I am surprised by how often Christians are stunned to hear me say that cremation is not a Christian act. Previous generations of Christians would have understood exactly, but today an anti-cremation stance seems at best Luddite and at worst carnal. People will ask, “Can’t God raise a cremated Christian just as he can raise a decomposed buried Chrisitan?”
Our eschatology has everything to do then with how we “dispose” of the “remains” of our dead loved ones. Since we believe in the resurrection of the body, we don’t see a corpse as “garbage.” From the time of our earliest ancestors in the faith, we have buried our dead, committing them to the earth from which they came with the conviction that they will one day be summoned from it once more. The image of sleep is useful–not because the dead are unconscious, but because they will one day be awakened (Luke 8:52-55).
God deems as faith Joseph committing his bones to his brothers for future transport into the land of promise (Heb 11:22). In the same way, the act of burial is a testimony of the entire community to the resurrection of the body. Cremation is a horrifying testimony of the burning up of the flesh and bones, a testimony that is decidedly pagan in both origin and in practice. Stephen Prothero’s Purified by Fire traces how atheists and “freethinkers” in America pioneered the practice in America precisely because they denied the resurrection of the flesh.
Of course, God can resurrect a cremated Christian (or a Christian torn to pieces by lions, etc.), but how we deal with the body of a Christian teaches us–and the watching world–what we really believe about the gospel. People in our churches who are talked into cremation by funeral home directors, or by the wishes of the loved ones themselves, aren’t evil. But pastors and church leaders should patiently teach that what we do at the graveside is part of our witness too.
