Trying to make Christian sense of original sin and reincarnation

Today we're doing rambling theological speculations instead of sync. A change is as good as a rest.

In Joseph Smith's 1842 summary of Mormon beliefs, the second thing he mentioned -- second only to belief in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost -- was this:

We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression (AoF 1:2).

To modern people, this just seems like common sense. Obviously, each person is morally responsible only for his own actions. Obviously, no just God would punish one person for another person's actions, especially not for the actions of a distant ancestor on whom the descendant could have exerted no possible influence. We may have inherited a predisposition to sin from Adam but cannot possibly have inherited his actual sins themselves. Whatever "original sin" might be, it can't be that.

The problem with the above understanding is that elsewhere in Mormon scripture it is implied that the reason we are not punished for Adam's misdeeds is not that we are inherently incapable of being guilty of them but rather that Christ has atoned for them. It seems that we are forgiven for Adam's transgression in much the same way that we may be forgiven for our own, but that without Christ's intervention it would be just to punish us for what Adam did.

I say "it is implied" and "it seems" because the scriptures on this topic are not exactly crystal clear, but it seems to me that that is what they are saying.

Here is Mormon, channeling Christ, explaining why children should not be baptized:

Listen to the words of Christ, your Redeemer, your Lord and your God:

Behold, I came into the world not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; the whole need no physician, but they that are sick; wherefore, little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin; wherefore the curse of Adam is taken from them in me, that it hath no power over them; and the law of circumcision is done away in me.

And after this manner did the Holy Ghost manifest the word of God unto me; wherefore, my beloved son, I know that it is solemn mockery before God, that ye should baptize little children (Moro. 8:8-9).

Immediately before the passage I have bolded, Mormon seems to be saying that little children are inherently innocent, but then he goes on to say that "the curse of Adam is taken from them in me." In Genesis, the curse pronounced on Adam is that the ground will bring forth thorns and thistles, that he will need to work to survive, and that he will eventually die. Children don't work for a living, but that's because they are provided for by their parents or others, not because Christ removed the power of that curse over them. The other aspects of the curse -- most notably mortality -- affect children as much as anyone else. In fact, for most of human history, most human deaths occurred in infancy. Given that fact, together with the context of explaining why children need not repent or be baptized, I think we have to understand "the curse of Adam" as Adam's guilt, as original sin.

The other relevant, but highly confusing, passage is from the Pearl of Great Price. The passage I've bolded isn't exactly straight from the horse's mouth -- it's Joseph Smith receiving revelation about what Moses wrote about what Enoch taught about how a conversation between Adam and God was understood by the people -- but it's what we've got.

And our father Adam spake unto the Lord, and said:

Why is it that men must repent and be baptized in water?

And the Lord said unto Adam:

Behold I have forgiven thee thy transgression in the Garden of Eden.

Hence came the saying abroad among the people, that the Son of God hath atoned for original guilt, wherein the sins of the parents cannot be answered upon the heads of the children, for they are whole from the foundation of the world.

And the Lord spake unto Adam, saying:

Inasmuch as thy children are conceived in sin, even so when they begin to grow up, sin conceiveth in their hearts, and they taste the bitter, that they may know to prize the good. And it is given unto them to know good from evil; wherefore they are agents unto themselves, and I have given unto you another law and commandment. Wherefore teach it unto your children, that all men, everywhere, must repent, or they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God, for no unclean thing can dwell there, or dwell in his presence . . . (Moses 6:53-57).

This is as close as the scriptures ever come to using the phrase "original sin" and -- despite the popular understanding that "Mormons don't believe in original sin" -- it doesn't say there is no such thing; it says that Christ has atoned for it.

That "wherein" (literally "in which") is a bit confusing, but I think the only coherent reading is to take it as meaning something like "wherefore" or "for which reason." It is saying that children are not guilty of the sins of the parents because Christ has atoned for original guilt -- but otherwise, they would be. The other possible reading is take it as a parenthetical explanation -- "but, by the way, when we say 'original guilt' we don't mean children being punished for their parents' sins" -- but then what exactly is Christ atoning for?

Adding to the confusion is the assertion that children are "whole from the foundation of the world"; Mormon uses the very same phrase in his own discussion of infant baptism (Moro. 8:12). This would seem to imply that they have always been whole and were thus never in need of any atonement, but I don't think it means that. Elsewhere in scripture, the atonement is spoken of as having been "prepared from the foundation of the world" (Mosiah 4:6-7), and Jesus, even though he was killed at a particular point in history and not before, is called "the lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8). Moses reports Enoch himself using such language:

And behold, Enoch saw the day of the coming of the Son of Man, even in the flesh; and his soul rejoiced, saying: 

The Righteous is lifted up, and the Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world . . . (Moses 7:47).

Enoch is seeing a vision of a particular time in the future, when Jesus will be executed on the cross, and yet he still describes it as something happening "from the foundation of the world." Whatever that expression means, it seems clear that it doesn't necessarily mean that something has always been true and thus never needed to happen.

It's also important to note that the passage I've bolded above is not something that was revealed but just something that people were saying -- and the basis for that saying was apparently God's telling Adam that he, Adam, had been forgiven. The logic seems to be that we would have inherited Adam's guilt, but Adam was forgiven, and thus we inherit that forgiveness as well.

That's what these scriptures seem to be saying. Nevertheless, I must insist -- there's no arguing with bedrock moral intuitions -- that no one can be guilty of a sin they had no hand in committing, and that this is inherently and necessarily true, not something that was made-true by anything Jesus did or suffered.

So, where does that leave us?

"In Adam's fall / We sinnèd all." The only way that could be true would be if each of us was in some sense Adam. "You must consider yourselves as if you were, respectively, Adam and Eve," participants in the Mormon temple ceremony are (or used to be) told. But surely that is only because the ceremony uses Adam and Eve as symbolic "everyman" figures. I mean, we can't each of us be reincarnations of Adam or Eve, can we?

This brings us to two more cryptic statements from Joseph Smith's Book of Moses:

And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many (Moses 1:34).

And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living; for thus have I, the Lord God, called the first of all women, which are many (Moses 4:26).

The explanations I heard growing up Mormon was that the first passage is saying that the name Adam means "many" (perhaps a scribal error, as it in fact means "man"), and the second is simply saying that there are many women, of which Eve is the first of all. But the two passages are too obviously parallel for them to mean two completely different things, using similar wording only by coincidence. I think we have to understand them to be saying that there are somehow many Adams and many Eves.

The immediate context of the many-Adams verse is that God has created "worlds without number" (v. 33), and that "there are many worlds . . . innumerable are they unto man" (v. 35). One fairly natural interpretation, then, is that each "world" (whether that means "planet" or "parallel universe") has its own first man, and that first man is always called, at least by God, Adam. I explored this possibility back in 2021 in "Lives, the universes, and everything," but here I want to explore a different possibility. The text doesn't say "the first man of each world"; it says "the first man of all men." As it reads, that seems like it should be a single unique figure, many worlds or not. But, making allowances for Joseph Smith's frontier grammar, I want to read it as "the first man of each man."

The first man of each man? Actually, my 2021 post also explored the idea that each Man in the fullest sense is composed of many men. I imagined God saying:

The first man is called Adam, Moses -- but there are many Earths that have an Adam. Millions of them, quadrillions, numbers you can't even begin to fathom. Many of them have an Abraham, many a Melchizedek, many a Moses. Thou art Moses, but there is a larger Moses -- one who, like me, belongs to many worlds. For ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.

The idea was that there are countless parallel universes, many of which have some version of Moses, and that each of these individual Moseses is somehow part of a single, multiverse-spanning "larger Moses," the godlike being who is, if he only knew it, "our" Moses's true self. And the idea was that this was not something special about Moses but was the true nature of each and every human being.

These days, though, my thoughts are less on the idea of a Greater Self embracing many parallel lives than on one embracing many sequential ones. In other words, reincarnation. Each person is one in a series of incarnations of a greater Being, and each Being's very first incarnation (perhaps a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) -- the first man of each man -- is called Adam or, as the case may be, Eve. The story of the Fall, then, is a figurative telling of what happens when Being incarnates for the first time, leaving paradise, becoming mortal, and being clothed in a garment of skins. This process inevitably involves sin, or at least “transgression,” and this is the “original guilt” spoken of. More broadly, original guilt would include all the misdeeds of all one’s past incarnations and not only those of “Adam.”

This helps explain, in a way the conventional understanding of Adam and Eve does not, both why we would each be considered guilty of the sins of our respective “Adam” and why Christ would extend blanket amnesty for that guilt, so that each child is born clean. There is a sense in which we “are” our past incarnations and bear responsibility for their deeds, and another sense in which we are not them — no memory of their lives, no continuity of consciousness — and cannot meaningfully repent for anything they did.

Having a specific named example will make this easier to discuss this clearly. Let's suppose that George S. Patton was correct in his belief that he was the reincarnation of Hannibal and use him. But it is imprecise to say that Patton was Hannibal. Rather, both Patton and Hannibal were successive incarnations of some larger Being. It will be convenient to have a name for this Being that incarnated as both Hannibal and Patton, so let’s call him Resheph. For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore any other incarnations this Resheph may have had.

The relationships among these three will bear a certain resemblance to those old Trinitarian formulas: Hannibal is Resheph, and Patton is Resheph, but Patton is not Hannibal, and yet there are not two Reshephs but one Resheph.

Patton cannot meaningfully repent for the sins of Hannibal. He doesn’t even know in any detail what those sins are, beyond what he can gather from history books and whatever inklings of memory he may imagine he has. He cannot truly feel remorse for something he reads in a history book, nor is it clear how he could “make amends” for Hannibal’s misdeeds when not only the people Hannibal harmed but the very world in which he lived is long gone. “Forsaking” some of Hannibal’s sins is easy enough — I’m sure Patton didn’t own slaves and refrained from offering child sacrifices to Baal — but the vast difference between the two men and their worlds makes this meaningless and not really redemptive. Not doing what Hannibal did turns out to be rather easy when you're not Hannibal.

So, supposing Hannibal died in his sins unrepentant, what happens? Patton cannot repent for Hannibal’s sins. Only Hannibal can do that, and Hannibal is dead. If Patton is counted guilty of the sins of Hannibal, then Patton is irrevocably damned, and it’s not clear what the point of his incarnation could be. If, on the other hand, Hannibal’s sins are unconditionally erased the moment Patton is born, then it seems that reincarnation is a morally unsatisfying get-out-of-jail-free card, rendering repentance unnecessary and irrelevant.

I think the only solution is that, while Patton cannot and must not be expected to repent for Hannibal’s sins, Resheph can and must.

For reincarnation to have any meaning, we have to assume that there is a larger Resheph consciousness who in certain conditions — between incarnations, presumably, and ultimately in the resurrection — has full access to the memory and experience of all his incarnations. Without this, the individual Being cannot really be said to live on after death. Without a unified Resheph consciousness, Patton is just a new being created from the dead Hannibal, just as the particles that once formed one body might be recycled to make another, and there is no more “life after death” than there would be under materialist assumptions.

Hannibal’s consciousness is more limited and impaired than Resheph’s and thus not identical to it, but I think it is still possible for Resheph to meaningfully repent for Hannibal’s deeds, much as a man can repent for something he did when he was drunk or otherwise impaired. Ideally, Hannibal repents for Hannibal’s sins before he dies; that is the best and easiest way. Failing that, though Resheph can attempt it, but he must do so while he has full access to his experience as Hannibal, not while he is in another incarnation and subject to the veil of forgetfulness.

However, these other incarnations are likely the primary means by which Resheph can enact his repentance. What a discarnate spirit can do to make amends for deeds done in the body is limited. We could imagine our hypothetical repentant Resheph thinking of what he needs to do to make amends and then arranging an incarnation where he will have the opportunity and inclination to do those things. Of course this will always be something of a gamble, since incarnating means passing through the veil of forgetfulness. You have to somehow try to arrange things so that you'll still be able to accomplish your mission even though your memory of what that mission is will be blocked.

Perhaps the amnesia and the lack of access to the larger consciousness are not total. Perhaps some syncs and hunches and visions and such are faint communications from the larger self, nudging you in the direction of your forgotten mission. Perhaps faint hints of the Resheph consciousness shining through were what enabled Patton to figure out that he had been Hannibal (again, supposing for the sake of the example that he was right about that). In some cases at least, Wordsworth may have been right that "not in entire forgetfulness . . . do we come."

Or perhaps it is mainly other Beings who arrange the incarnation and provide the nudges, particularly if the Being being reincarnated is not actually repentant. Perhaps some incarnation are arranged in order to provide experiences that may lead the larger Being to repentance.

But I think this is about as far as I can go with this using abstractions and a generic example. To really understand if it works, I think it will be necessary to imagine a specific example and write a story. I haven't written fiction since my teens and am probably not very good at it, but it seems to be what is indicated.

I'm still not entirely convinced that reincarnation really is compatible with Christianity. The reincarnation perspective tends to treat bodies as dispensable and replaceable, which is hard to reconcile with the resurrection idea of the body being a necessary and permanent part of the immortal soul. "In the resurrection, whose wife shall she be?" asked the Sadducees of the woman who had had seven successive husbands, "for they all had her." We might ask something similar of the soul who has had seven bodies and seven mortal identities, and no obvious answer suggests itself.

Just thinking aloud here. Comments are welcome, if anyone thinks they have some light to shed on these murky questions.