Without Holiness

“Without holiness,” the author of Hebrews says, “no one will see the Lord” (Heb 12:14). Let’s not get too distracted by who gets there and who does not get there, but instead we can focus on what the author says here: it requires holiness.

What do you think? How do we become holy? How much holiness is required to see the Lord? When do we become holy? Do you think there could be a purgatory?

There are, Jerry Walls tells us, four options:

1. Some will enter into heaven with “their sins, imperfections, and the like intact, so heaven is not in fact essentially sinless” (6).

2. Some will be lost and never make it to heaven “if they die without actually becoming completely holy.”

3. At the moment of death — just before, just after — “God makes people holy by an instantaneous unilateral act, however imperfect, sinful, and immature in character they may be.” [This means all Christians — in the sense of every Christian — regardless of obedience, character etc — is instantaneously fit for God’s presence. Some would say there is a difference in rewards, but this fiddles with the meaning of holiness. If you are holy, you are holy — not partly holy.]

4. Some say “the sanctification process continues after death with our willing cooperation until the process is complete, and we are actually made holy through and through.” All of this is from Jerry Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, and we will begin a series next Monday. Come along and join us.

The most appealing story I’ve read on Purgatory is in J.R.R. Tolkien, Leaf by Niggle. Well, that excludes the mother of all purgatory studies, Dante’s Divine Comedy.