A Christian burial service offers you a chance to preach the gospel to your loved ones from beyond the grave. It will press eternal truths directly upon tender hearts. It will preach gospel hope directly into open ears. Why would any believer pass on such an opportunity? Scattering your ashes off the dock at the cottage says a lot about how precious your family is to you, and a fair bit about your appreciation for nature, but it says nothing about who you are, what you believe and where you are going. Those are things that your loved ones need to know.

We recently did a 16 week series on Biblical Anthropology in which we talked a lot about what it means to be a human being, what it means to have a body and what it means to be resurrected. The material covered in the series gave rise to a number of questions about cremation.

Prior to 1980 very few Canadians were cremated, but according to recent data, about 75% of Canadians are cremated today. Most choose cremation because it is slightly less expensive than burial. Some prefer it because they want their ashes scattered in a location that has been meaningful to them and to their family. With religion on the decline in Canada, many are choosing cremation because they do not wish to have a traditional funeral.

How should a Christian think about such things?

Cremation was the most common way of dealing with the bodies of the dead in most pagan and pre-Christian cultures. Greeks and Romans, for example, did not have a high view of the body. They saw the body as a sort of cage for the soul. Burning the body was thus a way of releasing the soul so that it could enter into a higher plane of existence. Jews and Christians, however, had a view of the human person informed by Genesis 1-2. Reflecting on this foundational text, Catholic theologian Abigail Favale writes:

“God forms the human (the adam) from the humus of the soil and breathes into his body, animating him with the divine breath of life. This imagery reveals an important truth about our nature: we are both earth and breath, matter and spirit. We are physical creatures; our bodies are integral to who we are. Yet we are not merely matter, because God’s breath enlivens each of us with an immaterial soul. This is one of the foundational principles of a Christian anthropology: every human being is a unity of body and soul.”[1]

A bible reading believer understands that he or she does not merely have a body, he or she is a body, and therefore that body matters, both in the immediate and eternal sense. As such, it was common in both the Jewish and Christian tradition to carefully wash the bodies of the diseased and to lay those bodies respectfully in either a tomb or a grave in hopes of resurrection.

Theologians debate as to how developed the doctrine of resurrection was within Judaism, but there is less debate as to how the doctrine developed as a result of the resurrection of Jesus and the teaching of the Paul. The physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead was a first order doctrine for the Apostle:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. (1 Corinthians 15:3-5 ESV)

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