May/June 2002
Is Cremation Christian?
by Hank Hanegraaff
| While God has no problem resurrecting the cremated, cremation does not point to the resurrection of God. |
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
Cremation has become an increasingly popular means for disposing of the dead. In fact, by the year 2010, it is estimated that about a third of all Americans will cremate their loved ones. Dr. Norman Geisler and Douglas Potter point out that those who opt for cremation often do so for emotional, economical and ecological reasons. Emotionally, cremation is thought to bring immediate closure to the grieving process; economically, it is measured in hundreds rather than thousands of dollars and ecologically, it is said to save valuable land for more productive purposes.
The arguments for cremation from emotion, economics and ecology are not particularly compelling. First, from an emotional perspective, cremation does not logically lead to a more satisfying sense of closure than does burial. Geisler and Potter explain, "Much of the therapeutic value of any funerary ritual depends on cultural conditioning, prior understanding of the death experience, the circumstance of death itself, the relationship of the deceased and the emotional make-up of the survivors."
Furthermore, economic considerations should not be valued more highly than ethical considerations -- eternal values are ultimately more significant than economic values.
Finally, the ecological argument is weak in that there is no warrant for suggesting that we will run out of suitable land for burial sites any time soon.
In sharp distinction to the arguments for cremation, the arguments for burial are incredibly persuasive. First, Scripture clearly favors burial over cremation. The Old Testament pattern was always burial except in highly unusual circumstances. The exception that best proves the rule is the partial cremation of King Saul and his sons -- and even in this case the bodies were burned, but the bones were buried (1 Samuel 31:12-13).
Likewise, the New Testament pattern is always burial. The apostle Paul includes burial as an essential part of the gospel itself when he repeats a very early Christian creedal statement, "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3-4).
Additionally, Paul equates baptism with both burial and resurrection when he says that we were buried with Christ "through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life" (Romans 6:4).
Furthermore, burial symbolizes the promise of resurrection by anticipating the preservation of the body. Cremation, however, symbolizes the pagan worldview of reincarnation. As Geisler and Potter put it, "The Christian has escaped the judgment by fire presented in the Bible (Revelation 20:14). Cremation is the wrong picture to remind believers of salvation in the body by resurrection (cf. Romans 8:11)... Cremation better symbolizes pantheism, which in its Eastern forms is usually associated with a salvation from the body by escaping the cycle of reincarnation." Thus, while resurrectionists look forward to the restoration of the body, reincarnationists look forward to being relieved from their bodies.
Finally, burial highlights the sanctity of the body. Geisler and Potter emphasize that in the Christian worldview, the body is incredibly significant in that it has numerical identity to the resurrected body and is "uniquely designed to give expression to the image of God in man" (see Genesis 1:27; 9:6; cf. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
While God has no problem resurrecting the cremated, cremation does not point to the resurrection of God. Ultimately, the hope of the believer rests in the one-to-one correspondence between the body that dies and the body that rises. In the immortal words of the apostle to the Gentiles:
"We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed -- in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.' "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" (1 Corinthians 15:51-55)
(Adapted from chapter 15 of Hank Hanegraaff's Resurrection [Word, 2000].)
-- Hank Hanegraaff