I am surprised by how often Christians are stunned to hear me say that cremation is not a Christian act. Previous generations of Christians would have understood exactly, but today an anti-cremation stance seems at best Luddite and at worst carnal. People will ask, "Can't God raise a cremated Christian just as he can raise a decomposed buried Christian?"
Our eschatology has everything to do then with how we "dispose" of the "remains" of our dead loved ones. Since we believe in the resurrection of the body, we don't see a corpse as "garbage." From the time of our earliest ancestors in the faith, we have buried our dead, committing them to the earth from which they came with the conviction that they will one day be summoned from it once more.
[...]
[A]theists and "freethinkers" in America pioneered the practice [of cremation] in America precisely because they denied the resurrection of the flesh.
Russell D. Moore
No comments:
Post a Comment