A moral universe without purgatory would be a thin, desiccated place: metaphysical reality flattened to nothing more than God and the individual soul that must, down the wearisome road, face some grim and final judgment.
Admittedly, there’s a kind of purity—the ash-white purity of a prairie, burnt-over in a flash fire—to the Calvinist logic that wants to scrape the world down to its irreducible elements: There must be God and the soul, with a soteriological judgment of that soul, or everything from ethics to the purpose of existence dissolves into meaninglessness. So why not say that these are all that reality contains? Any claim of further metaphysical elements is unnecessary froth at best or a damnable distraction at worst.
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