Fire Without Flame

A Protestant Reappraisal and Rebuttal of Purgatory’s Modern Revival

By J Neil Daniels

Oct 24, 2025

I. The Strange Return of an Old Fire

Not many doctrines have traveled such a curious path as purgatory. Once the bedrock of late medieval Catholic piety — an invisible realm crowded with suffering souls, masses, indulgences, and anxious relatives — it became, almost overnight, one of the great heresies of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther’s first hammer blows against the Castle Church door at Wittenberg in 1517 were aimed precisely at this system: the economy of indulgences feeding off the idea of temporal punishment after death.¹ For centuries since, Protestants have treated purgatory as something more than just an error. It was a theological emblem of everything wrong with medieval religion — superstition, sacerdotal control, the captivity of consciences.

Yet in a turn that would have bewildered the Reformers, the idea has flickered again within certain Protestant circles. This renewed curiosity has less to do with medieval fire and more with the question of moral transformation. Can a believer, still imperfect at death, enter the presence of the holy God unpurified? The modern revival has been spearheaded by Jerry L. Walls, a philosopher best known for his trilogy on the afterlife.² Through careful argument, Walls proposes a “Protestant version” of purgatory — one scrubbed of indulgences and papal machinery, but still affirming a postmortem process of sanctification.

It is a surprising proposal, and not without charm. Walls writes with clarity and charity, and his desire to retrieve a sense of the moral seriousness of salvation is admirable. But his case, as we shall see, cannot survive sustained theological and biblical scrutiny. Purgatory, even dressed in Protestant clothing, remains what Calvin once called “a deadly fiction of Satan, which nullifies the cross of Christ.”³

II. The Roots of the Fire

To appreciate the modern revival, we must remember how the doctrine began — not as a system, but as a set of intuitions and prayers. In the catacombs of Rome, early Christians occasionally inscribed requests for the peace of the departed: Anima dulcissima, requiescas in pace. These epitaphs suggest affection more than doctrine. But by the third and fourth centuries, the custom of praying for the dead had become established enough to provoke discussion.

Tertullian, never one to pass up a chance for speculation, speaks of annual commemorations for the dead.⁴ Origen, with his grand cosmic imagination, envisioned a purifying fire through which all creation would eventually pass.⁵ Augustine, more cautious, allowed that some sins “may be forgiven in this life and others in the life to come,” yet he stopped short of defining the process.⁶ There was, however, no system — no fixed geography of the afterlife. The early Fathers tended to imagine the dead resting in Abraham’s bosom or Hades, awaiting resurrection, with the righteous experiencing a measure of peace and the wicked of torment.

By the time of Gregory the Great (d. 604), however, the scattered embers had begun to coalesce into a doctrine. Gregory’s Dialogues contain the first clear statements of an intermediate fire purging lesser sins.⁷ His influence, coupled with the growing practice of offering masses for the dead, created the framework medieval theology would codify. Over the next centuries, the notion of temporal punishment — the residue of sin’s debt remaining after forgiveness — became the linchpin. The doctrine’s logic was juridical: divine justice demanded full satisfaction. If it was not completed in life, it must be in the afterlife.

The theological edifice reached its maturity with Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologicae.⁸ For Aquinas, purgatory was a mercy. God, being just, required the satisfaction of temporal punishment, but being loving, provided a means of purgation short of hell. Yet by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this merciful vision had metastasized into an elaborate spiritual economy — indulgences, confraternities, chantry chapels, the trafficking of grace through parchment. The Council of Florence (1439) affirmed the doctrine formally, and the Council of Trent (1563) later defended it explicitly against Protestant denials.⁹

One could say that purgatory, like a medieval cathedral, was built stone by stone across centuries: Augustine’s uncertain fire, Gregory’s narratives of postmortem purification, Aquinas’s legal system, and finally Trent’s confident dogma.

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III. The Reformers and the Breaking of the Chain

The Protestant Reformation did not merely tweak the doctrine — it burned it to the ground. Luther’s early lectures on the Psalms and Romans reveal that he once entertained the existence of purgatory, largely because it seemed universally held. But by 1520 he had turned fiercely against it, declaring that “purgatory cannot be proved from Scripture, and it is dangerous to teach it.”¹⁰ The danger, in his eyes, was twofold: first, it distracted sinners from trusting wholly in Christ; second, it provided an endless pretext for ecclesiastical exploitation.

When Johann Tetzel announced that as soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs, Luther recognized the peril of theology turned marketplace. His Ninety-Five Theses struck directly at indulgences but implicitly at purgatory itself.¹¹ Over the next decade, Luther’s language hardened. In his 1530 preface to the Apocalypse, he called purgatory an “invention of the devil.”¹²

Calvin, ever more systematic, devoted a famous passage in Book III of the Institutes to demolishing it. “It is a deadly fiction,” he wrote, “which nullifies the cross of Christ, inflicts unbearable contempt upon God’s mercy, and overturns our faith.”¹³ For Calvin, the logic was simple: either Christ’s sacrifice fully satisfied divine justice, or it did not. If it did, there can be no further satisfaction; if it did not, the gospel collapses.

The English Reformers, more concise and perhaps more caustic, enshrined their rejection in the Thirty-Nine Articles: “The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory…is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture.”¹⁴ The phrase “fond thing” in sixteenth-century English did not mean affectionate, but foolish — a vanity, a delusion.

Behind all these condemnations lay a coherent system of thought. The Reformers’ rejection of purgatory rested on four pillars: sola scriptura, demanding biblical warrant; sola fide, asserting justification by faith alone; the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement, leaving no debt unpaid; and the priesthood of all believers, erasing the need for clerical mediation. Taken together, these made purgatory not just unnecessary but impossible.

The Reformation’s rejection was not a tantrum against superstition. It was a carefully reasoned defense of the gospel’s logic. Luther and Calvin were not innovators so much as restorers — reclaiming the early Christian simplicity lost beneath centuries of scholastic accumulation.

IV. Walls and the Return of the Middle Realm

Enter Jerry L. Walls. Born in the mid-twentieth century and trained as a philosopher of religion, Walls earned his Ph.D. at Notre Dame under Alvin Plantinga, which perhaps explains his analytic precision. His trilogy — Hell: The Logic of Damnation (1992), Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (2002), and Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (2012) — represents the most sophisticated modern defense of the afterlife within a broadly Protestant framework.¹⁵

Walls is not reviving medieval purgatory. He rejects indulgences, denies temporal punishment, and explicitly disavows the notion that purgatory satisfies divine justice. Instead, he proposes what he calls the sanctification model. According to this model, purgatory is simply the final stage of sanctification — the completion of moral transformation for those who die in Christ but not yet perfected in holiness. It is, in his words, “the natural and organic final stage of sanctification for those who die imperfectly sanctified but who are truly justified by grace through faith.”¹⁶

The appeal of this model lies in its coherence with certain Protestant instincts. Evangelicals, after all, agree that sanctification is rarely complete in this life and that without holiness “no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14). Walls argues that this unfinished sanctification cannot be completed instantaneously at death without violating the logic of moral development. Character, he insists, is formed through free cooperation with divine grace; thus, genuine transformation requires a temporal process. Purgatory, then, is not punishment but pedagogy.

Walls frames his argument in three strands — biblical, philosophical, and moral. Biblically, he concedes the case is not explicit but claims it is implicit in texts like 1 Corinthians 3:11–15 (the testing of works by fire), 1 John 3:2–3 (“we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”), and Hebrews 12:14. Philosophically, he draws on libertarian freedom: if sanctification involves free cooperation, then perfection must involve a continuing process of voluntary surrender. Morally, he appeals to intuition — as C. S. Lewis once put it, “Our souls demand purgatory, don’t they?”¹⁷

Walls’s proposal is, in many ways, a product of modern sensibilities. It is therapeutic rather than juridical, existential rather than institutional. It appeals to those uneasy with forensic language — justification, imputation, acquittal — and who long for a vision of salvation as moral transformation. In that sense, Walls’s purgatory is not medieval fire but modern refinement.

Still, the question must be asked: does Scripture, or Protestant theology, allow such a thing? Can the logic of sanctification, however plausible, bear the weight of this postmortem world?

V. Scripture’s Silence and Resistance

The difficulty for Walls begins precisely where Protestantism begins — with the Bible. Even granting his philosophical case, the absence of clear scriptural support remains fatal. The key texts long used by Catholic apologists fare no better under Protestant scrutiny today than they did in the sixteenth century.

Take 1 Corinthians 3:11–15, where Paul speaks of a day when “each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire.” The believer whose work survives will receive a reward, while the one whose work burns up “will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” Walls takes this as the best biblical image for purgatory. But the passage, read in context, speaks of ministries being tested, not souls being purified. The fire tests what each has built on the foundation of Christ — it is metaphorical, not metaphysical.¹⁸ Moreover, the event occurs “on the Day,” that is, at the final judgment, not in an intermediate state. There is no suggestion of duration or process.

Hebrews 12:14 likewise requires holiness to see the Lord, but it says nothing about how that holiness is achieved after death. The verse functions as moral exhortation, not metaphysical speculation. The same may be said for 1 John 3:2–3: the purification occurs because we see him, not in order to see him.

When we turn to texts that actually describe the believer’s postmortem state, the evidence cuts sharply the other way. Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5:8 — “away from the body and at home with the Lord” — and Philippians 1:23 — “to depart and be with Christ, which is far better” — both imply immediate communion with Christ upon death. The thief on the cross hears, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43), not “after a season of purification.” Even the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) depicts two fixed destinies, separated by a chasm no one can cross.

Most decisive are the passages emphasizing the finished nature of Christ’s work: Hebrews 9:12, “he entered once for all into the holy places, having obtained eternal redemption”; 10:14, “by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” Romans 8:1 rings like a trumpet: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” It is hard to square such declarations with any notion of postmortem purgation, however gentle.

The New Testament speaks often of fire, but always as judgment or testing at the final consummation, never as therapeutic cleansing between death and resurrection. The biblical landscape knows of heaven, hell, and the resurrection — but no middle realm of the saved-yet-unsanctified.

Walls, to his credit, acknowledges the thinness of the biblical case. He suggests that Protestant theology allows for theological conclusions that are biblically consistent even if not explicitly taught. That may be true for inferences tightly drawn from Scripture, but purgatory is not a modest inference. It adds an entire stage to the ordo salutis, a new chapter in the drama of redemption. For a movement founded on sola scriptura, the absence of clear revelation on such a point is not a silence to fill but a boundary to respect.

VI. Atonement, Assurance, and the Shadow of Sanctification

Walls’s “sanctification model” may sidestep medieval penitential logic, but it opens other, arguably deeper, wounds. Protestant theology has always distinguished justification and sanctification without separating them — the first forensic and complete, the second transformative and progressive. Justification is God’s declarative act: the sinner is acquitted and counted righteous on the basis of Christ’s obedience, received by faith alone. Sanctification, by contrast, is the Spirit’s work of inward renewal, incomplete in this life yet assured of completion at glorification.

Walls’s model threatens to collapse that distinction. If believers cannot enter heaven until they are actually perfect, then justification — being declared righteous — is not enough. One must become righteous through a process of postmortem sanctification. The danger is subtle but real: the ground of final acceptance shifts from Christ’s imputed righteousness to our perfected character. However grace-filled the process, the logic makes human moral progress (even if posthumous) a necessary condition of final salvation.

The Formula of Concord foresaw such confusion. “Sanctification must not be mingled with the article of justification,” it warned, “as though our renewal were a part of our righteousness before God.”¹⁹ Yet Walls’s purgatory does precisely that, making moral transformation a gateway to heaven rather than a fruit of justification.

The problem bleeds into the doctrine of assurance. Reformation theology gave believers confidence that they could die at peace, resting on Christ’s finished work. The believer’s hope was not in his own holiness — which remained partial — but in Christ’s perfect obedience. Introduce purgatory, and the solid ground shifts to sand. How long will the soul’s purification take? What remains to be purged? The medieval church provided masses, indulgences, and intercession — mechanisms of comfort, though ill-founded. Protestant purgatory offers none, only uncertainty.

Walls insists this model need not undermine assurance, since all who enter purgatory are saved. But assurance in Scripture is not merely the guarantee of eventual salvation; it is confidence of immediate acceptance — “today you will be with me in paradise.” Any theology that transforms death into the entrance of further travail undermines that assurance.

The Christological stakes are even higher. If Christ’s atonement fully satisfied divine justice and reconciled believers completely, then any residual purification implies insufficiency in his work. Hebrews 10:14’s claim that Christ “has perfected forever those who are being sanctified” leaves little room for a supplementary fire. To say, as Walls does, that atonement covers guilt but not transformation creates an artificial division. The cross accomplished both: pardon and power, forgiveness and renewal. Romans 6 declares that believers have died to sin and been raised with Christ. Sanctification flows from that definitive event, not from a future probationary realm.

Even the Holy Spirit’s role suffers diminishment. Scripture presents the Spirit as the agent of sanctification, conforming believers to Christ’s image. If postmortem purgation is required to complete what the Spirit began, we must ask whether the Spirit’s power is inadequate. “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6). Not after that day, not through suffering beyond the grave, but at Christ’s return.

The Protestant instinct here is not impatience but confidence. The God who justifies the ungodly will also glorify them (Rom. 8:30). The chain is unbreakable — no link called purgatory is needed.

VII. Between Death and Glory

One of the less discussed difficulties of Walls’s model is its relation to Christian eschatology. If purgatory exists, where and when does it occur? The traditional Catholic view situates it in the intermediate state, between death and resurrection. But Protestant theology, emphasizing resurrection as the believer’s ultimate hope, leaves little room for disembodied sanctification.

The human person, biblically speaking, is a unity of body and soul. Moral habits, temptations, and even sins are embodied realities. How then could a disembodied soul be “purified” of bodily vices? The very grammar of sanctification — resisting temptation, practicing virtue, mortifying flesh — presupposes bodily existence. A disembodied process of moral formation seems metaphysically incoherent.

Some have proposed a post-resurrection purgatory — a kind of remedial sanctification before entry into the new creation. But this runs afoul of the New Testament’s eschatological sequence. Resurrection, judgment, and new creation occur together, not in stages. “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet,” Paul writes, “the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed” (1 Cor. 15:52). The transformation described is instantaneous and complete. To insert a prolonged purgation after resurrection is to extend salvation history beyond its scriptural terminus.

Walls’s purgatory thus hangs awkwardly between two worlds — too late for earthly sanctification, too early for resurrection glory. The Reformed confessions, by contrast, speak with serene simplicity: “The souls of the righteous, being made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens.”²⁰ No intermediate workshop of purification, no cosmic therapy. Death itself — that final enemy conquered by Christ — marks the believer’s deliverance from sin’s presence.

Here, too, the pastoral resonance matters. To tell the dying believer that death ushers him immediately into Christ’s presence is to proclaim victory. To tell him he faces further purification, however benign, is to turn death from triumph into travail. The gospel’s power lies in its finality: “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” Anything less feels like retreat into the shadowlands.

VIII. Pastoral Reverberations

Theology, inevitably, finds its way into practice. The medieval church’s system of masses, prayers for the dead, and indulgences grew organically from purgatory’s logic. One can hardly fault the reasoning: if souls suffer in a purifying state, why not assist them through prayer or offering? Even Walls’s sanitized version cannot fully escape that gravitational pull. Once one affirms an intermediate process of purification, intercession for the dead seems not only permissible but charitable.

Walls disavows such implications, yet history teaches that doctrines generate their own devotions. The Reformation’s abolition of purgatory freed Christians from a commerce of fear. It replaced anxious calculation with grateful assurance. “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21). To reintroduce purgatory — even a Protestant one — risks reviving the very anxieties the gospel dispelled.

There is also a subtler pastoral danger: complacency. If sanctification continues beyond death, why labor so strenuously for holiness now? Walls argues that his view actually intensifies moral urgency, since sanctification extends seamlessly into eternity. But human psychology rarely works that way. Deferred holiness invites delay. The New Testament’s ethical urgency depends on the finality of this life as the arena of moral growth. “Make every effort to be found without spot or blemish” (2 Pet. 3:14) has force precisely because there is no second act.

The Reformation’s pastoral genius lay in its simplicity. The dying Christian, assured of Christ’s finished work, could die in peace. The pastor’s task was to lift weary eyes from self to Savior. Purgatory, by contrast, turns the gaze inward again, toward an unfinished process. The comfort of the gospel is replaced by a lingering uncertainty about what remains to be done.

IX. A Better Way to Speak of Holiness

Walls’s instincts are not wrong. He perceives, as many do, that modern Protestantism sometimes treats salvation as a legal fiction, neglecting the transformative goal of holiness. He wants a theology that takes sanctification seriously. That concern is legitimate — even necessary. But the solution lies not in resurrecting purgatory; it lies in recovering a richer doctrine of glorification.

Traditional Protestant theology already affirms what purgatory seeks to express: that believers must be made truly holy to see God. It simply locates that perfection in God’s act, not in a process. At death, the soul is freed from sin’s presence; at resurrection, the body is raised incorruptible. “The souls of believers,” says the Westminster Larger Catechism, “are at their death made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory.”²¹ That is purgation enough — not by fire, but by grace.

Alternatively, some theologians emphasize that the transformation to holiness occurs at the resurrection itself, when believers see Christ and are instantly conformed to his image (1 John 3:2). Either way, the emphasis remains on divine action, not human cooperation. The Spirit who sanctifies in life completes that work in death or resurrection. No postmortem moral therapy is needed.

This vision preserves the moral seriousness Walls desires while avoiding the pitfalls he introduces. It keeps salvation God-centered, not process-centered. It safeguards assurance without cheapening holiness. And it preserves the pastoral tenderness of the gospel: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord…that they may rest from their labors” (Rev. 14:13). Rest, not refinement, is the believer’s hope.

X. Conclusion: The Finished Work and the Final Word

The attempt to rehabilitate purgatory within Protestant theology is, in the end, an exercise in theological nostalgia — a longing for moral wholeness misplaced in metaphysical speculation. Jerry Walls’s project deserves respect for its philosophical rigor and sincerity. Yet his “Protestant purgatory” cannot be reconciled with Scripture’s silence, the Reformation’s core principles, or the gospel’s assurance.

Purgatory fails the biblical test: it lacks explicit warrant and contradicts the New Testament’s presentation of immediate communion with Christ after death. It fails the theological test: it blurs justification and sanctification, weakens assurance, and diminishes the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement. It fails the pastoral test: it clouds the believer’s hope and threatens to reintroduce the very anxieties the Reformers banished.

Five centuries after Wittenberg, the Reformers’ verdict still stands. Purgatory — whether medieval or modern, penal or pedagogical — undermines the gospel’s finished work. “It is finished” remains Christ’s final word, and it requires no postscript.

For those who die in Christ, there is no middle fire, no lingering debt, no unfinished purification — only the open arms of the Savior and the rest that remains for the people of God. The gospel offers something far better than purgatory’s promise of eventual perfection: it offers perfection already secured, waiting to be revealed.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” And, to borrow Luther’s bold simplicity, that means no purgatory either.

Endnotes

Martin Luther, Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences (1517).

Jerry L. Walls, Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F. L. Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), III.v.6.

Tertullian, De Corona Militis 3.

Origen, De Principiis 1.6.3.

Augustine, City of God 21.13.

Gregory the Great, Dialogues 4.39.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Suppl., Q. 71.

Council of Trent, Session 25 (1563).

Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian” (1520).

Ninety-Five Theses, Theses 27–32.

Luther, “Preface to the Revelation of St. John,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 35 (1960), 395–411.

Calvin, Institutes, III.v.6.

Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1563), Art. 22.

Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).

Walls, Heaven, 48.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 108.

For discussion, see Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 150–53.

Formula of Concord, Art. III, in The Book of Concord, ed. T. G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959).

Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), Ch. 32.

Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 86.