Albert the Pious takes-up the matter of the Vatican’s recent urging that, in the event that a loved one is cremated, the ashes be buried in consecrated ground.
In releasing the statement yesterday the Vatican was speaking to Roman Catholics, but it was articulating a position that has been generally held by Christians throughout the centuries, that is a very clear Christian preference for the burial of the dead rather than cremation. The background to this is that in the ancient world, cremation was almost always associated with pagan religious worldviews and rituals, and there was a clear distinction between the paganism and Christianity in terms of the body. Many ancient paganisms and worldviews held that the body is that from which the spirit had to escape at the moment of death and the cremation of the body was a symbolic way of freeing the spirit from the body. This is still the teaching in some Asian religions. And the interesting thing is that in the specifics of its teaching, the Roman Catholic Vatican declares exactly what it means in terms of worldview. As NPR reports,
“The newly articulated ash norms include not storing human cremains in the home and refraining from scattering ashes ‘in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way … in order that every appearance of pantheism, naturalism or nihilism be avoided.’”
This is interesting, don’t you think? The point is not to observe some instruction found in the Bible, but to assure that the rest of of the world knows that the decedent was a Christian and not one of those wicked others. It’s for show.
Theologians used to note that the flesh of the dead was often eaten by insects and animals, and then shat onto the ground in various locations, and wonder how He reassembled the pieces in order to torture or reward the dead person for eternity. And what about the problem of somebody recycled as dung and eventually taken-up into a vegetable and re-eaten? What about, that is, matter that belonged to two different dead people? Which one got it?
Also, what about the people who were burned at the stake? How could they possibly be re-assembled in order to be tortured for eternity?
It is a fact: Theologians used to worry and argue about this kind of thing and, from all appearance, without ever having the insight that they’re morons caught-up in a weird version of Dungeons & Dragons.