Does the Bible require that when Christians die their bodies should be buried? An article over at Front Porch Republic makes a pretty good case for the Christian practice of burial, along with the not so felicitous implication that cremation is of pagan derivation. But we have no explicit instruction from Scripture, only examples. According to Andrew Harvey:
Our burning discussion keeps returning to the word “tradition.†And most Christian churches . . . had no established doctrine to address the issue of modern cremation. The only fact was convention: Christians simply had never cremated before. But burial is indisputably the rule throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. God’s people in every covenant prefer interment. Everyone on God’s side gets buried eventually. From Adam to the Beloved Disciple John every saint who falls asleep in the Lord finds a grave as a bed. (Moreover, cremation is reserved in the Old Testament for the wicked and apostate: see Josh. 7:25, 2 Kgs. 23:20, Amos 2:1.) The only time where one of the Lord’s anointed is unfortunately cremated (King Saul, defiled by the Philistines) – it is through burial that his remains finally rest in peace. Additionally this hard and fast “orthopraxy†also correlates to a theology, an “orthodoxia.â€
In the Gospels the burials of John the Baptist and Jesus allude to a new meaning for burial—baptism. Christ’s burial and resurrection are the physical, material, corporeal events that reveal the typology of Passover: Christ becomes our Passover because when we are baptized we are buried in his death and rise from the waters in newness of life having been set free from our spiritual Egypt—the bondage of sin and death—and set into our Promised Land of righteousness.
Of course, this does not add up to a slam dunk of the good and necessary variety. I am not sure that one can actually be made. Nor do I think cremation makes any sense as a fitting way to treat the human body. (My wife and I even refused to cremate our beloved cat.)
Here’s an example I once used on friends at Touchstone. If we wanted to save room on the planet by disposing of bodies in more efficient ways, we could always chop of the remains of the deceased so that we could actually fit more bodies into a cemetery. I suspect that most people would find repugnant the idea of having a spouse, or parent, or sibling cut up for any reason, efficiency likely several rungs down on the rationale ladder. So why would incinerating a body be any less offensive?
So could it be that the light of nature is clear even where Scripture refuses to say “thou shalt” (or for the King James challenged, “you should”)?
Old Life 