Over on the Touchstone blog, Russell Moore has an interesting post about “Cremation and a New Kind of Christianity.” Citing Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new book, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Moore notes that one of the greatest cultural shifts in the Church over the last century has been the overwhelming acceptance of cremation, when from its very first days Christianity had distinguished itself as a Church that buries its dead:
For MacCulloch, there are several implications of the skyrocketing cremation rates. The first is that the theological and doxological claims against it, once held with unanimity, are not even discussed by cremation proponents. Arguments instead focus on public health, cost (and I would add the American evangelical response: “why not?”).
“The removal of a corpse’s final parting from a church, which is a community place of worship, a setting for all aspects of Christian life, to a crematorium, a specialized and often rather depressingly clinical office room for dealing with death” is a liturgical evolution of massive proportions, MacCulloch suggests.
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Moreover, he argues, cremation also has profound doctrinal implications.
“Death is not so much distanced as sanitized and domesticated, made part of the spectrum of consumer choice in a consumer society,” he writes. “The Church is robbed of what was once one of its strongest cards, its power to pronounce and give public liturgical shape to loss and bewilderment at the apparent lack of pattern in the brief span of human life.”
I had generally considered myself a fan of cremation (done in accordance with the Church’s teachings, of course), for many of the reasons named above — theologically, I see no problem with cremated remains being resurrected as readily as a decomposed body; practically, I want to avoid the financial boondoggle of the funeral industry, which I have always associated with the desire to “sanitize and domesticate” death, moreso than cremation. The embalming, the outlandish caskets, the plastic-flower graveyards…why go to such expensive lengths to pretend that whole “dust to dust” thing isn’t happening?
But I hadn’t considered the way the Church’s rites must necessarily change when burying a body instead of burying ashes. It was only 13 years ago that cremated remains were allowed to be present at a funeral mass in the U.S. at all (by dint of a special indult), and even then, all references to the body have to be excised from the traditional prayers — as there is no “body” present to pray for. Maybe I was too quick to discount the significance of praying over and committing a body to the ground, as Jesus’ own body was laid in the tomb.
Looks like I may have to reconsider my funeral plans. (I’ll say it now, though: I will personally haunt anyone who pumps me full of embalming fluid after I die.) What about readers? Anyone else given the cremation issue any thought?