Is it a sin to cremate the Dead?
When I was a kid in Church, it was common to hear adults reference the cremation of the dead as a sin. It was regarded as “pagan.” Hindus cremated. Buddhists cremated. Native American religions cremated. That was all we needed to know, apparently.
If it was pointed out that our way of preserving the dead was also present in pagan religious practices of people like the Egyptians, and many African and Confucian traditions… and that even violent and blood thirsty religions like Islam do it like we do, you could count on them developing a sudden ability to distinguish intent from practice—an ability they lacked seconds before when condemning cremation.
Now, the Tanakh (What we call the Old Testament) nowhere forbids cremation; it simply records the practices of the patriarchs who continued the traditions in which Abraham was raised among the Mesopotamians—‘burial,’ so to speak, meaning placing the body in an open tomb until the flesh decayed, then gathering the bones into a box until they turned to dust.” Few practices would have been without ritual significance but beyond the words of Genesis 3:19 “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” we are given little direct instruction. Though some regard biblical precedent as automatic command, I am cautious about doing so. Rigid, unthinking imitation is easy—and often becomes a lazy rallying point for inconsistent reasoning. We really should think more carefully and ask pertinent questions of a methodological persuasion when trying to dissuade or persuade others to our own practices.
We do have the Amos condemnation of Moab for burning the bones of the King of Edom to lime. It is common to desecrate the corpse of fallen enemies. But does intention matter? Many today seek to honor their dead with cremation and sentimental handlings of the ashes, returning them to the earth in special places, or ways. Creating jewelry out of the ashes, like artificially pressed diamonds. This is not too distant from repurposing the hair of the dead in “mourning jewelry” in Victorian age British settlements. The Nazis collected bales of hair from the dead and sent them to factories for various uses, tried to use human fat for soap, and some even made lampshades from the tattooed skin of their victims. Shall we regard “mourning jewelry” the same way simply because it uses similar processes?
Without pagan intention does a specific way of doing something automatically make it pagan? Or does doing something with pagan intention make it pagan? Does “WHY” matter? I think “WHY” does matter.
Some have sought meaningful symbolism in the “preservation” of the body together in the hope of coming resurrection. That is powerful symbolism and I would never condemn someone for using that symbolism in their handling of their own dead. But we should be rational and not just sentimental when we go about accusing others of “pagan practice” rather than merely acknowledging varied symbolism.
Does God need us to preserve the particles of the body so that He can resurrect it? If we say yes, we limit God and do create some absurdities for ourselves. I despise deconstruction practices of trying to make absurdities out of traditions by intentionally misinterpreting those traditions—so I hope I’m not doing that here—but let’s be rational for a few seconds. When you establish a norm and want to give it powerful associations that go beyond symbol (i.e. God NEEDS us to preserve the body so he can resurrect it) we should also be careful to consider exceptions that, frankly, cannot be helped. Some people die in the wild and rot and spread without any human intervention. Some people are burned to ashes in random fires. Many of the dead in the World Trade Center Towers were disintegrated. People are lost at sea, eaten by animals, and (sorry for being gross—but true) defecated abroad to nourish plants that other things eat—including people—and reabsorb into themselves. Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote often of local religious persons defaming someone’s name by suggesting that they ate the apples growing in the church graveyard. Did Harry Harrison’s Soylent Green get the idea from her? We may never know. I can imagine a crazed deacons being dragged away by the ushers screaming, “Graveyard Apples are PEOPLE!!!!!”
So, in these instances, we do need to clarify the nature of the resurrection in relationship to the physical body. In the practices of the patriarchs, the particles of the body were not preserved. Only mumification sought that end. In Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer we find the oft quoted lines spoken over the dead, “We therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Indeed, even while alive, we shed particles of ourselves, and in death, no matter how we try, we will lose many if not all those particles to be repurposed by nature in other things, living and dead… plants, animals, and other human beings.
At the risk of sounding like those scribes trying to trap Jesus, we should ask those against cremation, “Whose particles shall they be in the resurrection since so many had them and even died possessing them?” I’ll also play the “Jesus” role exposing the folly of the insistence behind the question and suggest that feeling the need to answer this regarding cremation begs the assumptions we often make about resurrection. Jesus exposed the Sadducees assumptions, and I’ll poke at some of ours.
Jesus comes back in a glorified body… the very one recently crucified. Though he lost a lot of the flesh and blood of that body on his way to the cross. But for most of the dead in history, Paul envisions a seed planted and something wholly other resurrected. In 1st Corinthians 15:35 Paul proposes the question for his readers, “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’”
He goes on to answer this plainly, “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.” We will be given glorified bodies, incorruptible, spiritual bodies, that exist fully in the new-earthly and spiritual realm forever, but we have no need to preserve the particles or chose who gets shared particles. God will give us new bodies without losing any of us to either unfortunate death experiences, which scatter us to the four winds, or intentional practices that do the same.
So it is a sin to cremate the dead? Here is my essential answer. Symbolism matters. Intention matters. God judges the heart, and there is nothing intrinsically sinful about sending a person back to the earth this way or that. We can safely commit these bodies to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and trust God with the rest.
Of course, a lot more can be said about the role of honoring the dead in society, and about environmental concerns. We have a limited earth with about eight billion people alive today, over one hundred billion who have lived before, and—if humanity lasts another thousand years—perhaps another two hundred billion yet to come.” So there’s that.
Andrew D. Sargent, PhD