Part 4 — VII. REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.
Reading edition
214Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old.
Emerson.
The more diligently the student works this mine (the Bible), the richer and more abundant he finds the ore; new light continually beams from this source of heavenly knowledge to direct and illustrate the work of God and the ways of men.—Sir Walter Scott.
The divine oracles are not so silent in this matter as is imagined. But truly I have so tender a sense of the sacred authority of that holy volume that I dare not be so bold with it as to force it to speak what I think it intends not. Wherefore I would not willingly urge Scripture as a proof of anything, but what I am sure by the whole tenor of it is therein contained. Would I take the liberty to fetch in everything for a Scripture evidence that with a little industry a man might make serviceable to his design, I doubt not but I should be able to fill my margent with quotations which should be as much to purpose as have been cited in general Catechisms and Confessions of Faith.... And yet I must needs say that there is very fair probability for Pre-existence in the written word of God, as there is in that which is engraved upon our rational natures.—Glanvil, in Lux Orientalis.
215
VII.
REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.
The vitality of the doctrine of Reincarnation does not in the least depend upon a scriptural endorsement of it, but the fact that it is surprisingly conspicuous here is certainly interesting and confirmatory. Every candid Christian student must acknowledge that the revelation of truth is no more confined to the central book of Christendom than sunshine is limited to the Orient. There must be great principles of philosophy, like that of evolution, outside of the Bible; and yet the most skeptical thinker has to concede that this volume is the richest treasury of wisdom,—the best of which is still unlearned.
Although most Christians are unaware of it, reincarnation is strongly present in the Bible, chiefly in the form of preëxistence. It is not inculcated as a doctrine essential to redemption. Neither is immortality. But it is taken for granted, cropping out here and there as a fundamental rock. Some scholars consider it an unimportant oriental speculation which is accidentally entangled into the texture. But the uniform strength and beauty of its hold seem to rank it with the other essential threads of the warp upon which is woven the noblest fabric of religious thought.
216A sufficient evidence of the Biblical support of pre-existence, and of the consequent wide-spread belief in it among the Jews, is found in Solomon’s long reference to it among his Proverbs. The wise king wrote of himself: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way before the works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no foundations abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: while as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: when he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the foundations of the deep: when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; rejoicing in the habitable part of the earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.”[34] This passage disposes of the theory of Delitzsch that preëxistence in the Bible means simply an existence in the foreknowledge of the creator. Such a mere foreknowledge would not place him previous to the parts of creation which preceded his earthly appearance. And the last two clauses clearly express a prior physical life. The prophets, too, are assured of their pre-natal antiquity. Jeremiah hears Jehovah tell him, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.”[35]
217Skipping passages of disputed interpretation in Job and the Psalms which suggest this idea, there is good evidence for it all through the Old Testament, which is universally conceded by commentators, and was always claimed by the Jewish rabbis. The translators have distinguished the revealed form of Deity, as successively recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, by the word LORD, in capitals, separating this use of the word from other forms, as the preëxistent Christ. “The angel of the Lord” and “the angel of Jehovah” are other expressions for the same manifestation of the Highest, which modern theology regards as the second person of the Trinity. Wherever God is said to have appeared as man, to Abraham at Mamre, to Jacob at Peniel, to Joshua at Gilgal, to the three captives in the Babylonian furnace as “a fourth, like to the Son of God,” etc., Christian scholarship has maintained this to be the same person who afterward became the son of Mary. The Jews also consider these various appearances to be their promised Christ. After the captivity they held the same view concerning all persons. The apocryphal “Wisdom of Solomon” teaches unmistakably the preëxistence of human souls in Platonic form, although it probably is older than Philo, as when it says (ix. 15), “I was an ingenuous child, and received a good soul; nay, more, being good, I came into a body undefiled;” and “the corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things.” Glimpses of it appear also in “Ecclesiasticus.”
The assertion of Josephus that this idea was common among the Pharisees is proven in the Gospels, where members of the Sanhedrin cast the retort at 218Jesus, “Thou wast altogether born in sins.”[36] The prevalence of this feeling in the judgments of daily life is seen in the question put to Jesus by his disciples, “Which did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”[37] referring to the two contending popular theories, that of Moses, who taught that the sins of the fathers would descend on the children to the third and fourth generation, and that of reincarnation, subsequently adopted, by which a man’s discomforts resulted from his former misconduct. Jesus’ reply, “Neither,” is no denial of the truth of reincarnation, for in other passages he definitely affirms it of himself, but merely an indication that he thought this truth had better not be given those listeners then, just as he withheld other verities until the ripe time for utterance. This very expression of preëxistence used by the disciples he employs toward the man whom he healed at Bethesda’s pool after thirty-eight years of paralysis: “Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.”[38] Repeatedly he confirms the popular impression that John the Baptist was a reincarnation of Elijah. To the throng around him he said: “Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist.” “If ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.”[39] That John the Baptist denied his former personality as Elijah is not strange, for no one remembers distinctly his earlier life. Often Jesus refers to his descent from heaven, as when he says, “I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me;”[40] and what he means by heaven 219is shown by his words to Nicodemus, “No man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.”[41] The inference is that the heaven in which he formerly lived was similar to the heaven of that moment, namely earth. Again, Jesus asked his disciples, “Whom say men that I am?” And his disciples state the popular thought in answering, “Some say Elijah, others Jeremiah, and others one of the old prophets.” “But whom say ye that I am?” Peter, the spokesman, replies, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of God,” and so expresses another phase of the same prevailing idea, for the Christ was also an Old Testament personage. And Jesus approves this response. After Herod had decapitated John the Baptist, the appearance of Jesus, also preaching and baptizing, roused in him the apprehension that the prophet he killed had come again in a second life.
Preëxistence, the premise necessarily leading to reincarnation, is the keynote of the most spiritual of the Gospels. The initial sentence sounds it, the body of the book often repeats it, and the final climax is strengthened by it. From the proem, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God,” all through the story occur frequent allusions to it: “The word was made flesh” (John i. 14); “I am the living bread which came down from Heaven” (vi. 51); “Ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before” (vi. 62); “Before Abraham was, I am” (viii. 58); and finally, “Glorify thou me with the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (xvii. 5); “For thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world” (xvii. 24). It is always phrased 220in such a form as might be asserted by any one, though the speaker says it only of himself.
What the fourth Gospel dwells upon so fondly, and what is echoed in other New Testament books,—as in Philippians ii. 7, “He took on him the form of a servant,” in 2 Cor. viii. 9, “Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor,” and in 1 John i. 2, “That eternal Life which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us,”—is a thought not limited to the Christ. Precisely the same occurs in the mention of the prophet-baptizer John: “There was a man sent from God” (John i. 6). The obvious sense of this verse to the Christians nearest its publication appears in the comments upon it by Origen, who says that it implies the existence of John the Baptist’s soul previous to his terrestrial body, and hints at the universal belief in preëxistence by adding, “And if the Catholic opinion hold good concerning the soul, as not propagated with the body, but existing previously and for various reasons clothed in flesh and blood, this expression, ‘sent from God,’ will no longer seem extraordinary as applied to John.” No words could more exactly suit the aspirations of an oriental believer in reincarnation than these in the Apocalypse: “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out” (Rev. iii. 12).
More important than any separate quotations is the general tone of the Scriptures, which points directly toward reincarnation. They represent the earthly life as a pilgrimage to the heavenly country of spiritual union with God. It is our conceit and ignorance alone which deems a single earthly life sufficient to accomplish that purpose. They teach the sinful nature 221of all men and their responsibility for their sin, which certainly demands previous lives for the acquisition of that condition, as shown well by Chevalier Ramsay. (See pages 83–87.) St. Paul’s idea of the Fall and of God are precisely those of Philo and Origen. The Bible also treats Paradise as the ancient abode of man and his future home, which requires a series of reincarnations as the connecting chain.
223