Reincarnation – an original Christian doctrine

66 out. – An oversight or intentional? The readers would surely like an explanation! The Council ended on the 2 nd of June 553 A.D. but Pope Vigilius signed the Council documents, thereby giving them validity, only months after on the 8 th of December 553 A.D. The anathema, proclaimed 300 years after Origen’s death, has never been revised. In the “Regulae Tridentinae” de libris prohibitis from the 24 th of March 1564, known by the name of “Index” , Regula I. states: “All books that have been rejected prior to the year 1515 by Popes and Ecumenical Councils, and not listed in this index, are to be regarded as rejected as they have been rejected in the past.”(DS 1861) Concretely applied, this rejections must also apply to Origen’s documents. Those that trespass against them are threatened with anathema. (DS 1861) 5. The results of these anathemas In place of an evaluation of these processes, something the readers might want to undertake themselves, the assessment of the American theologian Cyril C. Richardson of the Union Theological Seminary, New York shall be rendered here: “The condemnation of Origen is one of the saddest episodes in the history of the Christian Church. The width of his thoughts, his spirit and the capacious sympathy of his religion stand in vivacious contrast to the narrow-minded, progress antagonistic attitude of his monastic detractors… It is as if a curtain was draw across the intellectual freedom of the East and with the help of various falsified texts from his works, one condemned everything that was noble, liberal and mature within Origen’s world of faith and thoughts. He, who had fought for a truly catholic religion, who asserted that all things are the legacy of the Church and that all things belong to Christ, was debarred from the Church by the curse of intolerance and fanaticism. The long-winded differences of opinion about Origen , reaching their culmination under Justinian , mark the end of a lot of things that were noble and enlightened within the early traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church.” 161 The condemnation and thereby the removal of any knowledge about the pre-existence of the soul before the birth of the physical body and the final return of all fallen souls to God, their Creator, deprived the original doctrine of reincarnation, the re-embodiment of the soul into the flesh, of its foundation; well, any thought about it actually had no right to appear anywhere within the Church’s doctrine in their opinion. The vacuum thus created allowed the following to be dogmatically secured within the Church’s history: The creation of the soul by God at the moment of the procreation of the physical body, the doctrine of original sin, the seemingly essential forgiving-of-sin function of the Church’s hierarchy and the eternal damnation of all human souls living outside the ecumenical system after their terrestrial demise. The mistakes from 543 A.D. and 553 A.D are comparable – even if it is incomparably more fatal and consequential for individual soul of the faithful within the influential sphere of the Church – with the mistake from the year 1633 A.D. Galileo verified that the Earth orbits around the sun and not vice versa. This discovery was a heresy according to ecumenical saying, one that stood in contrast to the literal interpretation of the Bible. Only in 1983, ergo after 350 years, did the Vatican 161 Richardson, see P. 50