Hard to argue against.
On the other hand the Jews believed in the fulfillment of an OT prophecy which is not necessarily a belief in reincarnation.
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Today I attended a Christmas party where a Jewish couple attended and they were even involved in the local Hasidic group as well. They vehemently denied that reincarnation was any part of Jewish belief because nobody in the Jewish community considers the Kabbalah as in any way representing Jewish thought. Thus if any Jewish people believe in reincarnation they are in a rather rare Jewish sect far from the mainstream of Jewish thought.
Oh and all your Bible quote mining proves, is how easily people can interpret things in the Bible to justify just about anything from misogyny and racism to slavery and human sacrifice.
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Oh for Goodness Sake!
If Kabbalah isnt representative of SOME Jewish thought then we are playing foolish games with words.
As we know, Jewish thought and practice was DEEPLY divided. Even the Pharisees were divided into TWO schools (one school opposed divorce!).
If Jews were talking about a reincarnated saint so much that it is noticed in multiple books of the New Testament… your point is kaput!
I was only reporting what they said. Nothing more.
You may prefer to ignore what people say about what they believe but I do not.
As far as I am concerned, The contents of the misna is conclusive that none of the Jewish scholars believed in reincarnation and that covers Jewish thought up to 1000 CE. And that tells us the views of the vast majority of Judaism as well. Yes the Kabbalah (from the 13th century) and Jewish mystics represent the fact that there are some Jews now who believe differently. Undoubtedly there are even Jews who believe in fairies and UFOs too.
So you are arguing that Kabbalah is an alien intrusion into Judaism… that there was no popular connection between a judaism of the New Testament period and Kabbalah whenit emerged in written form ?
That is the consensus among scholars, yes. They think it originates either from Gnosticism or some sect of Islam. I think the former is most likely.
You can say the very same thing about some of the views of the Maccabees. Gnosticism finds its earliest society-wide development in the martyrdoms of the Maccabee followers in Syria/Palestine!
I think we can box ourselves in on the question of the soul if we start with Plato and Aristotle, who were, after all, just two thinkers in a vast sea of human inquiry into the soul, the afterlife, and the relationship between the soul and human life. People from all races and cultures and religions ask about the soul because it’s a universal experience.
The soul is difficult to understand from the perspective of individual human beings, but when you collate the memories of soul from many different perspectives, you get a better idea of what the soul means – the same way French Impressionists and Pointillists created truthful images that made little sense when your nose was 6 inches from the canvas, but left you breathless when you stepped back a few paces.
The soul, like God, is something which can be heard and felt by the Heart but not seen by the Mind. The soul can’t be proven by instruments or rational arguments of the Mind. But the soul can be experienced through the peripheral vision of the Heart, through intense Heart emotions such as love and awe and wonder and creativity and faith. How does the beauty of art, music, marriage, poetry, gardening, dance, humour, and grief affect the biological wiring of our brains? Logically? Of course not. The beauty is completely illogical, yet it heals us in ways that can only be described as lifting the soul. Similarly, experiences of God’s presence are completely illogical. But they happen. And they change lives because they allow us to open up our Hearts to the completely illogical reality of God’s love – which is another way of talking about the soul’s unshakeable faith in God.
As I see it, the soul is us, the core self, the irreducible aspect that makes each of us a unique child of God who is loved for our unique ways of understanding the deep mysteries of Divine Love. I’m also in the minority in accepting the idea of preexistent soul.
But as others here have pointed out, we won’t know for sure until we die.
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I wish I could. Makes so much sense.
Can you tell me in what way? I can see 3 theories. 1) Origen 2) Mormonism 3) Reincarnation.
True.
Hello, Ed,
Well, there are a lot of theories about the soul floating around in our culture, our history, and our religious texts. The three theories you mention are definitely some of the better-known ones, but there are others, not least among them Plato’s, whose descriptions in Phaedrus of the soul as the charioteer have had a lot of influence on Christian thought.
For Christians, our thoughts about the soul have been so clouded by the theories of early church fathers such as Tertullian and Augustine, and so confused by various teachings about transmigration and reincarnation (some of which came from the East, but not exclusively so; for example, Pythagoras taught transmigration of the soul) that we almost never stop to ask ourselves what Jesus himself said about the soul – if he said anything at all.
When I read the Gospel of Mark, with its various Kingdom teachings, I see a theology of the soul that is quite unlike anything else in the Bible. I see a narrative that attempts to explain Jesus’ radical understanding of the inner self – the Kingdom, or soul in human form – as the starting place for love, healing, forgiveness, a thinking faith, and a relationship with God based on worthiness and inclusiveness rather than judgment and punishment. There’s nothing in Mark which says the soul is NOT preexistent. We just kind of assume it must be there because of the church’s doctrines on the nature of humankind.
Jesus tries to explain again and again that what’s inside you is more important for your journey of faith than what’s outside you. But there’s nothing occult about Jesus’ Kingdom/inner self teachings, and this is what makes them so radical. They’re so practical and so grounded in common sense, community, compassion, and inclusiveness that we can miss the point entirely. Jesus is saying that the inner self – the soul – is made by God and therefore it must be good, just like the everything else that’s good in the Creation narrative of Genesis 1. The Kingdom is something that’s always there. It’s an eternal state that you can get back to as a human being if you pay attention to the priorities of the Heart (not just the priorities of the Mind and the Law). You can transform your inner self into the fertile soil of Mark 4:8 and 4:20 if you follow in Jesus’ footsteps and make new choices about how to treat God, yourself, and other people – the way young children do because they haven’t forgotten what it means to accept love and blessings (Mark 10:13-16).
There’s no karma here. There’s no Platonic punishment for failure to measure up as a soul. There’s no Gnostic fall. But there are plenty of human mistakes that get in the way of our ability to live our human lives as the souls we really are. It’s those human mistakes that Jesus keeps nagging about.
It’s all about opening your eyes and your ears and your heart, speaking honestly, not being a hypocrite, and giving up the status-based “right” to treat others badly. Somewhere behind your closed eyes and ears lies the person God knows you can be if you use your free will wisely.
Free will is the key here. The preexistent soul, created by Mother Father God in pure love and integrity, simply cannot imagine how free will could be used in any way except pure love – so God gives us a temporary chance to see for ourselves how badly free will can be used.
Then God forgives us.
Being a soul in human form isn’t a punishment (though it often seems that way) – instead, it’s a chance to see for ourselves what Divine love, forgiveness, courage, faith, truth, and humbleness are really all about.
God bless.
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Thanks for sharing.
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Start peeling off things from this idea of the “soul” which are already explained by science (body and mind) and the Bible (spirit) and nothing is left. There is nothing which can be added to a physical form which can impart such things as life, consciousness, mind, and morality. This idea is pure myth, magic, and fantasy – great for stories, such a fountain of youth by which people can live forever, but nothing to do with reality.
Yes and other people believe in psychics, fairies, and UFOs. But I don’t see such beliefs as helpful except when writing fiction.
A disembodied soul is the very “guts” of the popular Western viewpoint of an afterlife!
Saying we must have a physical body follows the same broad sweeps of “meta-physics” that mormons follow. They believe if humans had a good enough space ship, we could take a trip to where a physical God resides!
Like saying that sucking blood is the very “guts” of the popular Western viewpoint of vampires.
But this shows that we have a misunderstanding.
Already Paul teaches in 1 Cor 15 that we are resurrected to a spiritual body not a physical body, and while the physical body is perishable, the spiritual body is imperishable. So already in the Bible we have this notion of something which survives the death of the physical body.
Thus my point was that with science and the Bible there is nothing left for the so called “soul” to be or do. The only exception being support for this twisted belief that children are all possessed by old evil sinners who keep coming back for more. No I don’t see any value whatsoever in that. Sounds like justification for the mistreatment of children.
But the real point is that we can do much much better explaining life and how it works with science than resorting to magical soul thingies be inserted into bodies. We have no reason to believe there is any such thing as philosophical zombies – and thus no reason to believe in such things as “souls” which can be removed in order to create such zombies.
Zombies? Vampires? Little children?
Your zealous insistence cannot be impeded, can it?
I dont think you sre going to convince the average Christian that there can be no soul without a body.
Why would I convince them of that any more than I would convince them that there can be no little gray men without UFOs.
The point is that the “soul” is not a Biblical concept. It serves no purpose for either science or Christianity. It’s only if you want to push reincarnation or other dubious ideas that you would need any “souls” anyway. There is no stuff or thing which has to be added to the body in order to make it alive or conscious. Life and conscious are the activities of the things measurable in the body already.
So what about the mind??? That isn’t added to the body either. The mind grows from the language, ideas and nurturing of parents and others.
Soul without a body.
A 3-part godhead.
A flood that is global instead of regional.
Curing ills by prayers alone.
Spirits that cause illness.
Hellfire and damnation.
Predestination.
Venomous snakes.
Glossalalia (tongues).
All these things can be rejected, or embraced, by various denominations.
I’m sure your denomination is most interesting … despite small membership.