Friday, October 1, 2010

Reincarnation and Christianity

Just a few weeks ago a clerk in a local store was attending me. He looked familiar to me, so I asked, “Do we know each other?” After exchanging names we concluded that we had not met before. But then he brightened and cheerfully said, “Hey, maybe we knew each other in a former life.” I could see that he was serious and I responded by saying, “I don’t think so, but I’m very interested in your comment about reincarnation because I’m a Christ follower, and the Bible has some very definite things to say about what happens after we die”.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, some 25% of Americans (more women than men) now believe in reincarnation. It seems plausible to me that a similar number of Canadians also embrace the notion that we die more than once and are born anew in some form.

So what gives? Why are so many gravitating toward an Eastern worldview that in the past was considered strange at best, if not an alien way of thinking?

From various conversations I’ve had I think that many people simply cannot accept that this life is all there is. I’ve heard this said by people with doctorates as well as ordinary store clerks. It appears to be a kind of a gut-level, intuitive thing. It reminds me of the text from the Bible that says, “God has put eternity in their hearts.” A Buddhist website I consulted opined that the strong interest in reincarnation, “is perhaps due to the comfort found in believing that each of us continues on in some form and that we have the opportunity to continually improve…increase our good karma and correct mistakes….”

Other people cannot accept the idea that this life ends all because it would mean that instead of justice people will in fact never have to pay for their crimes and sins. Hitler sometimes surfaces in these conversations, always with the premise that he will obviously have to go through a great many lives and suffer a great deal in order to pay for his crimes. This notion ties in with the belief that bad karma is carried forward into one’s new life and that this karma will have to be paid down, either by doing good or through suffering.

Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, believes that, “our fascination with reincarnation is related to Americans’ relative prosperity. Modern Americans, in their optimism and material success, see reincarnation as a chance to postpone eternity for another day.” Imagine it—a belief system that means you never have to say that you’re dead.

Some people reading this column may wonder what historic Christianity actually says about reincarnation. It happens that on this subject, in particular, the answer is startlingly clear. The Bible from beginning to end views time as linear, not cyclical. There is no vast system called the Wheel of Time that just keeps going round and round. We are born, we live, we die once and then we face the judgment of a fair God. The key scripture is found in Hebrews 9:27, “And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment…”

Fundamentally reincarnation is an amazingly complex do-it-yourself project. The individual keeps cycling through birth and rebirth in order that he, himself, will get the opportunity to pay off bad karma while earning good karma so that one day he can finally break the cycle and go off to Nirvana.

But whatever else it is, Christianity is the opposite of a do-it-yourself mentality. Christians believe that every individual is born, not basically good, but rather basically sinful and desperately in need of outside help. They look then with delight to Christ who can destroy all bad karma in an instant of time, and who has all sufficient power to prepare them for one good death, and their one new life to come.

Published in The Guelph Mercury, Sept. 25, 2010