"PASTORAL THEOLOGY & PRACTICE" PROF. HAROLD SENKBEIL & DR. RICHARD WARNECK CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 1-800-825-7234 * * * * * This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * * *. >> ERIC: I've been hearing some concerns and questions from my congregation members about cremation. This is especially true among my older parishioners who were raised Catholic, since the Catholic church did not allow cremation until the mid 1960s. What should a Lutheran pastor tell his people about cremation? Do we argue against it? >> PROFESSOR HAROLD SENKBEIL: Well, Eric, no, we don't argue against it. That's the short answer. But there is a longer context to that answer that I think you need to be aware of. The reservations regarding cremation are not a peculiarity related to the Roman Catholic church, but the long-standing tradition of the Christian church has been very much opposed to cremation, historically speaking. Why was that? For a number of reasons. First of all, we see in Holy Scripture that the burning of persons is really an expression of the wrath of God. It's a horrible way of dying. It is indeed a capital punishment imposed upon God's people Israel in order to address certain reprehensible sins. So it's an element of destruction, burning in fire, in other words. So that was one factor. The other reason was this: During the rise of agnosticism and militant atheism in the 18th and 19th centuries due to rationalism, there was a clear indication amongst the atheists that they did not want to be buried in the ground when they died because they wanted to surely rule out any kind of resurrection. So for them, cremation was a matter of their confession that there is no God and there is no after life and there is no resurrection of the body. Now, you can easily understand, then, the Christians in general in that kind of a context, were very much opposed to cremation because they didn't want to give the impression that they didn't believe in the resurrection of the body. Now, that kind of framework, that kind of mindset is no longer common knowledge in our society and there are other kinds of practical reasons and many various metropolitan and urban areas, for example, the burial grounds are getting filled up with bodies. So in order to compress these remains, they're frequently cremated and buried in those cemeteries in a much smaller spot. So these are practical concerns that enter in. And for these two reasons, the practical concerns and the fact that there are no longer militant atheists around claiming that cremation is a sign of denial of the resurrection, the church has therefore permitted cremation to occur amongst its members. In fact, you'll find in the new Agenda, the Pastoral Agenda, that the burial rites�include prayers for the disposal of cremains, as they're called. Now, there's a broader context, I think, that do raise some pastoral concerns, however, and they are these. There's an unfortunate tendency to think within contemporary Christiandom, also amongst our Lutheran churches, to kind of buy into the spirit of the times which is very much in tune with spirituality but a very kind of general spirituality, not a Biblical understanding of what the soul is and the union of the body and the soul at the time of conception. The separation of the body from the soul, of course, occurs at the moment of earthly death. But there is a reunification in the resurrection of that body and soul. And so our Christian practices need to reflect that. Unfortunately, I think, there's somewhat of a kind of gnostic�separation between body and soul that occurs in the heads of a lot of our Christians, including our Lutheran Christians, in which they have a rather cheap idea of what the body is, that it's kind of a dead body is kind of like so much trash to be discarded, that it's really not important. It's only the soul that's important. And Heaven consists of disembodied souls. Now, that of course as you understand, Eric, is not a Biblical idea at all. In fact, we even confess in the Apostle's Creed, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." So whatever we do ought to clearly confess our confidence that the body which is sown�in dishonor, to quote I Corinthians 15 will be raised in glory. So whatever we do, we don't want to encourage this idea of demeaning the body, of tossing it out with the trash, of despising it in any way. So I think I would want to teach my people not just when death occurs to their surviving family members but consistently to the entire parish that as a matter of our conviction and faith in our God who created us, who redeemed us and who sanctifies us, that we are going to treat these bodies that God gave us with respect, even in death. And however we dispose of these bodies, it is not done in discarding them, but, rather, we reverently commend these bodies to the earth in either burial of the body or in cremated remains in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection unto eternal life. That definitely has to be in the framework. And we want to always encourage that idea. * * * * * This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * * *