Wednesday, November 02, 2005

All Souls Day

Today's All Souls Day, so I've read up on it a bit. Apparently today some people pray for people that have died, to try and make sure they get into Heaven. According to some people this is heretical, and that it has pagan origins. I'm not sure it's heretical (I could be wrong), although I do think the Catholic doctorine relating to Purgatory is reasonably dodgey.
Anyway, one of the reasons I'm not sure that it's heresy is that the scriptures say Jesus 'went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.' (2 Peter 3:19-20) So perhaps prayers for the dead would influence how they respond to Jesus preaching? Anyway, I don't think it's definitely heretical. I also don't know particularly much about it.
As for the pagan origins, I think that perhaps we should better acknowledge that Christianity has had a lot of pagan influences as well as Jewish. Same sort of thing as I was talking about yesterday, about being familiar with our spiritual ancestory.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

yeah cool, pagan it up baby, redeem everything!!!! check out at All Sainting at urban seed: church http://www.urbanseed.org/journal/mt/mc/archives/2005/10/call_2_worship.html

Steve said...

Purgatory rests on a simple logical syllogism:

The idea of purgatory is simple:

1. people on earth are sinful (Rom. 3:23)

2. people in heaven are not (Rev. 21:27)

Therefore:

3. people who go from earth to heaven are purged of sin (Isaiah 6:1-7)