In my years as a Protestant Evangelical Christian, I sometimes taught classes at retreat. I remember in my college years I taught a retreat class on what it meant to be justified by faith alone.  I argued that we are clothed with the righteousness of Christ.  God will not deal with us according to our righteousness, but according to the righteousness of Christ. Christ lived the perfect life for us. We will be rewarded, not according to our deeds, but by the vicarious obedience of Christ.  I taught that the implication of this is that we will all receive the same amount of rewards, because all our rewards were not based on anything we had done, but only what Christ had done. It is sort of like heavenly communism. We are all treated equally. It did not matter if you were a great man or woman of God, or if you were a carnal, lukewarm Christian. If you made it to glory through your faith in Christ, you would receive as much glory as the most saintly Christian.

After the class, a Moody Bible student came up to talk to me further. He accused me of teaching heresy! I was flabbergasted! Nobody ever accused of heresy before! I decided to ask the keynote speaker at the retreat. His name was Dr. Lloyd Perry, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I explained to him what I taught and asked him if I had taught heresy.

“Yep!”, he said. “That is heresy. There are differing rewards at the end depending on how we live now.”

“Well, could you show me in the Bible?” I asked.

“Well, eh, I cannot pop up a verse just like that!”  But he gave it the good old college try. His Bible had a compact concordance in the back, so he quickly found a passage which he thought would settle the issue.

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.

2 Cor 5:10

But I had a problem with this verse.  It says that we receive what is due to us “whether good or bad”.  But if we are rewarded for our bad deeds, then that sounds very much like we Christians could experience some kind of punishment. So I asked Dr. Perry what that meant.

“Well, it seems reasonable to me, that a Christian who is saved by the grace, but did not really live for God, would experience some kind of pain for the way he lived.”

I could not believe he actually said that.

“That’s Purgatory!”  I then exclaimed.

“NO! IT’S NOT!!!”  Dr. Perry was then very mad of being accused of such a Catholic notion. This sort of ended our discussion, especially since our discussion was attracting fellow retreaters. He promised me that he would mail me a full explanation of the Biblical position of rewards, which he assured me was not purgatory, although he never explained how it was different. I gave him my address, but I never received anything from him.

Now, this is not just some ordinary evangelical Christian. This is a professor at one of the most respected evangelical seminaries in Protestantism, Trinity Evangelical Divinity Schools (TEDS) of Deerfield, which I myself attended later. It is well-known for its conservatism.  And yet he believed that some Christians will experience pain and suffering after judgment. This, to me, sounds like purgatory. If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, it is probably a duck.

I suspect that there are more Protestants than we think who believe in purgatory but just do not call it so.