Dr Paul Allen

What is cremation? Cremation is a process that uses intense heat (1400–1800 °F) to incinerate a body. After the body is vaporised and reduced to bone fragments, these fragments are pulverised into a sand-like powder. The final step involves placing the “cremains” in a container and returning them to the surviving family. The word “cremate” is actually a sanitised version of the crass “burning a corpse.” What is the history of cremation? Early Christianity While there were a few exceptions (notably the Hebrews), cremation was a common practice in the ancient world. That rapidly changed, however, with the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. As Francis Schaeffer explains, “Gradually Christianity came to Roman Avenches. We know this by studying the cemetery of that time—the Romans burned their dead, the Christians buried theirs.” 1 In some respects, the care with which early Christians disposed of their dead through the burial process would not have gone unnoticed in the pagan wo...

No. Cremation , however, may have something to say about the Bible . The proper handling of human bodies after death is not something the Bible expressly deals with.  There are sundry ceremonial laws in the Old Covenant about touching dead bodies , but no instruction on what to do with these bodies. As such we need to be careful not to condemn what the Bible does not condemn. How though, could cremation speak to the Bible? Cremation, strange as it may sound, is a form of liturgy.  It is a form for dealing with matters of eternal consequence. As a form it in turn communicates a message. That message, it seems, does speak against the Bible’s understanding of death.  Cremation, however subtly, suggests that our bodies are of no significance or import, that they are simply so much trash that must be burned.  It is implicitly a Gnostic practice, a denial of the goodness of the creation in general and the human body in particular. Burial, on the other hand, ...