[Purgatory] was firmly rejected, on good biblical and theological grounds, by the sixteenth-century Reformers. The arguments regularly advanced in support of some kind of purgatory, however modernized, do not come from the Bible. I cannot stress sufficiently that if we raise the question of punishment for sin, this is something that has already been dealt with on the cross of Jesus. Paul says, in his most central and careful statement, not that God punished Jesus, but that God “condemned sin in the flesh” of Jesus (Romans 8:3). The idea that Christians need to suffer punishment for their sins in a post-mortem purgatory, or anywhere else, reveals a straightforward failure to grasp the very heart of what was achieved on the cross.

—N.T. Wright, For All the Saints