Why Don’t Christians Believe in Reincarnation? Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers breaks down the biblical and theological reasons why Christians reject the concept of reincarnation. Discover how the concept of judgment and the afterlife differs between Christianity and Eastern religions. Explore the implications of reincarnation on the Christian understanding of sin, salvation, and the human soul.
Transcripts:
Hi Cy, hi Joe.
Hi Glenda.
I’m wondering why we as Christians and Catholics don’t believe in reincarnation and what scriptures point to that non-belief?
Yeah, there’s plenty of scriptures that point to that. I wanna suggest two ways of looking at it, one just biblically, so for instance, Hebrews 9 verse 27 says it is appointed for men to die once and after that comes judgment.
That’s a really clear, if you want just like a one verse refutation, you could just say, okay, well reincarnation says we don’t die once, we die over and over again, and we aren’t judged after death, like we’re leading not in the sense that Hebrews is talking about which is that you are going to heaven or hell.
If you look more broadly, you’ll find that the Bible is replete with these descriptions of judgment, that there is a time when you die and you’re judged, so for instance, in the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus tells the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, when they die, one goes to the place of comfort and one goes to the place of torment. So that’s the repeated kind of pattern.
Jesus, we find him going to liberate the souls in suffering in 1 Peter 3, or the souls kind of in limbo waiting for him in 1 Peter 3, when he descends to the dead.
And so like when Jesus dies on the cross, he doesn’t get reincarnated, rather soul and body are separated and he goes to the spiritual realm. So the whole Christian message presupposes that reincarnation isn’t true. And in the Old Testament, but in a much clearer way, I think in the New Testament, we get a clear description that when you die, you go to heaven or hell. Now, that doesn’t preclude purgatory, where there’s like a process of purification before you enter heaven, but it would preclude a whole second lifetime on earth. That’s incompatible to biblical evidence that you die once and then are judged. The last thing I’d say is even apart from the biblical evidence, I find that a belief in reincarnation is hard to grasp, it’s hard to reconcile it, we’ll say, with the idea of population growth.
That there’s more people now than there were 100 years ago, or a thousand years ago or 10,000 years ago. And if everybody’s just getting reincarnated, how is the number of people on earth going up? And even if you said, well, maybe some of like animals that are becoming people or something like this, well, it seems like the number of living organisms is in flux, seemingly going up, but it could potentially be going down. Either way, you would think there’d be a constant number, you know, that every time one person dies, another one’s born, we don’t see that demonstrably in human history. We see the opposite.
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