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Christianity and rebirth. (Read 234 times)
brahbata
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Christianity and rebirth.
Feb 23rd, 2021 at 5:19am
 


Christianity and rebirth.


H
allo dear ones,

in a Christian forum I asked the question how Christians think about rebirth. I received a reply from TamLin that I think is well worth reading .... I asked and may put this answer in here - enjoy!

Love,

brah



Hello brahbata!


Church Christianity nowadays rejects, at least officially, the doctrine and the reality of the so-called reincarnation.

Many Christians outside the churches, however, see it as an essential part of Christian doctrine.

According to my conviction as a free, unattached follower of Christ, uniquely attached to Christ, I consider it to be true, in any case highly probable, logical, benevolent and just.

At the beginning of Christianity, reincarnation was one of the "pillars" in the whole edifice of faith.
Without it, "Christianity" would have lacked (and has actually lacked) any logic.

For how could a benevolent God give golden spoons to one man and only the hunger cloth to another in his allegedly only (!!) life on earth?

Early church princes and theologians like Origenes, Basilides or Saint Gregory taught of course the re-embodiment of the soul.

Officially after the Council of Nicaa (the first great council in the history of the Church) in 325 - but, as can be assumed, even before that - the deliberate modification or even eradication of unpopular or misunderstood passages in the writings of the New Testament began, including those concerning reincarnation.

It was not until the fifth council in Constantinople in 553 that reincarnation was finally "abolished"!!!

Correctores appointed by ecclesiastical authorities especially for this purpose were authorized to correct scriptural texts in the sense of what was considered correct according to the ecclesiastical rulers of that time.
It is likely that numerous passages of the New Testament concerning the doctrine of reincarnation were removed during that period.

One of the most famous "Church Fathers" -Origenes- was one of the greatest scholars and Bible experts that "Christianity" has ever known.

He was a scientist who had won all the worldly honors of the Greek educational world of that time, and he is also the only one who presented the doctrine of Christianity also literarily in the form of a closed philosophical system.
In order to base all his statements on a broad biblical foundation, he prepared for himself a comprehensive text edition of the Old Testament (the Hexapla), so that he could always refer his teachings to this foundation.

In addition to Greek, he also mastered Hebrew (the language of the original Old Testament texts), and even learned Jesus' mother tongue, Aramaic, in order to be able to read the original texts of those who had known Jesus personally and had written down his life and teachings.
Origen can thus, without exaggeration, be called a universal scholar of world renown.

He is a witness to the highest Christian knowledge and its preeminent teacher.
His literary legacy represents, up to the 20th century, the most comprehensive and profound development of the Bible. (from the introduction of the book Origen the Diamond by Robert Sträuli, 1987).

In De principiis, then, Origen advocates quite directly the principles of karma and reincarnation. It says there for example:

If one wants to know why the human soul obeys the good one time and the evil the other time, one has to look for the cause in a life that preceded the present life. Each of us hastens towards perfection through a succession of lives. We are bound to lead ever new and ever better lives, whether on earth or in other worlds. Our devotion to God, which purifies us from all evil, means the end of our rebirth.


And in another place he writes:

Due to an attraction to evil, certain souls take on bodies, first a human one. Then, after their life span as a human being has expired, due to irrational desires they change to an animal body, from where they sink to the level of plants. From this state they rise again, passing through the same stages, and return to their heavenly places.


Thus, according to Origen, the ultimate purpose of all life within the material world is for souls to purify and ennoble themselves through many incarnations until all, by obeying the commandments of Jesus and through their love and devotion to God, eventually return to the eternal communion of God:



For God directs souls not only with a view to, say, the fifty or sixty years of this earthly life, but to infinite eternity; for He has made spiritual substance incorruptible and related to Himself, and the rational soul is not excluded from healing as if it were confined to life here on earth....

This [return to God], however, must not be imagined as a sudden happening, but as a gradual one, taking place step by step in the course of innumerable and infinitely long periods of time, the process of improvement slowly seizing one by one...; some hurrying ahead and striving more rapidly to the heights, others following at a short distance, and still others far behind; and so there are innumerable stages of progressors who come from enmity to reconciliation with God, and at the end there is the last enemy, who is called death, and who is also destroyed, that he may no longer be an enemy.



This last statement refers to the biblical passage 1 Cor. 15:26, which Origen explains as follows:

The destruction of the last enemy, however, is to be understood in such a way that it is not his God-created substance that perishes, but his hostile will, which does not originate from God, but from himself. He is thus destroyed, not in order not to be in the future, but in order not to be an enemy and death in the future.


Thus, we can summarize:

The knowledge of reincarnation was thus known in the environment of Jesus, so that he could presuppose it here and there in his teachings.
This is also one of three possible explanations for why not so much has been handed down on this subject.

A second explanation is that this tradition was not in the interest of the church, which is why most testimonies were preserved outside the Bible in the so-called Apocrypha (= hidden writings).

And a third conceivable explanation is pointed out by the church father Jerome, from whom the following sentence is handed down:

"The doctrine of the Second Coming has been proclaimed to the few since the very earliest times, as a faith handed down, which has not been proclaimed publicly."
(Jerome, Epistula ad Demetriadem, quoted in K. O. Schmidt, Kehret wieder Menschenkinder, Bonn 1970, p. 42),


which also makes sense:

A community, which wants to help a peace kingdom or a "kingdom of God" on earth to break through, should not lose itself in reincarnation speculations, neither directed into the past nor into the future.

A combination of all possible explanations is conceivable.

Greeting

TamLin


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