
Burying Our Dead: Is Cremation Christian?
The inspiration for this post is the cremation question I saw on Twitter by a guy who goes by the handle, Smash Baals. It became quite the lively discussion and a lot of people expressed strong opinions one way or the other. The back and forth had an interesting effect on me because the more I interacted and read, the more convinced I became that cremation is in fact not Christian at all. I’ll explain what I mean by that, but I am sure in our day my new conviction would be considered “controversial.” I’ll explain that as well, but after years of waffling and mulling and ambivalence, I’ve come to the conclusion for a variety of reasons that as Christians we should bury our dead and not practice cremation. The primary concern of those who have no strong opinion one way or the other is reflected in this comment:
There’s nothing in the Bible that instructs us, New Testament believers, on how to handle our bodies in death. To claim that cremation is “unchristian,” is unbiblical. There is no ground to stand on.
I am sure in the 21st century post-Christian West this is the default position of most Christians. I frame it this way specifically because we live in a thoroughly secular society that for all intents and purposes is pagan. It’s ironic because Christianity grew to overcome the paganism of the ancient world, and all these centuries later paganism is back on the throne of society. We call it secularism, but it’s pagan in ostensibly non-religious garb, but there is no such thing as a non-religious society or a non-religious person because all people live by faith.
This Christian concern about it being biblical or unbiblical is a typically modern Christian way to frame this. We call this concept biblicism, which is a distinctly Protestant malady. It first shows up in Pietism and some Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then comes to dominate modern Evangelicalism in the 19th and 20th centuries through the Second Great Awakening and fundamentalism. It’s a misunderstanding of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone. In stating Scripture alone is our basis for faith and life, we are not saying therefore that if something isn’t expressly stated in Scripture it is illegitimate. In the Reformed world this is called the regulative principle, primarily in regard to worship. It says, if something isn’t expressly allowed or commanded in Scripture regarding worship, it’s wrong and unbiblical to do it. That position itself, however, is wrong and unbiblical.
This becomes obvious when you realize how little Scripture actually addresses in the overall scheme of things. In worship, for example, it’s one thing to say unless something is expressly commanded in Scripture it must not be done, and another that we should do what Scripture commands. For instance, the Bible says nothing about pianos and organs, maybe because they didn’t exist at the time. But it does say something about other musical instruments used in praising the Lord. The Biblicist who is hard core regulative would say, too bad, it doesn’t command or allow for pianos or organs, so no pianos and organs! That’s just dumb, I say speaking the truth in love. So, regarding burial, yes we don’t find it directly addressed in our Bibles, but we do see how dead bodies are handled in contrast to the pagans, and that tells us a lot. We also see how burial developed in Western Christian history in contrast to paganism, and that also tells us a lot.
The History of Christian Death and Burial
Many early church leaders spoke against cremation, and burial replaced cremation as Christianity spread. It took quite a while for paganism to be vanquished in the West, and thus their burial custom of burning the bodies of the dead as well. With the conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century, paganism began its slow demise. When Rome fell a hundred years later, however, it looked like it would be Christianity that would experience demise, but alas, God’s providential control over all things for His people, His church (Eph. 1:18-23) prevailed. This came through the British Isles starting with St. Patrick becoming a missionary to the Irish in the fifth century, then Charlemagne’s rule in the eighth into the ninth century on the continent, and finally Alfred the Great in the later ninth century. Alfred defeated the pagan Scandinavian hordes by the miraculous intervention of God and helped begin to establish a Christian England that would change the world.
There are many theological and Scriptural reasons why burial is the preferred and Christian approach to handling our dead, which can be seen in the development of the early church. The church was born into a Hellenistic world where Greek ideas permeated the culture and society, especially those of Plato which developed into the heresy of Gnosticism. Greek thought reflects a radical dualism where matter is tainted and bad, and the soul and the spiritual, non-matter, is good. The goal of life is to eventually escape this tainted mortal body into a non-material realm, so burning dead bodies to ashes was a reflection of this anti-materialist perspective on reality. All pagans shared it to one degree or another because they had no other theological reason for suffering and evil than matter itself being at fault. The concept of a personal, Creator God who made all things good, indeed very good, was unknown among pagans and heathens of every other religion except for Jews and then the Christians.
Christianity took direct aim at Greek and pagan thought with the incarnation of the personal Creator God, something inconceivable to an ancient Roman or Greek. Jews couldn’t conceive of it either, but for very different reasons. The Apostle John speaking of the word or logos in the beginning, the one who was with God and was in fact God, affirms in the incarnation the fundamental goodness of the material world and the human body:
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Clearly, it wasn’t matter that makes the world fallen and miserable, but man’s rebellion against his Creator; big difference! And because God united himself with a human body, so Christians saw the body as sacred, part of the full human person. Our bodies are us, and we are our bodies. There is a kind of dualism in Christianity as well, but not playing the material off of the spiritual as the Greeks did. Who we are is more than just our bodies. Some would call that essence, our unique personalities, what makes us, us, our soul (psuché- ψυχή in Greek). Our souls, who we are in our essence, may be separated for a time from our bodies in death, but that is temporary. Our hope, and this is critical, is not an immaterial, i.e. bodyless, existence in an ethereal place called heaven where we go when we die, but a material resurrected body united with our souls in the resurrection on a renewed and redeemed earth, the same earth we exist on now.
Which brings us to one of the pictures of death in the Bible being a kind of sleep from which we will all awaken, and burial is clearly more consistent with this image than cremation. In the great resurrection chapter, I Corinthians 15, Paul speaks of the eternal and spiritual nature of our physical bodies:
42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
Given what is a uniquely biblical anthropology, how Christians understand the nature of man, it is a person who is buried, not just their remains. I came up with a powerful phrase for our kids as they were growing up to communicate God’s hand in the creation of our bodies and who we are: lucky dirt. It was a sarcastic mocking of the idea that we’re simply material beings and a product of mere chance. No, what David says about us in Psalm 139 is that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” This is because we are not merely matter in motion, as I said above, we are persons made, as revealed in Genesis 1, in God’s image, male and female. That we bury persons not merely remains is seen in Mark 1 when the women go to the tomb where Jesus is buried:
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so they could go and anoint him.
The NIV says “body,” but the Greek says him, and not his remains. As I said, Christianity teaches us that we are our bodies and our bodies are us, even though we are more than just bodies. As Paul also says in I Corinthians 15, our bodies have one kind of splendor while our heavenly bodies will have another kind, but both bodies are us! As Paul says, our earthly body must die because what is sown does not come to life unless it dies. Buriel reminds us of this, cremation does not.
So we must ask ourselves a question. Does cremation communicate the same meaning attached to the body as burial? Of course not. People will often ask that their remains be spread in various places that means something to them and their family, which says nothing about the Christian hope of our final destination in a resurrected body on a renewed and redeemed earth. Even if Christians choose cremation, I would hope they would bury the remains of the person as an affirmation of the dignity of the human body and the hope of the resurrection.
Burial and Cremation in a Secular Society
The concern of many of the Christians who commented on Twitter was that this issue would have some bearing on one’s salvation, but that misses the point entirely. Something can be Christian without having any impact on one’s salvation, or not. There are wider societal issues at stake as Christians throughout history understood because a culture is a people’s religion externalized. The ultimate faith commitments of a people would then have implications for how people in that society lived. This was intuitively accepted by all peoples in all societies for all of time until secularism slowly grew out of the 17th century Enlightenment. The great lie of secularism is the myth of neutrality, that a society can be irreligious. This was supposedly the answer to the Wars of Religion, but as we’ve seen over the last several hundred years, wars keep on happening.
It took until the middle of the 20th century for secularism to become the default worldview in the Western world. We can see clearly now that it wasn’t that the West merely grew increasingly irreligious, but that God himself became persona non grata, an unwelcome presence in cultural life. God with all his unpleasant side effects must not be seen in public, but must remain part of people’s private lives. As long as God was kept in private, people could be as religious as they wanted. The lie in all this is that people can somehow be irreligious, but in fact all people live by faith, and thus all people are ultimately religious. Further, a people’s religion, or ultimate faith commitments, have profound implications for culture.
An example of this related to cremation comes from India. Not too long ago, a Hindu tradition probably going back two thousand years known as Sati was practiced by certain Hindu castes. When the man died his body would be cremated and the ashes thrown into the river, and so deliver his spirit to heaven. The other part of this tradition was that if he had a living wife she would be taken and burned her as well, by force if necessary, and burn her on the same funeral pyre as her husband. When the Christian British colonized India, they finally put a stop to this barbaric practice. Hindus obviously didn’t see it that way, so it was culturally accepted even for the many who did not practice it. Culture always cultivates and will have inevitable moral implications.
What we do with our dead communicates something profound about our Christian worldview, and what Christians value and hold to be true not only about the human person but about the ultimate nature of reality. Because of the Enlightenment and rationalism, eventually giving us Darwin and materialism, the secular worldview defaults to matter is all that exists. Cremation regardless of the context in which it is practiced, will always tend to confirm materialism and thus secularism. As I said above if all we are is lucky dirt, matter in motion, and we live in a culture that confirms this, then cremation will communicate exactly that. It is important to understand, which should be clear by now, that I am not making a theological argument but a cultural one because culture not only cultivates but communicates as well, it tells us something about who we are and what this world is.
Many of us are familiar with the phrase heard at funerals, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” a phrase found in the Book of Common prayer, not in the Bible. However, seeing our perishable bodies as dust is clearly biblical, as a few examples make clear. After the fall we read, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen, 3:19). Or this statement from Abraham: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes” (Gen. 18:27). Or when Joab laments, “He throws me into the mud, and I am reduced to dust and ashes” (Job 30:19). And when the cynical Solomon declares, “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return” (Eccl. 3:20).
Yet knowing this, Christians for over 1800 years specifically refused to practice the pagan custom of cremating their dead (people weren’t cremated in America before 1876). In the beginning this was specifically because of their Jewish understanding how to treat their dead who were promised resurrection at some point in God’s redeemed world. This article in the Jewish Virtual Library, “Death & Bereavement in Judaism: Ancient Burial Practices,” is a good one to read to see how important it was for the Jewish people to treat their dead with respect. Although they did not think of cremation as an abomination, nonetheless, their burial customers communicated a profound truth about the biblical nature of the created world, including the people in it.
Lastly, I will point out the value of cemeteries, which can be used for cremation but not created for that. They were created as a place of rest for the dead until the resurrection. They are also a visual reminder that we are mortal and death is our destiny, so we ought to, as the Psalmist says, ask God to “number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). All of my adult life since I became a Christin at the age of 18, when I drove by cemeteries I was reminded that death is a stark reality I will have to face some day, and that I should live appropriately. Because death is so remote from most people in our secular modern age, our mortality is news to most people. They live with the illusion that maybe the Grim Reaper won’t come for them after all, that death happens to other people, but surely not them. Of course they know that’s not true, but they live like it. As Freud said, none of us can imagine our own deaths, so we’d rather not think about it at all. Cemeteries remind us it is coming, and sooner than we think.
Given I’m somewhat morbid and think about death all the time, any time we would pass a cemetery with the kids in the car, I would remind them they are not immortal and death will come for them one day too. That would often lead to lectures about the veracity of Christianity and how in life only one thing ultimately matters, our relationship to God through Christ. With the much overused phraseology in the Trump era, for this and all the reasons above, I implore my fellow Christians that we must Make Burial Great Again.
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