Truth Unites - Did John Chrysostom Affirm Purgatory?

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

In this video Gavin Ortlund responds to a critique from the channel Agnus Domini about whether John Chrysostom believed in purgatory. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

This video is going to address whether John Chrysostom believed in purgatory. And this is in response to a criticism of me from the channel Agnes Domini. I don't want to do too many responses. I really want my videos to serve viewers and never to be about me defending myself in any way. But sometimes you have to set the record straight about something, especially when you see good faith onlookers maybe getting swayed by something. So that's what I want to do here. Three sections.

First, I want to address these first two are quick. why referencing the scholarship on this question is appropriate. Second, I want to discuss the nature of quote mining, because that was the charge he made against me. And then third, I want to work through John's writings themselves to show that, no, John Chrysostom did not believe in purgatory, and then we'll have some kind of summative implications to conclude with. But first, I think a candle is burning behind me.

I need to pause and check. This is our library upstairs, and it's my temporary studio. I lit a candle behind me. Try to get more light back there. May have been a mistake. I shall be back. Okay, it's probably fine, but now I have a little more peace of mind as I go here. It's also pouring rain right now, and we have these sky windows, so it's kind of interesting time to record. I also have five children sleeping right below me on the floor beneath me, so odds of me getting interrupted are very possible here. Okay, first, the claim that John Chrysostom did not believe in purgatory is pretty standard in the

scholarship to my awareness. I had mentioned this as given one example of this in my initial video. You could look at Brian Daly's book, which I think I held up earlier. He argues for the exact same thing on pages 108 and 109. That's Brian Daly's book. He's a fantastic Roman Catholic scholar. His book is very well received, The Hope of the Early Church, published in 1991 by Cambridge University Press. He's a very good scholar. Here's what Agnes Domini had to say about that. Seriously, how can anyone take Gavin's serious? He tries to bolster his position with scholarship. But I would be shocked, see, I would be shocked to find out that any serious theologian actually denies the clear teaching of purgatory in Chrysostom's homily.

And even if there were, there are scholars who say the most outrageous nonsense. Having scholarly support for your position, which Autland probably doesn't even have and it's just bluffing about, doesn't even make your position true even if it was true. Now, I held up the book and gave page numbers so he could have consulted. it rather than cause his audience to think that I'm probably bluffing. Let me put the passage up here so people can just see what I was referencing. He says Chrysostom does not seem to have had any conception of an interim state between death and resurrection, different in kind or degree from a person's ultimate fulfillment.

The punishments of the damned begin, in his view, immediately after their death. A point he too finds illustrated by the parable of the dives and Lazarus. The souls of the just, on the other hand, go directly to Christ. Remember that adverb directly. That's going to come up later. But one of the tactics people used to try to discredit me is to say I'm misrepresenting these scholars. They do this with Stephen Shoemaker as well, even though I'm literally just quoting the summary passages where he's giving an overview of his thesis at like the beginning or end of the book. And I also have emailed him to ask him to watch my video to confirm that I didn't get him wrong, which he graciously responded to that. And the quote here, that's literally in the final. So, Daly's book, I left it downstairs, but he's got like four pages on Crosostom, maybe three pages, and that's the final summative statement on the matter. So I'm not misrepresenting Daly. And Daly is representative of the scholarship on this point.

In my initial video, I also mentioned this book, which makes the exact same point using Crosostom's second homily on the parable of Lazarus and the rich man to show that he did not have a conception of purgatory. He thought the souls of the righteous are taken immediately by the angels. look at that homily later. Again, remember the word immediately. Remember these adverbs. So it's odd that Agnes Domini would say this. I would be shocked to find out that any serious theologian actually denies the clear teaching of purgatory in Chrysostom's homily. Now we'll work through John's writings in the bulk of this video in just a second. For now, I'm just sort of noting that

my position, namely that John Chrysostom doesn't affirm purgatory, is a pretty standard one. The reason I go into that is because it's not because scholarship should be wielded uncritically and just whatever the scholarship says you go with that. Of course not. Rather, it's to protect myself from being triangulated because criticisms like those of Agnes Domini are trying to make it about me and, you know, calling me a this liar who's deceiving people and that kind of thing. And if you just see that basically this is entirely a standard claim, it's harder for people to triangulate you like that because then you just ask, well, if my interpretation of John Chrysostom is the result of dishonesty and deception, the same criticism could apply to the best of scholarship on this topic,

including Roman Catholic scholarship. This is kind of an interesting sociological phenomenon that I experience on YouTube. Most of my life, I've been a pastor. I basically functioned in ministry and academic contexts. So I've been a pastor, and then I've functioned in scholarly context in the sense of, you know, getting a PhD, writing books and articles of an academic nature. I've taught a few Jan term courses at a Christian college, that kind of thing. So I have a little bit of a foot in that world as well. The world of online apologetics is this totally different culture and environment. And it's interesting. And what I experience is as I make that transition, people will frequently, I'll say something totally standard, just totally widely represented,

you know, just a throwaway comment. And then people will respond on YouTube as like, oh, can you believe he said this? And I'm realizing they just don't know that that's common. Another factor that I, another kind of interesting thing that I'm trying to navigate here and have honor before Christ and how I go about this is trying to defend yourself when people are clearly trying to demean you. I mean, the reality is my scholarly work is well reviewed by actual Roman Catholic scholars, some of whom are dear friends.

I'm not, at a personal level, I'm really not anti-Roman Catholic. I just want to be able to argue for my views, you know. And some of these scholars are great scholars as well. But in the online world, there's this intense hatefulness that seeks to demean me and discredit me and that kind of thing. And so pointing out my positions are commonplace is just a way. to protect people from making it about Gavin Orton. It's not about me. So I can protect myself from this unfair maligning as well as when you reference the scholarship. Scholarship's also just a great way to

learn. I mean, you don't read it uncritically, but you can learn things. And it's a way to invite people to consider why people take that view. So that'll lead us to John's writings. I'll get to in just a second. Second, I want to address what is quote mining. So the title of his video was quote mining refuted, and this is the charge, he's basically saying that I'm not just wrong, but that I'm lying, I'm dishonest, I'm a deceiver. One of his thumbnails says, I've been caught lying, and he's making all these kinds of claims. And this has to do with this charge of quote mining. Now, in general, quote mining typically means when you're plucking out a quote for a particular agenda that's out of context. It's not consistent with what the

author actually believed. Something like that broadly. But we just have to kind of clarify what quote mining is because actually, as we'll see as I go through this, I'm the one being quote mined, not doing the quote mining. One example of this that I'll get to in just a moment is if you watch his video carefully, you'll notice he doesn't show the entirety of my clips. He leaves certain things out to be able to manipulate what my position is, to make my position look a lot worse. I'll give a particularly egregious example of that in just a moment. Another tactic he uses is to fault me for not showing the entirety of a quote, as though, kind of implying to his viewers that I was being sneaky by leaving something out.

But then when you look at the parts that I left out, it's not relevant at all. It doesn't make any difference. So I put up a quote that had an ellipsis, meaning the three dots where you leave something out of a quote, and in the context of talking about John's view on prayers for the damned, And here's how he responded to that. The problem with this presentation are the three dots which you can see on his presentation. Without noting anything, Gavin almost makes it sound like this is one quote, like one free flow quote, as if there wasn't a part missing that is longer than the entirety of the quote on screen.

Yeah, that's right. In the middle of the quotation, Gavin has a huge section of the text left out. Here's the text and in red I have marked all that Gavin has quoted. Do you see the huge gap between the second and the third red section? Those two are being presented as one quote by Dr. Ortland. I bet that 90% of his viewers didn't even catch that there was anything left out at all. Now, I'll put up on the screen, I guess a lot throughout this video, I'm just going to have to really reduce my general font allowances.

I usually try not to make it super tiny and hard to read. So I'll have to not do that here so I don't get accused of leaving anything out here. So these quotes might be pretty small and hard to read. but I'll put up first the white section there that was removed in ellipsis the first time. You can pause to read it and you can see it doesn't affect anything in the slightest. I left it out because it's not relevant. It's just talking about how we should grieve for the debt. And then I'll put up the second portion.

And same thing here. This quote would only further my position that John is talking about the damned in this context. We'll go through this passage in a second. So the charge of quote mining here is trying to make it seem like I've left something out. I'm not giving the full picture. I'm plucking something out of context. And there's other charges like this throughout the video, but there's nothing in the removed portions that's relevant. And in fact, Agnes Domini doesn't even quote from either of those two white sections of the text that I left out with ellipsis.

He doesn't try to get anything from them. So the charge of quote mining is just being thrown out there, you know. To accuse someone of quote mining is extremely easy to do, but a lot of times it's just smoke. So if you say, John 316 proves that God loves the world, someone can say, oh, you're quote mining. You didn't read that in context. And you can say, well, okay, let me just read the verse. You read the verse.

They say, well, you're quote mining. You're not reading it in the context. So then you can read like John 3, 15 to 17. And then they can say, well, you're quote mining. You see where this is going. I could go on and on. But the point is, how much text do you have to quote? You know, if you make the charge of quote mining,

you have to show how something else is relevant. Now, with some passages he does that, but other times it's like this. It's just kind of a, it's misleading. his viewers. The other thing I want to address real quick that comes up a little bit is the charge of quote mining comes against me because people say, oh, he's quote mining John Chrysostom because he's referencing John's view on this issue, but he disagrees with John's view on some other issue. So he's just cherry picking or he's picking and choosing from the data. And this criticism fails to engage with what the actual argument here is. We're not claiming to agree with John or any of the

church fathers on every issue. We're simply trying to be historically accurate. This is an internal critique given in response to an alternative paradigm. We're responding to those who claim that John believed in purgatory. We're saying, no, he didn't. That claim is wrong. You're wrong when you say John believed in purgatory, and I'll explain that in just a second. But that's what we're saying. We're not saying that he lines up with Protestantism in every way or something like that. He also doesn't line up with any contemporary church in every way, as we'll see on this topic in a moment. So it's not picking and choosing, it's just being accurate. You know, as a metaphor I've used as if you have a friend who says all the founding fathers were deists, and you say, not really. John Jay wasn't a deist. He believes

in miracles and prayer and so forth. He was more orthodox. Some of the founding fathers, did I say founding fathers, I meant to say founding fathers. I hope I didn't say church fathers. Founding fathers, as in like, you know, George Washington, so forth, of our nation. And you can talk about some of them are kind of ambiguous. They're kind of quasi-deists. You can try to be accurate. And then people say, oh, you're just picking and choosing. You don't agree with those other founding fathers on everything else they believed either. You know, and it's like, I know, I'm not claiming I do. I'm just responding to the overstated claim from the other paradigm. This is an internal critique. Similarly, with regard to purgatory, we're trying to be historically accurate about

how it develops through our church history and we're responding to these, forgive me, simplistic claims of continuity that overlook the changes. Okay. So all that is to clarify the nature of my position. Now let's get into the historical evidence for it. What does John believe happens to a Christian when that person dies? Okay. What I basically argued in my initial video is that John believes in prayer for all the dead, both the saved and the damned. But he doesn't have any conception of an intermediate state like purgatory. Rather, insofar as it comes up, he seems to believe pretty clearly that Christians go straight or directly or immediately into heavenly rest and joy and glory and so forth. So in my initial video,

I'd referenced passages in John where he uses the language of immediacy to describe the translation of the Christian into heavenly glory. His sermon on Acts 9. where he describes the soul of the deceased Christian as speeding to her Lord, shining joyously, like the rising sun while it leaves the body, departing in the company of angels, etc. I had referenced similar language of immediacy from his sermon on Philippians 3, where he's talking about Paul's description of his death as a coming to life to be with Christ. His sermon on 1st Corinthians 15, we'll get to that later.

I referenced his sermon in honor of Philogonius, a deceased bishop, going to the heavenly city of God, celebrating with the angels, etc. Now, I'm not making any arguments just yet. I'm just summarizing my initial position that was being responded to. In a second, we'll go through these passages. But so in other words, the position is immediately go to heaven, directly to heaven, straight to heaven. And these are the adverbs that are used, you know, daily use the word directly. Maranis used the adverb immediately.

I'd used both of those adverbs as well as the adverb straight all throughout my video. It's very clear what I was arguing. I'd said that over and over. But in his response, this is one of those examples where he leaves out, where I summarized my argument, he skips over that. So he shows clips of me talking about the sermon on Philippians 3, the Philagonius sermon, but he skips over my summary. And so he's able to say this. Basically says, you will go to heaven too if you follow his example. This is unearically like the dumbest thing ever.

Like if you actually process what he's saying here, it's just clear. This is not a real argument. He's quoting a bunch of passages in which Chrysostam talks about people going to heaven. Wow. Who would have thought? Is that in any way taking away from purgatory? Clearly not. Pergatory is an intermediate state between heaven and death, which some believers need to go through.

In the end, they all go to heaven, directly or via purgatory. It doesn't matter. So you can see in his summary of my position, he's left off the adverbs straight, directly, immediately, et cetera. And he was able to do that by only playing those clips where I'm responding to the particular sermons and skipping over my summary. So he played right up to this summary. He played after it, but he skipped over where I actually said this. I'm firmly convinced John thinks deceased Christians go straight to heaven. He interprets the fire of 1st Corinthians 315 as the fire of hell.

And he consistently speaks about deceased Christians going straight to heaven. Let me give a few examples. So you can see my usage of the adverb straight there. Like I said, I also use the adverbs directly and immediately. So it's very clear what I'm arguing, I think. Again, the quote mining is not happening by me, but to me here. You don't have to quote every single second of a video when you respond to it. I'm not going to do that here.

But you shouldn't leave out sections that then enable you to distort the position you're attacking. And obviously, there's a difference between going straight to heaven versus going to purgatory first and then to heaven. And to distinguish between those two things is why we use the adverb straight or immediately or directly. Okay. So now, why do I hold that view, along with Daly and Marnis and others? Because the language of immediacy for the translation of a Christian into heavenly joy and rest and repose and so forth is found all over in John's writings.

I've referenced some of them. Now, some of these references can definitely be interpreted as speaking of only a particular kind of believer, because I'm fully aware, Roman Catholics don't think every single Christian goes to purgatory. But you cannot interpret all of the passages as limited like that. They are describing common, general Christian hope. So, for example, at the end of the homily on Philagonius, John, enjoins his listeners to follow Philagonius' example, such that being received into heaven

and paid back for obedience is what we may all attain to. He's generalizing from Philagonius to the common Christian hope of his listeners. Similarly in the Acts 9 sermon, Agnes Domini says that the references I adduced to immediate entry into heaven are only for children and the newly baptized. What is interesting about this, is that Christophe. The custom feels the need to specify this, in the case of newly baptized and children. What do these have in common? The children are not at the age of reason and are not held accountable for their actions, therefore they don't deserve punishment for it in the purgatorial fire.

And the newly baptized don't either. Since baptism remits the guilt of sin entirely, purgatory is for the sins committed after baptism. This is how the church teaches it. This is entirely in line with Catholic. Catholic teaching. There is no more certain way to get to heaven without purgatory, then you come out of the water freshly baptized and have a heart attack and you die. Like you're going straight to heaven, you don't have anything to atone for in purgatory.

The fact that Chrysostin explicitly points out that this applies to children and the newly baptized is extremely telling. He could have just talked about the baptized or believers in general. So yeah, once again, you can see how Gavin's own quote backfires on him. And even if they said what he wants them to say, it wouldn't prove that Chrysostom didn't hold to purgatory. It would just prove that some don't need to go there, which, well, I believe that too, and I'm Catholic. So you're going to have to account for that, Kevin. But he is the one who is failing to read the context here. If you just back up, you see how John starts this section.

He's talking about Peter raising Tabitha, and he's rebuking his listeners for an improper mourning of a Christian death. This is a pastoral concern. and he seems to have, apparently people are kind of ostentatiously mourning, you know. And so he's reminding them of the hope we have. And you'll have to deal with the small font so I don't get accused of leaving anything out here. But basically he's saying, I'll just read, for where tears are, or rather where miracles are, their tears ought not to be, not where such a mystery is celebrating. Here I beseech you, although somewhat of the like kind does not take place now,

yet in the case of our dead likewise a great mystery is celebrating okay just pausing there are dead that's the class of people under consideration are dead deceased christians he says say if as we sit together the emperor were to send and invite some one of us to the palace would it be right i ask to weep and mourn angels are present commissioned from heaven and come from thence sent from the king himself to call their fellow servant and say, do you weep? Do you not know what a mystery it is that is taking place? How awful, how dread and worthy indeed of hymns and lods! Would you learn that you may know that this is no time for tears? For it is a very great mystery of the wisdom of God. And as if leaving her dwelling the soul goes forth, speeding on her way to her own Lord, and why do you mourn?

Why then? you should do this on the birth of a child, for this is in fact also a birth and a better than that, for she goes forth to a very different light, is loosed as from a prison house, comes off as from a contest. So just pausing for a moment, you see what John is saying, he's using metaphors, being summoned by an emperor or birth are two metaphors to portray Christian death as a happy celebration and mystery, not something to be mourned. it's not a time for tears. The angels are present. This is worthy of hymns and lods as the soul speeds on her way to her own Lord.

This is said with reference to our dead. Only subsequently does he then reference a little child or a newly baptized person, which you can see at the bottom of our screen. And in what I underlined, you can see he includes them in the same fate that has already been established for our dead, saying, for he too is brought into the same condition. So for Agnes Domini to say John is only describing a newly baptized Christian or a child rather than deceased Christians generally is wrong. And that is the position that is taking John out of context, a quote-minding. And that can be seen plainly if you just read from our dead down continuously to speeding on her way to her own Lord. You can also see that just by looking at the rest of John's work. So in his homily 31 on Matthew, similar kind of pastoral concern, he's calling on his listeners not to mourn without hope after the death of a Christian child.

And he speaks of the child currently in heaven. He now possesses all good in safety. You can see that somewhere on the screen. I've got to figure out how to fit the quote on. But then he comforts the parent, but saying you also will go to him a little while after. So the reunion hope, In other words, the immediate translation into heaven such that from the time of there, there's a certain knowledge, the child is now in all good, is a hope not just for what happens to the child, but it's a hope extended to the parent as well, so that they can look forward to a soon reunion with their child. If actually there was a long period of suffering before seeing their child, think how misleading John's comments to that parent would be.

Now, I know some people coming from a different angle might try to say, oh, yeah, well, purgatory is consistent with speeding your way to the Lord. I think there's other problems with that, but I'm responding to Agnes Domini, so I'm going to stick with his arguments that he made here. Another example, John's four sermons on the rich man and Lazarus, particularly the second of these. In this sermon, John is correcting an erroneous belief that those who die of, violent death become demons. Yep, some people thought that, I guess. And in this context, he's

speaking of the translation of both the righteous and the unrighteous as immediate. Speaking of Lazarus and Luke 16, he says, it is quite certain that souls, when they leave the body, do not still linger here, but are forthwith led away. And hear how it is shown, it came to pass. It is said that he died, that's Lazarus, and was carried away by the angels, not the souls of the the just only, but also those of sinners are led away. And then he proved that point that the unrighteous are led away immediately as well from the parable of the rich fool in Luke 12. And so he's using these two figures, the rich fool in Luke 12 and Lazarus in Luke 16 as paradigmatic examples of the unrighteous and the righteous, respectively. In both cases, the translation to

their respective fates, hell for the one, heaven for the other, is immediate. So for Lazarus, he's using this example of a gladiator or a soldier who's been wounded and then he's taken up and crowned with applause and so forth. There is no hint of anything other than these two destinations, and in both cases the soul is immediately carried by the angels to them. So that's what the passage that Maranis convinces him of this. So bottom line is, it looks like going straight to heaven, speeding on your way into the glory and joy where all good is. being crowned, being summoned by the emperor, coming to life, etc. I mean, all these images. It looks like John thinks that happens to a deceased Christian immediately, directly.

There's not the slightest hint of any kind of intermediate process or some kind of suffering that you're going to go through before that. Now, in his video, Agnes Domini didn't really provide any convincing evidence to overturn that because his arguments to the contrary have two fundamental problems that I'll work through in this final wing of the video. first, and this will still be working through John's writings here. First, Agnes Domini assumes, I'm just calling him Agnes Domini, that's the name of his channel. I don't know who he is. I've only watched like one and then two minutes of another video. So somebody sent me this. I watched it. I thought,

oh man, I got to respond to this. This, you know, people are going to get swayed by this because it's so misleading. So I think he's anonymous. I mean, he doesn't really show pictures of himself. He just shows demeaning images of the people he's attacking. So I don't know who he is. He's, I'm just going to call Agnes Domini. So Agnes Domini simply assumes, this is the first problem, he simply assumes that prayers for the dead, for dead Christians mean purgatory. Okay, you can't, this came up many times in his video, too many to show clips of them all. For example, he made much of the fact that I didn't quote a sermon in John that's quoted by the Catholic Catechism, but that's because that passage is not relevant. It's only significant

if you make this assumption that prayers for deceased Christians means purgatory. But assumption is wrong. Anybody who watched my video, especially my response then to Trent Horn on purgatory, we'll see how important it is to make this distinction between praying for dead Christians in general versus praying for dead Christians in purgatory. Because there's numerous ways to pray for dead Christians that we see in the early church and in the Protestant tradition that don't involve purgatory. So for a detailed exposition of this point, you could watch my response to Trent Horn on purgatory, the 3518 minute mark. I talk about patristic eulogies, for example. I give lots of examples of this. I'm not going to go through all of them here.

I talk about Ambrose praying for Theodosius while clearly thinking and stating that Theodosius is currently in heaven, but he's praying for him. Or Gregory of Nazianzus' tribute to his brother, Cesarius, where he clearly thinks he's in heaven, but he's praying for him. So you can pray for people in heaven. I'll come back to that in John just a second. But there's other examples. You can pray for deceased Christians. I shouldn't say you can. You find in church history Christians who pray for deceased Christians, and those deceased Christians are understood to be neither in purgatory nor in heaven. I went through all of this in my initial video. It's so fascinating. The diversity and just the fascinating development of the church's thought on this topic. So, for example, you can pray for those in the

bosom of Abraham, which is one term that can be used for an idea in the late second century and early third century among Hippolytus, Ironaeus, and Turtilian, and it's understood to be a place of reward and joy and rest. It's not suffering, but it's also not the final state in the presence of God. You can see my quote from Hippolytus very early on in my initial video, very clear. You know, this is a joyful, happy place. It's not purgatory, but you're praying for them. Another example would be the Syriac fathers, Afrahat and Ephraim, who talk about happy solos. sleep. And he's saying you can pray for those in soul sleep. Lactantius, another example, lactantius believed that all, not just Christians, will go through a kind of purgatorial fire,

and it will happen on Judgment Day. Okay? So you could pray for deceased Christians in anticipation of that event. I'm not saying any of these views is right or wrong. I'm just trying to show how problematic it is to just leap from, oh, John is talking about praying for dead Christians, helping dead Christians in some way through our prayers, and therefore, purgatory. which is how he argued. It's really problematic. Because all of these ideas are different from purgatory. Now, in John's case, when John describes praying for deceased Christians, he speaks of praying for their entry into and then further progress into the reward and joy of heaven. For example, in John's homily 31 on Matthew, this is another passage where he's rebuking

an overly mournful attitude about death. He's saying, you shouldn't mourn. Let the devil do the morning because death is a journeying to greater blessings. It's a fair haven. You will be crowned and you will rest. This is another one of those passages where, you know, there's so many of these passages where it sounds like John thinks Christian death is spoken of in terms. It sounds like an immediate translation into heaven. But for our purposes right now, the point is that John clearly thinks you pray for these people, even though they're in heaven. Why do you pray for them? You pray for God to receive their soul. But there's no hint. But there's no hint. that that process of reception is some drawn-out suffering or something like that. It's more like

the prayers of Ambrose for Theodosius. Just receive his soul, O Lord. And then you pray for their furtherance in reward and recompense. I got the whole passage. It's like four paragraphs I'm looking at here. I'll put up those two relevant portions in bold so you can see them, commenting on this passage, Ed Sitchinsky, Ed Sitchinsky, who's another outstanding scholar. I had privilege of interviewing him on my channel. He's got a great book on purgatory and some other issues that divide the east and the west. And he discusses John's belief in prayer for the dead, which, again, trying to be honest here, John definitely believes in praying for the dead, and he definitely believes that's apostolic. But he explains the reasons for these prayers were simple.

If the deceased had departed a sinner, it may do away his sins, but if righteous, that it may become an increase of reward and recompense. So he's just quoting this same sermon there. So that's John's view. Pray for everybody. You pray for the righteous and the unrighteous. You pray for the progress in heavenly joy for the righteous. You pray for the mitigation of the suffering of the damned. Now let's talk about that second option. Praying for the damned. This is the second problem with Agnes Domini's response. He tries to get praying for purgatory from passages where John is clearly talking about praying for the damned. And as crazy as that idea sounds, yes, John believes in praying for the damned, and that's widely recognized. Agnes Domini takes kind of an eccentric

view here on this, denying that, even while he's sort of deriding those who think that. So regarding John's sermon on Philippians 3, Agnes Domini says, oh, that's just wailing for the damned. It's not praying for them. If you have a look at the beginning in the first red section, you will see that here Christosthen talks about being with the damned and we should feel sorry for them and weep. He doesn't talk about prayer or any offerings yet. He just says we should weep. But this is clearly wrong. Let's just put up the whole quote and read through it. Weep for the unbelievers. By the way, previously he's made it very clear. He's talking about non-believers. That'll be very clear as he goes here. Weep for those who differ in no wise from them. Those who depart hence

without the illumination, without the seal. They indeed deserve our wailing. They deserve our groans. They are outside the palace with the culprits, with the condemned. For verily I say unto you, unless a man be born of water and the spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Morn for those who have died in wealth and did not from their wealth, think of any solace for their their soul who had the power to wash away their sins and would not. Okay, this is one of those passages where I had excluded it with ellipsis. You can see my including it only furthers the point. He's talking about damned people.

They refuse to have their sins washed. They're excluded from the palace. They're without the seal. They are with the condemned. I mean, this is clearly damned people. And then he continues. I'm not skipping anything here. He says, let us all weep for these in private and in public, but with propriety.

with gravity, not so as to make exhibitions of ourselves, let us weep for these, not one day, or two, but all our life. Such tears spring not from senseless passion, but from true affection. The other sort are of senseless passion. For this cause, they are quickly quenched, where, as if they spring from the fear of God, they always abide with us. Let us weep for these, let us assist them according to our power. Let us think of some assistance for them, small that would be, yet still let us assist them how and in what way by praying and entreating others to make prayers for them by continually giving to the poor on their behalf. Now, I'd reference this passage in my initial video. The word these refers to the people he's just been talking about. He's described them like six times, these,

weep for these, weep for these. So on Agnes Domini's interpretation, he's switching. He's saying, weep for these, weep for these, weep for these, weep for these, pray for these. But now when he says, pray for these, he's talking about a different group of people somehow. You see how problematic that is? He's talking about weeping and praying for unbelievers, the condemned, the damned. And that's pretty explicit if you just read through the passage. And that's how John is generally interpreted as well, contrary to Agnes Domini's interpretation. Here's how Daly puts it. Chris Ostum does seem to envisage some possibility of spiritual growth for the damned.

Even if the dead person whom we mourn is damned, he observes, it is possible it is, if we wish it, that his punishment be lightened. Now that's daily, the end there is daily quoting Chrysostom. And his sermon on Acts 9, the exact same sermon I had cited to make the exact same point. And he references several other passages then in John to support this idea of mitigating the suffering of the damned through our prayers. Agnes Domini takes a contrary view to daily here in the sermon on Acts 9. He argues that this prayer is not for the damned person, but for a hypothetical sinner on their deathbed. He is entirely ignoring the context of this quote and is framing it as if this was talking

about a damned man when it couldn't be any more obvious that he is in fact speaking of a hypothetical man on his deathbed who has not yet died. Here you have the whole text. So the general prior context is that people are lamenting for the loved ones who deceased in sin or not in sin, just those who have died. And his answer is that we should quote, amend the person's themselves while yet living. Then he works through the passage for about five minutes.

A lot of what he says is fair and I would agree with some of the points. And then he concludes like this. I certainly hold that this supports purgatory in Chris Austin's writings. But what do I know, right? So if Gavin himself raises quotes, which end up being indicative of the opposite of what Gavin would have us believe, one can only imagine how weak his case is that he has to result to such lazy quote mining. introduces this code without context and he's implying that this is about a dead man,

which is explicitly contradicted in the text, just like unbelievably poor presentation of the fact. So Agnes Domini is trying to get purgatory out of this passage. Now, I think he raises some good points that this person might be, contrary to how Daly sees it a living person, not yet in hell, though typically he's overstated in how he makes his point. But the passage is tricky, actually. I'm not 100% sure how to interpret that specific point. I can definitely see how Agnes Domini is reading this passage,

and I think he's probably right to see him as alive at the time of the prayers for him because of the various things he discusses. At the same time, it is ambiguous whether this person actually comes to faith before death, because the passage is talking about others doing all of these things for this man, and it says the man himself doesn't do them. Remember, he's just been described with the words of Mark 1421. it would have been better for that man if he had not been born. And then the content of the prayer, what people are praying for is just the mitigation of punishment.

Some people do argue that John is envisioning the possibility of post-mortem salvation here. I'm not persuaded by that, but I've seen that in more than one book. And in connection to that, people discuss the fact that John interprets the fire of 1st Corinthians 315 as the fire of hell, not purgatory. You can see that in homily nine in his sermon on 1st Corinthians 3. But either way, okay, the point for us to see is that this is not a proof of purgatory. Whether it's an unbeliever in hell or an unbeliever on earth, it's not a believer in purgatory. So at most, this passage would just be neutral, but he's trying to get purgatory out of this passage. To do that, you'd have to say, oh, well, John is praying for the,

for this non-Christian, or he's saying we should pray for this non-Christian who's still alive, so that they become a Christian. And then subsequently, they die, they go to purgatory, and that's where the mitigation of punishment is now taking place as an answer to these previous prayers we prayed while he was still alive. You see, all that you'd have to read into the text. John never says anything like that. Furthermore, there's other passages that also talk about prayers for the damned.

So it's not just the Philippians 3 one I just read. You have homily 41 from a sermon on 1st Corinthians 15 where he talks about someone departing as a sinner and then says, help him as far as possible, not by prayers, but by, or not by tears, but by prayers and supplications and alms and offerings. So even if the Acts, the sermon on Acts 9 is not about praying for a damned person, Agnes Domini is wrong to deny this in John's writings because it's clear in other passages of John. And in no passage in John Chrysostom is there any reference to someone to praying for someone in purgatory or any notion of an intermediate state of suffering and cleansing

of any kind before Christians go to heaven for any Christian. That's just not there in his writings. And Agnes Domini is trying to get that out of passages that are talking about praying for the damned or possibly in one case for a living non-Christian. He never talks about praying for Christians in purgatory who are suffering or something like that. When you die, you go straight, directly into glory. That seems to be John's view. Okay, so to sum up, no, John does not believe in purgatory. He says, pray for all people, pray for the saved and the damned, pray for the furtherance. There's acceptance into heaven and furtherance in joy for the righteous, for the unrighteous. You pray for the mitigation of their suffering. There doesn't seem to be any concept of an

intermediate state of temporal punishment for sin or something like that for imperfectly purified Christians before they go to heaven. Okay, off of John, now the more general question here, we can then conclude just from that alone that no, purgatory is not universal among the church fathers. And to summarize, my interpretation, which I've argued for a greater length in my initial video, is it's an accretion. It's a slowly evolving development. This general concept of some kind of post-mortem cleansing fire starts coming in during the patristic era, especially through Clement of Alexandria and origin of Alexandria. And then a lot of people start developing it, and it starts evolving and growing.

And there's all, but there's all kinds of countervailing testimonies as well. I've already mentioned, you know, the bosom of Abraham among Hippolytus, Ironaeus Tertullian, the Syriac fathers and their idea of soul sleep. That's not purgatory. That's a happy rest. He talks about it, the outer rim of heaven. That's how they describe that. There's Chrysostom and others like Cyprian who believe in that the general Christian hope,

not just for some, but for Christians as such, is immediate. translation into heaven. So there's that idea. Again, it's not just John who believes that. Cyprian is another clear example. And then even among those who do think there's some kind of post-mortem cleansing or suffering for Christians, there's not just one idea of that. Purgatory proper is a very specific idea that has some differences with like Eastern Orthodox views of post-mortem cleansing, for example. It's punitive and expiatory. There's a role for indulgences, for example. So we've got the temporal punishment of sin. It's not just medicinal. It's specific. punishment. That's the idea of purgatory. And that is the result of a slow, gradual accretion.

Here's Daly's overall conclusion on this topic at the end of his book. While it is true that the notion of purgatory as a separate interim state for some souls is first found in developed form in Western medieval theology, its roots clearly lie in both the Greek and Latin patristic tradition, yet it is equally clear that many patristic authors oppose such a notion as compromising the finality of death and the judgment of God. Controversial in the early church, the notion of purgation after death was to remain controversial in the ecumenical discussions of the Middle Ages and the post-Reformation West. From a Roman Catholic scholar, very fair, balanced summary.

And again, pretty standard. The seminal text on this topic was written by a French medievalist, I think you pronounce his name, La Jaffe, and he basically argued for a 12th century emergence of purgatory proper, stemming out of a long history of antecedent ideas. And he talks about Clement and origin as sort of of the inventors or architects of this tradition of thought. My interest, as someone who desires for Christians to have the proper hope of what will happen to them, this is really practical, you know, what's going to happen the moment I die, is, and the reason I engage John Chrysostom and do a deep dive in him, but then look at these others as well, is to try to encourage people with what I think is

the true position and the position that the apostles taught. and that the New Testament holds out for us and is also attested throughout church history, namely what John says, you know, think of his metaphors. You're like the soldier beat up on the battlefield, and then you're plucked up into glory right away, carried forthwith by the angels. And I would say that this other tradition of thought, we do well to regard as fallible, because it is a slow evolution after the apostolic deposit, after the period of divine revelation is over,

and we do well to look to Holy Scripture as the infallible yardstick by which to test these later developments. That's just what Christianity is. This is a revealed religion. God gets to determine it. We don't get to determine it. And while we know that the church will never perish, we have promises for that. We don't have promises that anything that comes into existence throughout church history will always be correct. In fact, none of us can believe that. So this is why we want to test church history and the church today by the unique stature of divine revelation. We're tethered to that. That's why we cherish Soliscriptura because our consciences are bound to truth. We want to put our ultimate trust in that which is of divine constitution, not human constitution. And something the idea of purgatory is

a later slow accretion that is not founded upon divine revelation. And I want people to know the truth. So they have the true hope that to conclude on a pastoral note, all. love to my Roman Catholic friends and other Christian traditions. They are Christians. I pray well upon their souls and I'll be in heaven with so many of them. In fact, many of them are far better Christians than myself. So I'm not trying to attack at a personal level. I'm trying to say, I want people to know the truth. And here's the truth. The moment you die, you go to be with Jesus right away, straight away, just like the thief on the cross. He's your paradigm. Today, paradise. That's your hope. I just want people to know that because that's the truth. That's what divine revelation says. And I've made my case from the

scripture on other things. Okay, I'll stop there. You can tell I'm passionate about this, but it's from a pastoral burden. Thanks for watching the video. If you do like and subscribe, of course, all that's helpful. If you've missed my last video on heaven, the reason I'm in here is because we've moved recently to Tennessee. We're so thrilled and grateful to be here. Thanks for praying for us. And I'm kind of trying to figure out what I can use as a studio. This is just temporary. If you'd like to support Truth Unites, I am in a process of building up support for Truth Unites. I'm on track for that.

I'm not in any immediate pressing needs, but I do need to keep growing that. So you can do that on the Truth Unites website if you're interested in doing that. Only do that if that is a source of joy for your heart. And then I'll lastly just say that my next videos. I'm not going to be, so 2024 is here. I'm not going to be doing as much on the Protestant stuff. I will do a little. I'm going to do a study on Apostolic Succession.

I've taken three or four passes at that. I want to go do one more pass on that. So I'm going to do that. I'll do a few things now and again, but I'm going to focus on a few other things, especially general apologetics. And my next few videos are going to be about whether the flood of Noah was local or global,

and then Adam and Eve. And oh, man, I go into it with fear and trembling, but I was praying about it. I think, I don't want to be the kind of person who shies away from something if we need to talk about it because it's causing a lack of assurance in the gospel and the purpose of my channel is to give people assurance in the gospel.

So, caution to the wind and we'll dive in. Those will come out and about within the next week, week and a half. After that, the next video, the next major video, maybe you see some small ones, will be a video on the ontological argument. I've done another, doing another study on that, and I want to make a case that the ontological argument is sound. That'll be kind of a fun one. So that's what you can expect in my channel the next few weeks.

All right, thanks for watching, everybody. Give the video a like, share it with somebody. I appreciate it. God bless you. Please pray that truth unites gives people assurance. in the gospel. I appreciate the prayers. That's what I really want to give my life to, to be honest. I just want to give everything I got. And then praying for revival. The church needs revival and renewal. That's what I want to give my life to. All right, God bless everybody. Thanks for watching.