Where did I come from? Where am I going?
What was I before I was born, what will happen to me when I die?
These questions are probably spontaneous among many people - if not all people.
They arise from a sense of trying to understand "my" situation in life, in this world.
The current options in answering include the following:
1. The questions make no sense. There is no you except in this temporary life and world, a current by-product of brain activity. And indeed "you" is probably only the same thing as itself here-and-now - and was not so when you were a young child, and "you" may be obliterated before your body dies by brain pathology. This is mainstream secular atheism, as taught by Western culture.
2. The second question: Where am I going? is a real question, and the answer is [some kind of afterlife, such as heaven]; but the first question: Where did I come from? is an illegitimate question that has no answer; because "I" did not exist until my-self/ my-soul was created from nothing, some time before it was incarnated in a body. This is the conviction of mainstream orthodox Christianity, and some other religions.
3. The reincarnation answer, which varies in its ultimates on either side of this particular mortal life (eg, varies concerning explanations of the ultimate origin and destination of "me"); but reincarnation belief generally has the take-home message that where I came from was a previous mortal-earthly incarnation, and where I am going is another mortal-earthly incarnation. This is asserted by the likes of Hindus and Buddhists and Eastern influenced Westerners of a New Age and/or Esoteric flavour.
Answer 2 - we came from nothing, and/but will live eternally after death - is the mainstream, orthodox Christian answer.
I would draw attention to its intermediate position in the above list; in that it asserts that (like mainstream atheism) there was a time in the past when we did not exist.
This mainstream-orthodox-Christian asserted non-existence in the past of some essential "self" that is me; is something contradicted intuitively in some people (including myself) - to put it simply, I (like may people) have some kind of an inner conviction of a pre-mortal existence*.
That mainstream, orthodox Christianity decided to assert that each soul is created-from-nothing was, I believe, a very unfortunate decision. It is impossible to know how many people through history have rejected Jesus Christ because they were thereby compelled (by the churches) to reject their intuition of pre-mortal existence - but it must have been A Lot of people.
Especially unfortunate as there are many scriptural references that plausibly refer to pre-mortal existence - especially the Gospel discussion of whether John the Baptist was, or was not, another "incarnation" of one of the ancient Hebrew prophets (e.g. John 1: 21-5).
At present, the only widely known option with respect to pre-mortal life is reincarnation; but there is another possibility that seemed to go unnoticed until Joseph Smith the Mormon prophet; which is that we all existed eternally before this mortal incarnation, but as not-embodied, not-incarnate, spirit beings. This is indeed my own intuition with respect to myself.
(i.e. The phases of life, according to Mormonism, go roughly as follows: eternal pre-mortal spirit life; temporary mortal incarnation on earth; resurrected incarnate eternal life, of some kind - whether Paradisal or Heavenly in various degrees, or Hellish**.)
But I see no Christian grounds for excluding the possibility of reincarnations preceding this mortal life. I just don't feel this is true for me.
I wish that more people knew of, and had seriously considered, the Mormon idea of eternal, pre-mortal, spirit existence because, well... I think the idea has "a lot going for it!"
In other words, I think it is true that I lived a a spirit before this incarnation - so the idea is true at least for people like myself: those whose intuitive sense, direct knowledge, or memory rejects both creation from nothing, and (multiple) prior incarnations - but is convinced of prior existence.
However, looking forwards from this mortal life, I think that a Christian will - almost by definition - not desire further reincarnation, nor a return to spirit existence; but the Christian will instead desire to attain resurrection to eternal Heavenly life.
Of course, in principle, a Christian might feel he was not ready for resurrection, and therefore needed further reincarnations to prepare for the final choice of resurrection.
However; I think that resurrection is not the kind of thing that can be delayed in such a fashion; because (now that Jesus Christ has made this possible) future reincarnation actually involves rejecting the chance and possibility of resurrection, after we end this mortal life - which doesn't seem to me like something a Christian would want to do...
But that's just me!
* Mainstream Orthodox Christians find themselves in the difficult position of having to argue that our soul is immortal going forwards, but not going backwards. Such Christians must argue that it does not make sense to suppose our souls can be annihilated into nothingness after death; but that is does make sense to suppose that the soul emerged from nothingness before birth. I say this is difficult to argue - it is not of course impossible! Yet such arguments very rapidly become extremely complex and abstract, and thereby (for most people) are not compelling.
**This is the orthodox Mormon understanding. My own is broadly similar in terms of phases, but somewhat different in terms of detail in that I believe reincarnation is a pre-moral possibility; and that resurrection to eternal incarnation is only for those who choose Heaven, and that other choices will to remain post-mortal spirits.
3 comments:
i was expecting a fourth option, which uses different language and gives more context, but that ultimately and for all intents and purposes ends up being the same as the first one (atheism): the perennialist, and orthodox mystical, view - which is that our selves are really only illusions, that came, not from nothing as such, but from The One, and will return to The One, and the illusion of separateness, personality, individuality, will cease. many of the early church fathers who spoke of pre-existence spoke of it in these terms, ultimately all collapsed to the One at the start and at the end. the 'heaven' they spoke of, is really not an individual heaven, but a reabsorption, like a drop back into the ocean. i see no meaningful difference between this and atheism - which is why these ideas are so comfortable for the system. even reincarnation, which is sometimes included sometimes not, is something that happens in the middle but is supposed to end, when the soul finally is reabsorbed. so maybe this position is really a mixture of all three. but with regards to the question of here and now, it answers the same thing, that ultimately there is no such thing as 'I' - only God has it, and when all is said and done, only 'he' will have it. and we'll all be dissolved back into the soup.
this idea is very old of course, and has always existed alongside some kind of more personal idea of afterlife and prexistence, as far as i can tell - from the chinese to the druids and everyone in between, these two ideas always seemed to exist side by side, not necessarily even divided between common people and educated people - it was much more complicated than that. what seems to be the case is that, now, they can no longer be held simultaneously - and a society that takes oneness seriously will be suicidal. after all, there really is no point to anything we do here, whether we believe it's all chemicals or all God.
"That mainstream, orthodox Christianity decided to assert that each soul is created-from-nothing was, I believe, a very unfortunate decision."
It must be stressed that this was indeed a decision--converged upon as doctrine several centuries after Christ.
Before then, pre-existence was not entirely inconceivable to early Christians. Some even taught of its reality in some form or other (Origen, Clement). And of all the Greek philosophy orthodoxy adopted over the centuries, it conspicuously managed to exclude Plato's ideas about pre-existence.
That it took until the 1800s for pre-existence to seriously re-emerge as a concept in Christianity is quite telling.
@Frank - Yes, it was Romanticism that did it. Wordsworth (a mainstream Christian, in theory) made pre-mortal life almost mainstream with his prelude; but never theorized it.
A century earlier the very Platonic Christian Thomas Traherne also made reference to pre-mortal life in his Centuries of Meditations - albeit almost nobody read them and they were lost for a couple of hundred years.
But these things do need *explicit* theorization - hints don't suffice.
Post a Comment