Burial or Cremation?

How what we, as Christians, do with the bodies of our dead tells a story.

As I write this, I can overhear a room full of grieving family members who lost a mother and grandmother this week, as they eat and mourn and tell stories together. We’ve just finished serving them a meal, after the memorial service at our church. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people are gathered in Arizona for a memorial service, and watching online, as they remember Charlie Kirk and grieve the loss of his life.

And now that a week has passed since I first sat down to write, another beloved saint has gone home to the Lord, Voddie Baucham.

Honestly, I had planned to write this essay before now, as I read a booklet last month on the topic and felt that it’s something very much worth addressing in the church today. Now, with death on the church’s mind, it seems even more fitting.

The first thing I need to say is that I don’t believe this to be a sin issue, necessarily, so please do not hear me condemn the choice of one who decides to do with their loved one contrary to what I argue for in this essay. In other words, hear what I say, not what I do not say.

But just because it is not a matter of sin does not mean that what we, as Christians, do with our dead doesn’t matter. I believe that it matters very much, which is why I feel compelled to address it. Cremation is, after all, a new practice for Christians, historically speaking. But before we get to whether or not Christians ought to practice one or the other, burial or cremation, we need to address our view of the body, because these issues are very much linked.

Soul in a Body or Body with a Soul?

Modern day Evangelicalism is rampant with a functionally gnostic view of the body. Many focus so heavily on how we are meant for heaven, that this world is not our home, and that the soul is what matters most, that the body, and the physical world are viewed as severely lesser-than or not important at all. I address this idea a bit in this essay.

Consider what many picture as happening after we die: our spirit, now freed from the body, sits on a cloud, playing a harp or singing to God for eternity. No physical body. No manual labor. No earth on which to place our feet. It’s all void of any physical dimension to eternity.

Nancy Pearcey writes extensively about this erroneous view in her book Love Thy Body. She says, “The Gnostics saw death as freedom from the encumbrance of the body. But for the early Christians, says Peter Brown, death ‘was a rending of the self that left the soul shocked and horrified, like a bereaved spouse or parent, at the prospect of parting from the beloved body.’ Scripture portrays death as something alien- an enemy that entered creation with the fall.”

At death, the spirit and the body are separated. This is incredibly unnatural, as God made us both body and soul. So why do we often seem to prefer the spiritual to the material when it comes to the person? Pearcey points out that many Christians “hold an escapist concept of salvation, as though Jesus died to whisk us away to heaven” and that many preachers talk about being forgiven so that “we can go to heaven.”

But this leaves a church that is almost no good on this earth and right now in this life. What’s that old saying? “Don’t be so heavenly minded that you are of no earthly good.”

Why then does Paul stress that you are to “honor God with your bodies” (1 Corinthians 6:20) and to “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God- this is your true and proper worship” (Romans 12:1). Why does scripture refer to the church as the body of Christ? And why, if only the spiritual matters, did Jesus come to earth in physical form, taking on flesh and blood, to die for sins that are physically committed by material beings in physical ways? (all emphasis mine)

Because the body does matter. And it matters very much. As human beings we aren’t simply souls embodied for a time. We are both body and soul. My body is as much me as my soul is me.

I love what John Murray wrote about the body, that after death is laid in the tomb:

It is the body of the person. More properly, it is the person as respects the body. It is the person who is buried or laid in the tomb. How eloquent of this is the usage respecting our Lord. He was buried. He rose from the dead. In reference to Jesus the angel said, ‘come and see the place where he lay’… so what is laid in the grave is still integral to the person who died. In and during death, the person is identified with the dissolved material entity. (emphasis mine)

Mark 15:46 makes this point incredibly clear: “And Joseph bought a linen shroud, and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud and laid him in a tomb that had been cut out of the rock. And he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.”

We don’t say that Jesus’ body was buried. We say Jesus was buried. And Jesus was raised. And the same will be said of each and every one of us when we die. Then in eternity, you will receive back your body; everyone will, either for eternal punishment or if you are in Christ, renewed to glorification. In fact, this resurrection was a major debate in the time of Jesus and again during the early church which Paul addresses.

What About the Resurrection?

You are going to hear a rumor one day that Voddie Baucham is no more. Don’t you believe it. Don’t you believe it! Don’t you believe it because though I die, I will rise with Christ. It will not be the end of me because Christ is raised and I too will be raised with Christ. That is why he is called the firstborn from the dead. Folks, you don’t talk about a firstborn unless there are others who are born after him. Don’t you pity me. You pity the one who wants to hold onto Jesus without holding onto the resurrection. You pity the one who has absolutely no hope because they have no resurrected Christ.

One of the cornerstone beliefs of the Christian faith is the resurrection. The entirety of 1 Corinthians 15 makes this abundantly clear, but consider just these few verses:

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:20-23

This is precisely what Dr. Baucham was referring to in the quote above. In this life we are in Christ and in eternity we are with Christ. Because He died, was buried, and was raised bodily, we too after we die, will be raised bodily. We will, body and soul, be made alive. When the disciples saw Jesus after His resurrection, they saw His physical body. They touched His hands and He ate with them.

Paul goes on in 1 Corinthians 15 to use an analogy of the body as a seed that must first die and be buried in the soil, which then results in the renewed, glorified, eternal body of the saint. Donald Howard writes, “The burial of the body gives explicit expression to the analogy of the seed sown resulting in a future harvest; it is a distinct testimony to the future Christian hope of resurrection.”

Therein lies what I believe to be the clearest argument for Christian burial of the dead, which has been practiced for all of church history. What we do before men, the way we act and the decisions we make says something about what we believe. Or put the other way around, our beliefs should very much drive our actions.

If we believe what scripture teaches: that some time after the Christian dies his or her body will be resurrected to eternal life, then the way we treat our dead should reflect that. If what Paul says is true: that our bodies are as seeds to be planted in the ground to later be raised renewed and glorified as the fruits of the seed, then our actions toward our dead should say that very thing.

In this way, burying our dead preaches an entire sermon in itself.

Donald Howard goes on:

Every activity and opinion of the Christian must be based upon biblical premises. These include living and dying. As death is the last opportunity any of us will have to testify to God’s truth, what is more fitting than that our passing should focus upon the unique and distinctive doctrine of the resurrection of the body?

And as I’ve previously stated, this has been the stance of the church for nearly all of church history, both during the Old and New Testaments, and in the centuries following until the turn of the 20th century.

Historically, what a people did with their dead has been religious. It was a reflection of what they believed both about the body and about what happens after a person dies. Consider the Egyptian princes buried among their wealth, believed to carry it with them to the afterlife. Buddhists burned their bodies in order to separate and set free the soul from the body. Hinduism prescribed cremation in order to purify the body and set the soul free so it can transition to its next life (in another body).

But for the Christian, in which the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus is central to their faith, because a resurrection was coming, the body was buried.

Until recently.

A Pragmatic and Theological Shift

Howard recounts this history in his booklet Burial or Cremation: Does it Matter? where he tells us, “For over eighteen hundred years, cremation was never considered in countries which had experienced widespread gospel preaching or influence. Then in the 1870s a few Italian chemists and physicians appear to have initiated the modern movement.”

Cremation was legalized in 1877 in Italy while at the same time in England, the first cremation society was forming, through the efforts of a professed Agnostic surgery professor at London University called Sir Henry Thompson. Pragmatism was beginning to take hold, but it needed a catalyst. And in 1884 the Cremation Society in England received just that. A British father was indicted for attempting to burn the body of his child instead of burying it. It was determined that unless it could be proved that the father’s actions proved to be a public nuisance, he would not be charged. And in 1902, as a result of the work of the Cremation Society, Parliament passed an act that legalized cremation in England.

By 1904 there were ten crematoria in Britain and by 1922 there were two thousand cremations each year.

I find it interesting, the timing of this shift given what was taking place within the church. Gresham Machen’s book Christianity and Liberalism was published in 1923, addressing the widespread theological liberalism that was sweeping the church both in England and America, of which some tenets include a rejection of miracles and the supernatural including the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus.

As Howard points out, “Liberal theology had invaded the churches, and… spiritual regression and the progress of cremations ran parallel to each other. At the same time, belief in the resurrection of the body and of Christ himself was decreasing.” He also writes:

Burning bodies in our Western society is promoted within the context of strong assaults from secular philosophy and scientific materialism. Spiritual decline and the progress of cremation run parallel with each other. When death is secularized, cremation doesn’t matter.

And as time has gone on, instead of rejecting the practice of cremation on theological, traditional, and biblical grounds, the soft, modern Evangelical church has simply figured out how to file the practice under the category of Christian liberty.

Graveyards in Church Yards

It was once common practice for Christians to bury their dead at church. But this practice too has gone by the wayside. It’s no coincidence that the disappearance of church cemeteries coincides with an uptick in cremation and death disappearing from public view altogether.

There can be little doubt that in the Western world we don’t like death. We hide it away. We don’t talk about it. We don’t plan for it. We medicalize it. Rather than caring for our own dying elderly, we place them in facilities where they die separated from the comfort of their own home and family.

Mourning too has become less public and less communal with a reduction and sometimes elimination of traditional mourning rituals. Where death was once accepted as a familiar, expected destiny experienced communally, it now is viewed by modern man as an individual experience. According to Howard, “By the mid-twentieth century, death was rapidly disappearing from public view in the industrialized Western nations. [Philippe] Aries saw the increasing popularity of cremation as a confirmation of his opinion that the once familiar face of death has become, in Western societies, something shameful and forbidden.”

If this premise seems untrue, consider just how foreign the mourning and burial practices in the Bible are to modern sensibilities. Anointing the body with spices and oils. Wrapping the body in cloths. Days of mourning. Hired wailers. Sackcloth and ashes.

Howard points out that cremation and the ceremony that results (as there is no body present to mourn over and physically bury) “short-circuits” the grieving process. I also would argue that given what some do with the ashes of their loved ones, from keeping an urn on the mantel to incorporating them into jewelry and some other truly bizarre options, it can leave the grieving process open-ended, without true closure and finality.

Full finality comes when the coffin is lowered into the ground and the grave is filled in the sight of the mourners, however slow and brutal that may be. Tragically, this isn’t the case in the ceremony of cremation or even burial these days. The grave is often filled after mourners have left, in the sight of no one except the undertaker. And like no longer having graveyards in church yards, we are poorer, spiritually, for it.

Memento Mori

There is so much more to this discussion that I simply don’t have the time or space to cover, but I hope this has provided enough to consider for now. I’d like to conclude with an excellent quote from F. D. Maurice who said,

The more I think of the way in which the children of Israel asserted their right to the possession of Canaan, in which they had not one foot of other ground, merely by burying their dead in it… the more do I feel that every body put into this earth is a new invasion of Satan’s present dominion, a new declaration that Christ is coming to claim the earth for His Church.

Abraham could lay claim to the promised land because of a cemetery. That’s not insignificant. A cemetery, particularly one where saints are buried, is a physical reality that points to a promise that will be fulfilled. When there are physical bodies, laid in physical graves, as I’ve written about before, it reminds us of at least two things:

We will die. Our lives are but a vapor, here today and gone tomorrow. And while we have breath in our lungs, we are to live to glorify God.

But, death is not the end. We will be raised. These graveyards filled with the perishable seed that has been sown into the ground, remind us that the story isn’t over. For those who are in Christ and their body is in the ground, they are currently at home with Him, but they will also receive a new body, untouched by sin and death. And that in believing in Christ we have that same hope of eternal life.

Death does not spell the end of the body because death does not spell the end of the person. Jesus is coming back and will bring with Him resurrection. This is our hope as Christians.