Reincarnation?
by Peter Davison
Q What does the church teach about reincarnation, or about the possibility of intelligent life beyond earth?
A The Easter-Pentecost season is a good time to ponder such questions. Incarnation – belief in God as revealed in creation and supremely in the person of Jesus – is central to Christian faith. Reincarnation, however, is contrary to our belief that each of us is unique, both in our finite life on earth and in our eternal life beyond death. Reincarnation is linked to cyclical notions of fate — the so-called “wheel of fortune” – and an idea that we come back to earth in higher or lower forms until we achieve perfection. Thus we have people who claim “past lives” which continue to influence them, consciously or unconsciously, in the present. As Christians, we believe in the interdependence of creation. This takes into account our DNA, which reminds us how we share many characteristics with past and present relatives. These predispositions, however, do not deny our freedom and responsibility to make real choices about what to do with what we’ve been given. Contrary to some opinion, we are not “fated”, either by nature or by nurture, to act in predetermined ways – though there is a growing tendency to get into the blame game, abdicate our responsibility, and surrender our freedom.
As for the possibility of intelligent life beyond earth, we have no clear evidence of it, though it is quite possible we are not God’s only experiment. In your letter you wondered why God would want to risk creating people with freewill, given the mess we’ve made of it. But central to Christian faith is our belief that God is a God of love, whose greatest gift is that very freedom which makes us, in a sense, God-like, but also allows us to “screw up”. The Christian answer to the suffering caused by our selfishness is not the removal of our freedom, but the willingness of God to become “one of us”, to suffer with us and die for us, and by the resurrection of Jesus to show that life is not ultimately tragedy, but comedy – that life, not death, has the last laugh.
Think, too, what life without choice or risk would be like. We need law to remind us our freedom is limited by our life in community with others. But the “nanny state” which pretends to eliminate all risk ends up as tyranny, and prevents us from growing up into responsible freedom. Paradoxically, life with all its risks and all its pain is the greatest sign that God is not some remote and uncaring tyrant, but a God whose suffering love enables us to become fully alive. In baptism we become “Easter people” by dying with Christ to our false selves (egos), and rising with him to the new life (Self-beyond-self) where death and the fear of death no longer rule over us. In this sense we are “re-born”. Even now we belong to that “communion of saints” which consists of all God’s people in all times and all places, each of whom is unique, but all of whom share in the dignity of and glory of God’s grace in creation and redemption. That could include people from other planets of whom we have no knowledge, though we have no evidence so far. What we do believe, however, is that “eternity” is not a mere extension of linear time, but a dimension beyond all time and space, of which we may have occasional glimpses in this life, and which is our ultimate true home and “abiding city”.
