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.