Against Cremation

Everywhere you look in the 21st Century, someone is trying to sell you a short-term solution to a long-term problem. It is no wonder, then, that our churches should sometimes be tempted to do likewise. In my last piece for Mere Orthodoxy, Be Perfect, I suggested that the biblical notion of “perfection” means not so much “flawlessness” as “finished-ness,” that salvation means more than a blank-slate transformation brought on by a conversion experience, and that believers are not merely magically transferred to heaven when they die. Rather, they mature into perfected citizens of the New Jerusalem as a mustard seed becomes a tree. “I am aware that this defies modern imagination,” I wrote.

Our push-button culture has tricked us into believing in a push-button salvation. But as the story of the Bible (and the story of our lives!) slowly and painfully reveal, no such salvation is available to us. If, by the sudden flip of a switch or wave of a wand, all creation were made magically flawless, that might seem wonderful at first. But it would be a fragile salvation, prone to another fall (and then another and another). The Bible’s vision isn’t like that. […] The New Jerusalem is not so much magically flawless as it is perfectly finished. It cannot fall again any more than an adult could suddenly become an infant again. I cannot hate what my heart has learned over time to love, nor love what my heart has learned to hate. There is no going back. Perfection-as-a-flipped-switch is fragile, but perfection-as-maturity cannot be undone. It can only grow more and more perfect through all eternity.

What I am describing here is a “theology of continuity,” which I believe is the antidote for the blank-slate mentality that haunts much of our contemporary preaching and practice. A theology of continuity is resurrection-shaped. That is to say, like the risen body of our Lord, it assumes the paradoxical union of profound transformation (e.g. he walks through walls) with profound continuity (e.g. the holes in his hands and side still remain). Against this notion stands a blank-slate mentality, in which “born again” resembles neither born-ness nor again-ness, but something more like “zapped-ness” into a completely new and already-mature identity, which bears only accidental connections to the “you” you left behind. This blank-slate mentality offers quick and simple solutions to complicated problems, so its increasing popularity in both religious and secular spaces is no surprise. And this (forgive me) brings me to a rather involved but important tangent regarding the revolution that is currently happening in modern Western burial practices, which will serve to illustrate the crisis as well as to point toward a solution.

The Cremation Sensation

Among the various trends which prophesy the extreme trajectory of our blank-slate moment, one particular phenomenon deserves far greater attention than it is getting. In the last fifty years in North America, cremation has become the overwhelmingly preferred method of interment for our deceased loved ones. In 1960, the cremation rate for Americans was 3.5%. Today it is over 60%. Canada, which tends to be a harbinger for American social trends, projects their cremation rate to top 80% by 2028. This is no small shift. 

It would be an understatement to say that cremation has been uncommon in the history of Christianity. The ancient Church clearly condemned it as a pagan practice. The Orthodox Church still forbids it today. The Catholic Church has largely done the same, though in recent years it has become more complicated. As late as 1963, the Vatican issued a statement permitting cremation in some instances, though still warning against its symbolic denial of the resurrection of the body. It was not until 1997 that special permission was given to have the cremated remains of the deceased present at a Catholic funeral. Even still, traditional burial is strongly, explicitly preferred.

As for Protestants, in theory, positions on cremation vary widely. In practice, though, it seems safe to assume the Protestant (and Evangelical) rate of cremation has been following the national trend somewhat closely. A statement from pastor John MacArthur’s website sums up the mood among many American Evangelicals:

Scripture says nothing about a required mode of burial for either believers or non-believers…Obviously any buried body will eventually decompose. So cremation isn't a strange or wrong practice—it merely accelerates the natural process of oxidation. The believer will one day receive a new body (1 Cor. 15:42-49; 1 Thess. 4:13-18; Job 19:25-26), thus the state of what remains of the old body is unimportant…What we need to focus on as Christians is not how to dispose of our earthly bodies, but that one day new bodies will be fashioned for us like our Lord's.

Those who favor cremation have their reasons. Most notably, the average cost of cremation is far less than that of traditional casket burial. In my view, this is the most serious barrier for traditional burial today. It is also, however, one that could be at least partially overcome if our churches would start trading out their overflow parking lots for graveyards. Cremation is also said to be “more environmentally friendly.” One pro-cremation website adds the following benefits to the list: “fear of burial/natural decomposition,” “simpler arrangements,” and “flexible service options.” If my purpose here were to debate the ethics of cremation in particular, I might be tempted to show that none of these “benefits” are as beneficial as they might appear. But I have a different purpose in mind.

The point I want to make about the cremation phenomenon is not so much a moral point as a religious and symbolic one, not about what Christianity “allows” but about what it is. The Christian faith hinges on the resurrection of the body, that Jesus Christ rose bodily from the grave and that we shall rise with him in like fashion. But this is a truth more easily professed than embraced. It involves not only the belief in an historical Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but also the painful acceptance of a kind of recurring “Good Friday” in the present which appears at first to offer no “Easter Sunday” at all, except for the one that came once for all, and will come again. But the modern practice of cremation, whether accidentally or purposefully, affords a detour around the pain of this predicament.

It is easier, if we can help it, to avoid and help others to avoid the more palpable realities of death…seeing and handling the body, throwing dirt on the grave. It is easier to focus our funerary gatherings around “celebrating life” rather than mourning and burying the dead. It is easier to imagine that our loved ones do not have to face the judgment of death, nor the judgment after death, to imagine that they have been made whole already, that they lack nothing and await no future redemption of their bodies, nor do we. And the more quickly and impersonally we dispose of their actual bodies—the less attention and respect we give them—the easier it becomes to believe all this is so.

What the aforementioned MacArthur quote fails to comprehend is that the very fact that “the believer will one day receive a new body” does not render the treatment of our present bodies as unimportant, but as all the more important. As the writers of the New Testament make abundantly clear, followers of Christ believe in the resurrection not merely by confessing it but by participating in it. When what we proclaim with our mouths becomes detached from what we do with our patterns of behavior, we become like the man who looks in the mirror and then goes away and forgets what he looks like (James 1:23-24).

To be clear, I am not in the least concerned that cremation might introduce a physical problem for God, as though it would be any harder for him to raise a man who dies in a house fire than a man whose body decomposes naturally in the grave. Death is disintegration, however you look at it. But how we look at it still matters. The problem with the practice of cremation is not that it makes things harder for God, but that it makes things harder for us. It makes it harder to remember what is already hard to believe, that the very body which dies shall be raised.

Cremation, as far as this writer is concerned, is no sin. It is rather a risk, not for the person who has died, but for the rest of us. As our Catholic and Orthodox brethren have reminded us, the regularized practice of cremation by the people of God risks misunderstanding—perhaps even forgetting—that the resurrection of the body is the truest truth, not only the shape of our salvation, but the shape of reality. And as it turns out, we are indeed forgetting it.

A Blank-Slate Theology Vs. A Theology of Continuity

At present, our secular culture is suffering the consequences of a “blank-slate” theory of identity, characterized by an almost absurd forgetfulness of the body and of the body’s stubborn continuity amidst the morass of ever-new technologies which presume to render it obsolete. Likewise, and more to the point, our churches are suffering a similar fate in the way we think about and relate to God. This I have called a “blank-slate theology.”

The best way to sum up a blank-slate theology is with St. Paul’s famous words in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” I’m quoting Scripture here, because I want to be clear that I am not denouncing this as some false or heretical belief. On the contrary, almost nothing is more central to the gospel than the reality of new beginning, of death and new life. No, the question is not whether “new creation” is our reality in Christ, but how. How does new creation work? This is where our two theological frameworks come to fundamentally different conclusions:

In a blank-slate theology, new creation works as a kind of wholesale replacement of the old. Christ came not so much to fulfill Scripture as to override it. Jesus’s formula in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard it said…but I tell you…” is quoted as proof that he was introducing an entirely new ethic, even a new religion. In this view, the genealogies in the beginning of the Gospels seem out of place except as reminders of the old, crude order of things, which has been rendered obsolete by the work of Christ. Likewise, as believers in a blank-slate gospel, our own family trees exist only as reminders of what must be left behind and overcome. We were people born into a certain family in a certain place and culture, with our own natural talents, desires, weaknesses, and struggles. But now, we have been born again. Our second birth has little or nothing to do with the first.

By contrast, in a theology of continuity, new creation is understood not so much as replacement of the old, but as its redemption and fulfillment. Yes, the old must die. But it dies in order to become all that it was meant to be. Creation waits, groaning with the pains of childbirth, because God actually likes what he made. It was good when he made it, and it shall be good again–even better than it was–yet through death and resurrection. The genealogies at the beginning of the Gospels are there to remind us that we are living in one continuous story in which God has been working all along, and that Christ has entered the picture not merely to overcome the imperfect legacies of his ancestors but to redeem and fulfill them. Likewise, we who are born again in Christ share in his work of redeeming the bodies and lineages we were given.

The highest hope of a blank-slate theology is “heaven when we die,” where all things which could not be made right here on earth will be instantaneously re-made after death. I do not say this is false, but it is a leaky vessel. On the other hand, the central hope of a theology of continuity is “the resurrection of the body,” which is at once more palpable and also more subtle than its blank-slate counterpart. Again, in the Gospels, we find that the risen Christ is so completely transformed as to be unrecognizable to his closest friends, and yet, he is so unchanged as to retain even the holes in his hands from the nails on the cross. Profound transformation is joined with profound continuity. This is the truer truth. And it is also true of us.

Through his resurrection, Christ is making “all things new,” but he is making new things out of the old. Yes, our mortal bodies are corrupted by sin and destined for death. We must be born again. But we are not born again ex nihilo. Yes, we must die. But we awake on the other side of death to find, shockingly, that not all that was put on the altar has been consumed by the flames. The old has gone and the new has come, but the new turns out to be the pruned and purified perfection of the old, rather than its wholesale replacement. 

But for those of us who have grown up with a blank-slate mentality, this nuance can be hard to appreciate. We moderns have developed a certain distrust for continuity, especially regarding our identity and beliefs. For instance, if your Christian beliefs and practices were passed down to you from your parents, this is often seen as less “authentic” than if you had come to the faith “on your own.” This is akin to believing that a truly authentic Mexican meal is the meal that feels “authentically Mexican” to you, regardless of its connection to the people and traditions of Mexico. This, of course, would be absurd. But we speak this way all the time about things that matter far more than food.

Take a moment to appreciate just how much of the thinking of the modern secular West suffers from a kind of “blank-slate” mentality: “I am not defined by who other people say I am, nor even by the way I was born. I am who I say I am, by virtue of my own proclaimed identity.” Notice that this sort of belief proceeds not precisely from an abandonment of Christian truth, but rather from a deeply Christian truth misused, from a leaky-bucket version of “The old has gone; the new has come.” As historian Tom Holland has now famously shown, modern progressivism with its expressive-individualist ethos is arguably the product not of anti-Christian notions but rather of deeply Christian notions now-unmoored, in this case, a doubling down on the “blank-slate” side of the new creation without its paradoxical counterpart, continuity.

I mention this not to lodge an argument against modern progressivism (which, in some ways, is refuting itself), but rather to show just how much our modern Evangelical modes of thinking have in common with it. We “born-again-Christians” are in danger of forming our own blank-slate religion, more true than progressivism, but less true than the kingdom of God. In this religion, the old has magically disappeared and the new has magically come. The old seed has simply died. It need not grow out of the ground of death—slowly and painfully—into a shoot, and from a shoot into the largest tree in the garden. And we need not learn over time to embody its new life. We only proclaim it, and it is so. But when we open the pages of the New Testament, we find a different story. The kingdom of God is growing, manifesting itself as the unexpected marriage of continuity and transformation. We must indeed be born again. But the very body that dies will rise, thank God, bearing marks of the old as well as the new. It is a prescient time for the church to remember this.

“Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” (Matthew 13:52)