I read this very odd little book, Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall. Thomas Browne was an eccentric English polymath who wrote an extended reflection on cremation and other burial practices, after a number of pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon burial urns were found in Norfolk.

I really recommend reading it — Browne has this style that’s built on allusion, constantly referring to biblical, classical, philosophical, and patristic writing. It’s a lot of fun. But this whole train of thought started with a paragraph that mentions Tertullian of Carthage and Minucius Felix, both counted among the Church Fathers.

But whether this practise [cremation] was onely then left by Emperours and great persons, or generally about Rome, and not in other Provinces, we hold no authentick account. For after Tertullian, in the dayes of Minucius it was obviously objected upon Christians, that they condemned the practise of burning. And we finde a passage in Sidonius, which asserteth that practise in France unto a lower account [that is, more recently]. And perhaps not fully disused till Christianity fully established, which gave the finall extinction to these sepulchrall Bonefires.

Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia: Urne-Buriall, 1658. (Penguin Great Ideas edition, 2005), 14.

Browne says that Christians were opposed to the burning of dead bodies, and this opposition was one cause of Roman dislike for the church. Why were Christians opposed to burning?

Even as he traces the various known histories and practices of burial and cremation (and muses soberly on ‘how the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of bones and ashes,’) he relates how the various customs of burial and interment demonstrate something of the theology of each people:

The Indian Brachmans seemed too great friends unto fire, who burnt themselves alive, and thought it the noblest way to end their dayes in fire; according to the expression of the Indian, burning himself at Athens, in his last words upon the pyre unto the amazed spectators, Thus I make myself Immortall.

But the Chaldeans, the great Idolaters of fire, abhorred the burning of their carcasses, as a pollution of that Deity. The Persian Magi declined it upon the like scruple, and being only sollicitous about their bones, exposed their flesh to the prey of Birds and Dogges…

The Ægyptians were afraid of fire, not as a Deity, but a devouring Element, mercilesly consuming their bodies, and leaving too little of them; and therefore by precious Embalments, depositure in dry earths, or handsome inclosure in glasses, contrived the notablest ways of integrall conservation.

Thomas Browne, Urne-Buriall, p5

Why were the Christians in the patristic era so opposed to cremation? Browne answers:

And though [Christians] conceived all reparable by a resurrection, [they] cast not off all care of enterrment… since they acknowledged their bodies to be the lodging of Christ, and temples of the holy Ghost, they devolved not all upon the sufficiency of soul existence… Christian invention hath chiefly driven at Rites, which speak hopes of another life, and hints of a Resurrection.

Thomas Browne, Urne-Buriall, p33

Browne makes the same connection: the Christian insistence on burial instead of cremation, not only through the imperial and patristic era but right up to the last century in the West and even to the present in the rest of the world, is built on theological convictions. We know that we are not our own, for we were bought with a price, that we must glorify God with our bodies, and we ‘look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.’

The fact that God has a claim on our bodies, and the further fact that our bodies have a place in God’s redemptive purposes for us and for the cosmos, changes the way we relate to our bodies. This anthropological tussle we’re having in the West over the relationship between our selves and our bodies (most radically in the US, Canada, and Australia, and in a more muted fashion in these islands) has already completely claimed those least vocal of victims: the dead.

Cremation, as Bavinck puts it, ‘militates against Christian mores’, because it is the destruction of a God-given vessel that has an eternal future in the resurrection of the dead, both of the wicked and the good. ‘The Christian church and Christian theology, accordingly, vigorously maintained the identity of the resurrection body with the body that has died.’

Burial, on the other hand, is much more nearly in harmony with Scripture, creed, history, and liturgy; with the doctrine of the image of God that is also manifest in the body; with the doctrine of death as a punishment for sin, and with the respect that is due to the dead and the resurrection on the last day… they entrust [corpses] to the earth’s bosom and let them rest until the day of the resurrection.’

Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008) 4:695.

The mindset at work in the widespread practice of cremation, I contend, is an unChristian one. We treat the dead body as a thing to be discarded, a vehicle for the self rather than as a precious vessel and meaningful component of the self; as a ‘flesh prison’ rather than complementary earthly tent, made in God’s image in like measure to the soul now departed from it.

There’s a ‘shower-thought’ meme that did the rounds, saying ‘A bed is just the shelf you put your body on when you’re not using it.’ Cremation is just the same mindset taken to its ultimate conclusion: what do ‘you’ do with your body when ‘you’ are finished with it altogether? Answer: it doesn’t matter. Burn it, bury it, leave it for the dogs; turn it into a diamond, turn it into paint, suspend it in resin and make a coffee table out of it. Who cares? You’re not using it any more.

But what if — as the Scriptures and the creed and the Christian church all testify — what if ‘you’ aren’t really separable from your body? What if your body isn’t just a meat-suit, a flesh-prison, a vehicle for your true self which is entirely internal and subjective? What if you are your body, just as much as you are your soul? What if God has a claim on your body, through Christ, just as much as he has a claim on your soul? What if Paul meant it when he says we groan as we await the redemption, not only of our souls, but of our bodies? And what if God’s plans and purposes for you include your body?

Then maybe we have a responsibility to our bodies, even after we’re ‘done using them’. Maybe, rather than incinerating our corpses like so much garbage, we ‘commit our bodies to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body’.