Purgatory.
Purgatory.
§ 390. Eleventh: “Luther, in Assert., art. 37, believes that there is a purgatory. Nevertheless he adds that this cannot be proved from Holy Writ.” We respond. (1) He wrote that book in the first years of his opposition to the papacy. During those years, Luther still embraced some corruptions of the Papists that he later recognized and condemned. As a result, in the preface to the first volume of his works he asks the reader “to read the writings of his first years with much mercy.” (2) Moreover, in the same place Luther says that he believes in purgatory “not as something certain but as probable,” just as he believes that Thomas Aquinas is a saint, which he did not believe with an infallible and certain faith.