Below is information from A Handbook of Christian
Apologetics by Peter Kareeft and Ronald Tacelli. (InterVarsity Press, Downers
Grove).
Six Basic Theories on Life After Death.
The human race has
come up with six basic theories about what happens to us when we die.
1. Materialism:
Nothing survives. Death ends all of me. Seldom held before the eighteenth century,
materialism is now a strong minority view in industrialized nations. It is the
natural accompaniment of atheism.
2. Paganism: A
vague, shadowy semi-self or ghost survives and goes to the place of the dead,
the dark, gloomy Underworld. This is the standard pagan belief. Traces of it
can be found even in the Old Testament Jewish notion of sheol. The “ghost” that
survives is less alive, less substantial, less real than the flesh and blood
organism now living. It is something like a “ghost image” on a TV set: a pale
copy of the lost original.
3. Reincarnation:
The individual soul survives and is reincarnated into another body.
Reincarnation is usually connected with the next belief, pantheism, by the
notion of karma: that after the soul has fulfilled its destiny, and learned its
lessons and become sufficiently enlightened, it reverts to a divine status or
is absorbed into (or realizes its timeless identity with) the divine All.
4. Pantheism:
Death changes nothing, for what survives death is the same as what was real
before death: only the one, changeless, eternal, perfect, spiritual, divine,
all-inclusive Reality, sometimes called by a name (“Brahman”) and sometimes not
(as in Buddhism). In this view—that of Eastern mysticism—all separateness,
including time, is an illusion. Therefore, in this view, the very question of
what happens after death is mistaken. The question is not solved but dissolved.
5. Immortality:
The individual soul survives death, but not the body. This soul eventually reaches
its eternal destiny of heaven or hell, perhaps through intermediate stages,
perhaps through reincarnation. But what survives is an individual, bodiless
spirit. This is Platonism, often confused with Christianity.
6. Resurrection:
At death, the soul separates from the body and is reunited at the end of the
world to its new, immortal, resurrected body by a divine miracle. This is the
Christian view. This view, the supernatural resurrection of the body rather
than the natural immortality of the soul alone, is the only version of life
after death in Scripture. It is dimly prophesied and hoped for in the Old
Testament, but clearly revealed in the New.
Ten Refutations of Reincarnation
Christianity
rejects reincarnation for ten reasons.
1. It is
contradicted by Scripture (Heb 9:27).
2. It is
contradicted by orthodox tradition in all churches.
3. It would reduce
the Incarnation (referring to Christ’s incarnation) to a mere appearance, the
crucifixion to an accident, and Christ to one among many philosophers or
avatars. It would also confuse what Christ did with what creatures do:
incarnation with reincarnation.
4. It implies that
God made a mistake in designing our souls to live in bodies, that we are really
pure spirits in prison or angels in costume.
5. It is
contradicted by psychology and common sense, for its view of souls as
imprisoned in alien bodies denies the natural psychosomatic unity.
6. It entails a
very low view of the body, as a prison, a punishment.
7. It usually
blames sin on the body and the body’s power to confuse and darken the mind.
This is passing the buck from soul to body, as well as from will to mind, and a
confusion of sin with ignorance.
8. The idea that
we are reincarnated in order to learn lessons we failed to learn in a past
earthly life is contrary to both common sense and basic educational psychology.
I cannot learn something if there is no continuity of memory. I can learn from
my mistakes only if I remember them. People do not usually remember these past
“reincarnations.”
9. The supposed
evidence for reincarnation, rememberings from past lives that come out under
hypnosis or “past life regression” can be explained—if they truly occur at
all—as mental telepathy from other living beings, from the souls of dead humans
10. Reincarnation
cannot account for itself. Why are our souls imprisoned in bodies? Is it the
just punishment for evils we committed in past reincarnations? But why were
those past reincarnations necessary? For the same reason. But the beginning of
the process that justly imprisoned our souls in bodies in the first place—this must
have antedated the series of bodies. How could we have committed evil in the
state of perfect, pure, heavenly spirituality? Further, if we sinned in that
paradise, it is not paradisiacal after all. Yet that is the state that
reincarnation is supposed to lead us back to after all our embodied yearnings
are over
If the answer is
given that our bodies are not penalties for sin but illusions of individuality,
the pantheistic One becoming many in human consciousness, no reason can
possibly be given for this. Indeed, Hinduism calls it simply lila, divine play.
What a stupid game for God to play! If Oneness is perfection, why would
perfection play the game of imperfection? All the world’s sins and sufferings
are reduced to a meaningless, inexplicable game.
And if evil is
itself only illusory (the answer given by many mystics) then the existence of
this illusion is itself a real and not just illusory evil. Augustine makes this
telling point.
Where then is
evil, and what is its source, and how has it crept into the creation? What is
its root, what is its seed? Can it be that it is wholly without being? But why
should we fear and be on guard against what is not? Or if our fear of it is
groundless, then our very fear is itself an evil thing. For by it the heart is
driven and tormented for no cause; and that evil is all the worse, if there is
nothing to fear yet we do fear. Thus either there is evil which we fear, or the
fact that we fear is evil. (Confessions, VII, 5)
(See also Justin
Martyr, Dialog with Trypho [ca. a.d. 180], and Albrecht, Reincarnation, for
extended Christian critiques of this idea.)
