The Church has always denied it, especially when it was popular in the surrounding non Christian culture, e.g., in ancient Greece.
The Bible contradicts it: “It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27).
Reincarnation insults the body. It’s Cartesian, or Platonic, or Gnostic. It locates our whole humanity in the soul or spirit and treats the body merely as our temporary motel room at best and as a tomb or prison at worst. (In Greek, the word for “body,” soma, is almost the same as the word for “tomb,” sema.) The Jewish and Christian Scriptures tell us that God invented and created the body, and that the image of God is bodily as well as spiritual. The first time “the image of God” is mentioned, in Genesis 2:7, it is identified as “male and female.” The words mean physical, biological male and female, not just masculine and feminine minds.
By the way, reincarnation makes the same mistake as contraception: it reduces the body to an object, a thing. It’s no longer a part of me; it’s a part of the world out there.
