Reincarnation

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Christian Reincarnation

The mystery of God in humanity

Early in the fourth century, while Bishop Alexander of Alexandria was expounding on the Trinity to his flock, a theological tsunami was born.

A Libyan priest named Arius stood up and posed the following simple question: "If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence."  In other words, if the Father is the parent of the Son, then didn't the Son have a beginning? 

Apparently, no one had put it this way before.  For many bishops, Arius spoke heresy when he said that the Son had a beginning.  A debate erupted, led by Arius on the one side and by Alexander and his deacon Athanasius on the other.  Athanasius became the Church's lead fighter in a struggle that lasted his entire life. 

In 320, Alexander held a council of Alexandria to condemn the errors of Arius.  But this did not stop the controversy.  The Church had nearly split over the issue when the controversy reached the ears of the Roman emperor Constantine.  He decided to resolve it himself in a move that permanently changed the course of Christianity.

The orthodox accused the Arians of attempting to lower the Son by saying he had a beginning.  But, in fact, the Arians gave him an exalted position, honoring him as "first among creatures."   Arius described the Son as one who became "perfect God, only begotten and unchangeable," but also argued that he had an origin. 

The Arian controversy was really about the nature of humanity and how we are saved.  It involved two pictures of Jesus Christ:  Either he was a God who had always been God or he was a human who became God's Son.

If he was a human who became God's Son, then that implied that other humans could also become Sons of God.  This idea was unacceptable to the orthodox, hence their insistence that Jesus had always been God and was entirely different from all created beings.  As we shall see, the Church's theological position was, in part, dictated by its political needs.  The Arian position had the potential to erode the authority of the Church since it implied that the soul did not need the Church to achieve salvation.

The outcome of the Arian controversy was crucial to the Church's position on both reincarnation and the soul's opportunity to become one with God.  Earlier, the Church decided that the human soul is not now and never has been a part of God.  Instead it belongs to the material world and is separated from God by a great chasm.

Rejecting the idea that the soul is immortal and spiritual, which was a part of Christian thought at the time of Clement and Origen, the Fathers developed the concept of "creatio ex nihilo", creation out of nothing.  If the soul were not a part of God, the orthodox theologians reasoned, it could not have been created out of His essence.

The doctrine persists to this day.   By denying man's divine origin and potential, the doctrine of creation out of nothing rules out both preexistence and reincarnation.  Once the Church adopted the doctrine, it was only a matter of time before it rejected both Origenism and Arianism.  In fact, the Arian controversy was only one salvo in the battle to eradicate the mystical tradition Origen represented. 

Origen and his predecessor, Clement of Alexandria, lived in a Platonist world.  For them it was a given that there is an invisible spiritual world which is permanent and a visible material world that is changeable.  The soul belongs to the spiritual world, while the body belongs to the material world.

In the Platonists' view, the world and everything in it is not created but emanates from God, the One.  Souls come from the Divine Mind, and even when they are encased in bodily form, they retain their link to the Source.

Clement tells us that humanity is "of celestial birth, being a plant of heavenly origin."  Origen taught that man, having been made after the "image and likeness of God," has "a kind of blood-relationship with God."

While Clement and Origen were teaching in Alexandria, another group of Fathers was developing a countertheology.   They rejected the Greek concept of the soul in favor of a new and unheard of idea:   The soul is not a part of the spiritual world at all; but, like the body, it is part of the mutable material world.

They based their theology on the changeability of the soul.  How could the soul be divine and immortal, they asked, if it is capable of changing, falling and sinning?  Because it is capable of change, they reasoned, it cannot be like God, who is unchangeable.

Origen took up the problem of the soul's changeability but came up with a different solution.  He suggested that the soul was created immortal and that even though it fell (for which he suggests various reasons), it still has the power to restore itself to its original state.

For him the soul is poised between spirit and matter and can choose union with either:  "The will of this soul is something intermediate between the flesh and the spirit, undoubtedly serving and obeying one of the two, whichever it has chosen to obey."  If the soul chooses to join with spirit, Origen wrote, "the spirit will become one with it."

This new theology, which linked the soul with the body, led to the ruling out of preexistence.  If the soul is material and not spiritual, then it cannot have existed before the body.  As Gregory of Nyssa wrote: "Neither does the soul exist before the body, nor the body apart from the soul, but ... there is only a single origin for both of them."

When is the soul created then?   The Fathers came up with an improbable answer:  at the same time as the body - at conception.  "God is daily making souls," wrote Church Father Jerome.   If souls and bodies are created at the same time, both preexistence and reincarnation are out of the question since they imply that souls exist before bodies and can be attached to different bodies in succession.

The Church still teaches the soul is created at the same time as the body and therefore the soul and the body are a unit.

This kind of thinking led straight to the Arian controversy.  Now that the Church had denied that the soul preexists the body and that it belongs to the spiritual world, it also denied that souls, bodies and the created world emanated from God.

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Christian Reincarnation Index The controversy erupts The doctrine of reincarnation Scriptural support for reincarnation More scriptural support for reincarnation The mystery of God in humanity The Arian controversy The Council of Nicea The Fifth General Council Conclusion Proof of reincarnation?