John Piper: Should Christians Cremate Their Loved Ones?
“There has been a skyrocketing preference for cremation over the past decades in the United States …. There are various causes, but the greatest, by far, is the combination of secularization and economics. Fewer people test the practice with biblical criteria, and more people want the cheapest solution. So my aim here is to touch on both of those causes.” - Piper
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Christian virtue and biblical living should not rely upon spending $10,000+ to have your physical body taken care of after you move on to heaven.
My personal study of the issue suggests the Bible always mentions burial when a person dies. That being said, there is no command for it.
Given the high fees associated with burial in America today, grace should be used and each person make their own mind up on this issue free from guilt or projection of your own opinion.
How did we get from cremation to here!? I shall now beat a hasty exit …
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
[Mark_Smith]A lot of Christians specialize in “stewardship” being the greatest Christian virtue. They think the Christian ideal is to be a great steward of everything, and if you are not when you have failed.
I admit I have made a lot of financial mistakes in my life (student loans), and it seems like the only thing Christians do not forgive is financial mistakes. On the grand scale of things my mistakes are not that bad, but they are there and I will likely pay the consequences for them the rest of my life. I don’t need a brother pointing that out all the time.
Please be very sensitive about dealing with believers and personal finances .
Maybe you’ve been reading too many Christian finance blogs. I’ve never encountered that mindset.
[TylerR]How did we get from cremation to here!? I shall now beat a hasty exit …
It’s my fault Tyler. An abstract discussion of burial vs cremation ignores the financial realities of people. I recently faced the difficulty of this issue this year, so it is fresh on my mind.
[Andrew K]Maybe you’ve been reading too many Christian finance blogs. I’ve never encountered that mindset.
Andrew,
over the last few years, I’ve applied for several pastor and assistant pastor positions. One of the first questions is about debt. The second is does your wife work. I now realize I am never going to clear either of those questions…
Also, in my last church the decision process for eldership involved divulging debt. Not fun if you have student loans to be judged for it.
[Mark_Smith]Sorry to hear that, Mark. That’s unfortunate.Andrew,
over the last few years I’ve applied for several pastor and assistant pastor positions. One of the first questions is about debt. The second is does your wife work. I now realize I am never going to clear either of those questions…
Debt and financial systems in the US are predatory; anyone can be snatched up. I’ve certainly learned this myself, in the past several years.
[Mark_Smith]Josh,
If you are going to attack me by name at least note I did not mention your name… You assumed I was attacking you. I did not. For the record, I note that you mentioned what you were doing in your own life, and not generalizing.
Ok which post were you responding to?
In scripture we have the examples of burial, but I wonder how much of that was because it was so practical. It would be cheaper to dig a hole or find a cave, than to get a bunch of wood to burn. Today if we could just dig our own hole and place the body in it and cover it up, it would be way cheaper than cremation. I do excavator work in addition to being a pastor and I could dig and fill a hole for $250 (minimum charge). If you could not afford that, you can buy a shovel for $25. In Bible times there was no need for a casket or vault. Even in our country in years past, if you owned the land, you could dig a hole and bury the body. Much has changed with so many regulations.
When I was in Bible College, we toured a funeral parlor. The undertaker showed us the casket room. I asked about those that could not afford the expensive caskets. He said they had some in the back. He showed them to us. They were made of cardboard, but covered with very nice fabric. They looked beautiful. He did not want most of the customers to know about them, because with the mark up, he did not make as much on them.
When my dad died, the undertaker showed us vaults (required in some states) and many were very fancy. Most vaults are under a curtain during the burial, so no one sees them anyway. We got the cheapest one. When my grandpa died, the undertaker totally manipulated my grandma into getting one of the most expensive caskets. I was there and what he did was unethical in suggesting that if she did not spend more, she did not care about him.
[JD Miller]In scripture we have the examples of burial, but I wonder how much of that was because it was so practical. It would be cheaper to dig a hole or find a cave, than to get a bunch of wood to burn. Today if we could just dig our own hole and place the body in it and cover it up, it would be way cheaper than cremation. I do excavator work in addition to being a pastor and I could dig and fill a hole for $250 (minimum charge). If you could not afford that, you can buy a shovel for $25. In Bible times there was no need for a casket or vault. Even in our country in years past, if you owned the land, you could dig a hole and bury the body. Much has changed with so many regulations…
Doesn’t explain how cremation was pretty common in the ancient world.
From the article:
“In the 1000s B.C., people usually buried their dead in small stone-lined graves. Between 1000 and 750 B.C., most bodies were burned, or cremated, and the ashes were placed in pottery jars, which were then buried. Later Greeks buried bodies in earth-lined pits or cremated them inside the graves. “
…and
“The funeral customs during the Roman Republic, from 510 B.C. to 31 B.C., were simple. Most of the dead were cremated. “
…and
“In the early years of the Roman Empire, people in the western part of the empire continued to cremate their dead, while those in the eastern part adopted the Greek custom of burying them. Beginning in the A.D. 100s, however, burial became more common than cremation throughout the empire. This may have been connected to the spread of Christianity, which opposed cremation. “
As I understand it in-ground burial is very rare in Japan. Cremation is the standard.
Hoping to shed more light than heat..
My guess is that in the days before mechanical excavation, people “slacked off” on the digging for burial, especially since so many died of diseases that probably also affected their grieving families. Hard to dig a six foot hole to bury a cholera victim when you yourself have the disease, no?
And so I’d guess that though they didn’t know about what Louis Pasteur would discover about contagion in the 1860s, they did know that bad things happened when people weren’t adequately buried. You poison your water supply, invite large carrion-eaters into your neighborhood, and the like. So they therefore burned their dead.
And yes, I’d guess that false religion played mightily into that one, too.
Another big reason for cremation is that in the densely populated areas of the world, there simply isn’t enough land for graveyards without cutting down on things like food production. I believe that in many parts of Europe, burial plots are rented for 25 years—they are not perpetual. 25 years later, what’s left of the body is dug up and discarded, and the tombstone recycled.
One side note is that regarding Mark’s claim that many evangelicals get too worked up about finances, absolutely true. One of the charges made by The Elephant’s Debt against James MacDonald (with video if I remember right) was that MacDonald was very close to a crude prosperity theology. There is a subtle balance between helping people achieve financial stability and edging into a works/prosperity theology.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
[Rob Fall]As I understand it in-ground burial is very rare in Japan. Cremation is the standard.
Chinese strongly prefer burial. The govt. has been forcing them to cremate, which hasn’t gone over too well:
“Traditionally, Chinese people believe that burial is ‘the proper way to handle a dead body’, the official Xinhua News Agency says.” (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-44603990)
Bringing things full circle, recall that Jews dealt with lack of burial space by removing bodies from graves after decomposition and placing in ossuaries that were economically shelved in labeled vaults. A pretty good method of burial + space conservation. I think we could learn from that.
A few of them, including yours, discussed finances and planning.
Discussion