Does the Bible require that when Christians die their bodies should be buried? An article over at Front Porch Republic makes a pretty good case for the Christian practice of burial, along with the not so felicitous implication that cremation is of pagan derivation. But we have no explicit instruction from Scripture, only examples. According to Andrew Harvey:
Our burning discussion keeps returning to the word “tradition.” And most Christian churches . . . had no established doctrine to address the issue of modern cremation. The only fact was convention: Christians simply had never cremated before. But burial is indisputably the rule throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. God’s people in every covenant prefer interment. Everyone on God’s side gets buried eventually. From Adam to the Beloved Disciple John every saint who falls asleep in the Lord finds a grave as a bed. (Moreover, cremation is reserved in the Old Testament for the wicked and apostate: see Josh. 7:25, 2 Kgs. 23:20, Amos 2:1.) The only time where one of the Lord’s anointed is unfortunately cremated (King Saul, defiled by the Philistines) – it is through burial that his remains finally rest in peace. Additionally this hard and fast “orthopraxy” also correlates to a theology, an “orthodoxia.” Continue Reading>>>
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Is Cremation Christian? - PDF
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