In the third to last episode of Matt Smith’s tenure as the eleventh Doctor, he and his companion Clara reach what is supposed to be his tomb, a massive TARDIS having aged to the point where its dimensional engineering could no longer contain its actual mass and interior size. Much to Clara’s surprise, when they enter his tomb, they don’t find a body. Instead, they find a kind of thread of energy looping and folding back in on itself in a complicated knot. Clara asks the Doctor, “What is that?” The Doctor responds, “It’s my time stream. Well, what did you expect, a body? Which one would it be?” He was referring of course to the fact that the Doctor, when his body comes to the end of its ability to repair itself, regenerates all of his cells into a new body with a new face and even a slightly different personality, and can be either a man or a woman of any race. The Doctor becomes both an entirely new person even as he or she remains the same person with each regeneration.
Hypothetically speaking, and as a thought experiment, let’s return to the discussion of reincarnation, and specifically whether reincarnation is compatible with the resurrection of the body taught in the New Testament. Now, we’re not talking specifically about karmic reincarnation as in Hinduism or Buddhism, where one’s actions specifically impel the re-infleshment of a soul (though of course that could fall under this), but rather the general idea that a soul or psyche could be reborn into a new body after having passed out of a previous body upon that body’s death regardless of the cause.
One of the arguments against reincarnation being compatible with the New Testament is that of the resurrection of the body. “Which body would it be in the resurrection if the person had lived more than one life? Would it even be a man or a woman?”
As I thought this question over, it occurred to me how much it sounded like the question of the Sadducees in the Gospels where they ask Jesus the question of the woman who had married seven brothers in turn, one dying right after the other, “In the resurrection, whose wife would she be, for she had been married to all seven?”
Jesus’ answer to this question is, to loosely paraphrase it, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Because in the resurrection they will neither marry nor be given in marriage but will be like the angels of God in heaven.” And, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that His answer could also apply to the question of reincarnation and resurrection as well.
Let us suppose that a particular soul was born three thousand years ago, and went through many different reincarnations since that point as both man and woman and eventually reached the resurrection as one who had been joined to Jesus Christ by baptism into His death, burial, and resurrection. During that time, while each physical incarnation could not remember the last, could not each person’s memories be imprinted on that psyche forming parts of the larger whole of who that individual person is? While human beings may see many different people, God only sees the one individual soul growing and learning through each reincarnation. And in the resurrection, when that soul is given an immortal physical body of spirit, as Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15, would it not then reflect the physical form of the individual, immortal psyche itself, the aggregation of all those thousands of years of memories, experiences, and growth? As Jesus said, it would be neither man nor woman, or at least it would likely be without gender as the angels are without gender.
Part of the thinking on this is that the individual psyche is more than just the biology and experiences of this life, but is ultimately comprised of the natural and experiential influences and memories of every incarnation to which that psyche has been exposed. That there is more there under the surface of the conscious and even subconscious mind than we can realize comprising the entire whole of the person. That, like the Doctor in Doctor Who, each individual regeneration is their own personality as well as the same person from regeneration to regeneration. So then, the body with which our reincarnated fried is resurrected is not that of any one individual incarnation, but one which reflects the aggregate of all of them into who the whole individual person truly is, rather than any one part preferred over the other. A new immortal incarnation with perhaps a new name to reflect the whole instead of just the parts.
As I said, it’s a thought experiment, a hypothetical to go along with my previous musings about the possibility or not of reincarnation.
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