Burial, Cremation, Heritics and Limits on Divinity

The other day while reading James Michener’s Chesapeake there is a passage about the bodies of “heritics” being burned. The passage remined me of how archaic misbegotten religious notions are passed down uncritically from generation to generation shape today our lives and thinking. While it is diminishing in our society, there has been a strong reluctance against cremation due to an ancient religious teaching.

Burial is rooted in the belief in the resurrection of the dead. If there is no body to be resurrected, then the person cannot be resurrected to have eternal life or so goes the reasoning. Hence, for more than millennia, religious and civil leaders burned the bodies of “heretics” and major political opponents. The pronouncement that someone was to be burned served as a strong control over the middle age masses and burning protected the leaders from seeing their opponent in the afterlife if an injustice was carried out on them in this life…after all they assured that there would be no body for God to resurrect and correct the injustice. Today, the effects of such thinking linger effect in the number of people who see cremation as abhorrent.

For me, the ancient rationale for burial contradicts the Christian teachings about God being all-powerful, just and wise. It suggests that God is limited in his power by suggesting that the God who created the universe is powerless to resurrect someone if there was no physical body. Further, burning the bodies of heretics also suggests that God’s justice and power are limited in that the human activity makes it impossible for God to correct an injustice.

Over twelve years ago Evie and I have told our sons that we are to be cremated.