The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum cremation

jadeitedrake0,

As you stated, there is no explicit universal command re burial/cremation; it is not a doctrinal issue; there are no eternal consequences inherent in the act itself, for the dead person or those still living; therefore as Pilgrim pointed out it is properly considered adiaphora.

You also bring up a good point about a common misuse of burial, in cultures which pretend that the dead are not actually irretrievably separated from the living, but are actually still alive, just resting in their coffins. Like the Egyptian practice, this can become a real form of idolatry--"Daddy's still here with us"--which denies the horrible consequences of sin and death.

I do, however, apart from any reference to cremation or burial, want to challenge your statement:

That kind of thinking contains more Eastern/Gnostic theology than biblical. Our dead bodies, biblically, are in fact very much part of us, since God created us with both material and immaterial natures. The atheist says that death destroys the immaterial, leaving the material to rot. The Gnostic/Buddhist (and many evangelicals) says that death destroys the material, leaving the immaterial free to "party in heaven". The Christian says rather that death is the separation of the material from immaterial: the immaterial (soul of the believer) returning to the Lord, the material subjected to corruption, until the resurrection. Neither one is destroyed. To lose this doctrine really denies the goodness of God in creating the material world, and it denies the resurrection, since it implies that we really don't need our bodies.

Here are a couple biblical tests of your statement. In John 11, did Lazarus' body stop being Lazarus the moment he died, only to turn back into Lazarus the moment Jesus called him?

More critically, would we be correct to say that the body lying in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb, and resurrected on the 3rd day, was NOT JESUS ANYMORE?