one that matters: the man abides in the fire, he does not pass through it.

Augustine leaves it open, in his own words

The whole Western development rests on Augustine, and what Augustine actually wrote is the most useful sentence in this entire argument. He does not assert it. He suspends it.

"It is not impossible that something of the same kind may take place even after this life. It is a matter that may be inquired into, and either ascertained or left doubtful, whether some believers shall pass through a kind of purgatorial fire, and in proportion as they have loved with more or less devotion the goods that perish, be less or more quickly delivered from it."

— St. Augustine

Either ascertained or left doubtful. The man whose name the doctrine would be built on treated it as an open question and said so plainly, which is worth remembering whichever way you lean. Gregory the Great, two centuries later, is far more confident. The Council of Florence in 1439 defines it in an attempt to reunite East and West, the East does not accept it, and Trent in 1563 defines it again against the Reformers. Each step is more certain than the one before it, and the first step is a man saying the matter may be left doubtful.

So what can honestly be said

Three things, and no more.

The practice is early. Christians were praying for their dead well before the doctrine was defined, and the evidence for that is not seriously disputed by anyone.

The doctrine is not unanimous, and it is not absent either. Anyone who says purgatory was invented in the Middle Ages has to account for Origen, Cyprian and Lactantius. Anyone who says the early church taught it has to account for Chrysostom reading the central text as final judgment. Both claims are made confidently and neither survives the sources.

Scripture does not describe it. The New Testament nowhere sets out a state of purification after death, and the argument for it rests on inference from a verse about a builder's work and on a practice recorded in 2 Maccabees. That is a real argument. It is not a plain statement, and this site does not turn inference into a line.

So we hold it open. We are not going to defend a doctrine Scripture does not plainly teach, and we are not going to sneer at a practice the church was doing before it had a word for it. Where Scripture stops, we stop.

Related: What About the Children?, Judgment, Heaven, Hell, 2 Maccabees, Lines Drawn. Origen, Cyprian, Lactantius and Chrysostom from the Ante-Nicene and Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers, public domain. Scripture from the King James Version; 2 Maccabees in the Douay-Rheims.