Cremation and a New Kind of Christianity
— Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 —
“As hellfire receded, there advanced the literal fires of the crematorium.”
So writes Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in the concluding chapter of his massive Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. The history ends with a chapter on “culture wars,” the ways Christianity is experiencing change and tumult as it enters the twenty-first century. In the conclusion, MacCulloch traces out many of the controversies one might expect: from the challenges to Orthodoxy in a post-Soviet world to the Anglican sexual debates to the American fights over abortion and secularism and liberalism.
One of the primary changes in Christianity the historian sees, however, would probably surprise most Americans as being a “culture war” issue at all: cremation and burial.
Increasing rates of cremation in the West, MacCulloch writes, are surprising because cremation “is the abandonment of a key aspect of Christian practice since its early days.” MacCulloch demonstrates that a primary feature of the early Christian church was as “burial club.” He shows how “universally archaeologists are able to detect the spread of Christian culture through the ancient and early medieval world by the excavation of corpse burials oriented east-west.”
The historian also shows the roots of contemporary cremation in protest against historic creedal Christianity, including, in its modern form, by Italian liberal nationalists.
MacCulloch, no conservative, establishes that the unanimous voice of the church, in every sector, was for burial over against cremation, and concludes the traditionalist case (that cremation is a pagan practice inconsistent with historic Christianity) is “unanswerable.”
For MacCulloch, there are several implications of the skyrocketing cremation rates. The first is that the theological and doxological claims against it, once held with unanimity, are not even discussed by cremation proponents. Arguments instead focus on public health, cost (and I would add the American evangelical response: “why not?”).
“The removal of a corpse’s final parting from a church, which is a community place of worship, a setting for all aspects of Christian life, to a crematorium, a specialized and often rather depressingly clinical office room for dealing with death” is a liturgical evolution of massive proportions, MacCulloch suggests.
Moreover, he argues, cremation also has profound doctrinal implications.
“Death is not so much distanced as sanitized and domesticated, made part of the spectrum of consumer choice in a consumer society,” he writes. “The Church is robbed of what was once one of its strongest cards, its power to pronounce and give public liturgical shape to loss and bewilderment at the apparent lack of pattern in the brief span of human life.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I’ve written here in Touchstone and here in Christianity Today about why I oppose (with the twenty centuries of the great cloud of witnesses) the practice of cremation, and here (again in Touchstone) about why burial is so essential to Christian witness. I’m not interested (right now) in re-debating that. I just find it interesting that this new history marks out the cremation move as a significant shift. I agree.
Sometimes the “culture wars” that really matter aren’t the ones you’re screaming about with unbelievers in the public square; they’re the ones in which you’ve already surrendered, and never even noticed.
Would you take issue with a Christian, who holds to a bodily resurrection and has the hope of it, wanting to be cremated? What if this Christian insisted that a funeral take place complete in a church with a burial of ashes?
Blessings.
I lived in China for a couple of years, and to my knowledge, cremation is the norm (especially on Hong Kong island). How should Christians in a country like China, where land limitations, population density, and government restrictions make burial difficult, think about this issue?
I am curious as to what scriptural grounds one would appeal to in order to say cremation was wrong for the Christian. I have read through the Bible many times and haven’t seen anything close. But I guess I could have missed it.
My father once told me that people who had had a limb amputated wanted their amputated limb buried with them so that it would be available for the resurrection. Of course all the molecules that make up a body really do just blend into the earth in time.
I believe that we are ideas of God. In the resurrection we will be what God calls forth. God does not need the molecules we have when we die (which of course will not be the same molecules we had a couple years previous) handy to use in the resurrection. I wonder whether the ancient tradition assumed that.
Doc,
This is an interesting topic and I agree with the assessment that the culture is shifting. I grew up in east Tennessee and presently pastor in this region, and cremation has really been almost unheard of. I recently had the church write questions anonymously that we would answer with scripture. I was surprised to see this question show up often. Just weeks after that, a lady who was a longtime member here lost her son and he was cremated (his choice). She was devastated. Although, I don’t think that it is an absolute rule, cremation is not the best witness for Christ. The body being placed in the ground is one of the greatest testimonies of the resurrection. I don’t think we should give this up easily. There are issues that have already been mentioned that do factor in and it is resurrection not reconstruction. I do not think that is is sin. However, I agree that we should try our best to go against the current on this one. The grave is empty, death has been conquered, and the dead in Christ will rise!!!
NOTE: “The first is that the theological and doxological claims against it, once held with unanimity, are not even discussed by cremation proponents. Arguments instead focus on public health, cost (and I would add the American evangelical response: “why not?”).”
-The commenters thus far seem to be falling all over themselves to provide examples of the sentences quoted above.
(my first comment was typed before Matt Giles’ was posted)
@Matt
Quote: “The body being placed in the ground is one of the greatest testimonies of the resurrection.”
–This is highly subjective.
@Andrew
While I wouldn’t call myself a “cremation proponent”, I do not see any Biblical warrant to be against it, if it is something one wishes to do.
The only arguments I have heard against cremation thus far are (as I said to Matt) highly subjective. Such arguments include it being a “bad witness” or (as Dr. Moore says) or “not a Christian act”. These are not provable and thus are mere assertions.
Also, to compare it to such things as “sex realignment surgery” (as Dr. Moore did in an article) is unhelpful. One’s decision to be cremated should not be compared to anyone’s decision to have sex realignment surgery.
Blessings.