When The Truth Isn't True Enough

Cremation, Body-less Resurrection, & An Intro to "A Theology of Continuity"

How do you know if something is true? Here are three possible answers:

1. “If you can see it, taste it, touch it, then it’s true.” (i.e. empiricism)

Sure, but the senses can sometimes be deceiving. Not to mention, the vast majority of facts cannot be verified first-hand anyway.

2. “Look it up. If it comports with the source materials, then you know it’s true.” (i.e. authority)

Sure, but the source materials may also deceive, or, more likely, be deceived themselves. And which materials do you trust?

3. “It’s true if it works.” (i.e. pragmatism)

Personally, I like the sound of this one. But here too, there’s a problem. Many things “work” in the short term, yet still prove untrustworthy over the long haul. That dollar store toy your 5-year-old begged you to buy appeared to be a shrewd investment for the first 12 hours; not so much the next day, when she’s crying, holding the broken pieces in her hands.

In other words, the truth can be hard to verify. All the more so in our current social-media-driven context. When even the term “fact-check” becomes meme-bait, it’s tempting to believe we have indeed entered a “post-truth” era. But we still deal in truth. It’s just that most truths, like the dollar store toy, are not true enough for long enough. And the truest truths—the ones you build your life upon—are not so much gone as hidden, requiring real patience and perseverance to uncover, which, as it turns out, our modern technological age has almost entirely bred out of us.

An example of a fact-checking meme (I know nothing about FB fact-checkers.)

In 1958, long before the self-proclaimed post-truth era, C. S. Lewis was reading Psalm 119 and noticed something surprising about the way ancient Hebrews treated the word “true.”

On three occasions the poet asserts that the Law is ‘true’ or ‘the truth’ (vv. 86, 138, 142). We find the same in Psalm 111:7, ‘all his commandments are true.’ (The word, I understand, could also be translated ‘faithful’, or ‘sound’; what is, in the Hebrew sense, ‘true’ is what ‘holds water’, what doesn’t ‘give way’ or collapse.)…A modern logician would say that the Law is a command and that to call a command ‘true’ makes no sense; ‘The door is shut’ may be true or false but ‘Shut the door’ can’t. But I think we all see pretty well what the Psalmists mean…They mean that in the Law you find the ‘real’ or ‘correct’ or stable, well-grounded, directions for living. There are many rival directions for living, as the Pagan cultures all round us show. When the poets call the directions or ‘rulings’ of Jahweh ‘true’ they are expressing the assurance that these, and not those others, are the ‘real’ or ‘valid’ or unassailable ones; that they are based on the very nature of things and the very nature of God. (C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, chapter 6, emphasis mine)

That is, in the Bible, a thing is said to be “true” when it comports with reality, when it works in the deepest sense of the word, not merely as a temporary fix, but sustainably over generations. Sure, in a given moment, the sand may appear to be—may in fact be—a more desirable location to build a home than the rock, but the rock proves trustworthy over time. Again, “‘True’ is what holds water, what doesn’t give way or collapse.”

I mention all this because I believe in this moment we are particularly prone to settle for truths that do not hold water, truths which are true enough for today but not true enough for tomorrow. I don’t mean outright lies, necessarily. I’m speaking of truths you can see and experience, truths you can even quote from the Bible, truths which work, but which work about as well as a leaky bucket. Dollar store versions of the real thing. Obviously our secular culture is suffering from this constantly. But even within our Evangelical communities, we have seen the leaks. At times we have even seen the bottom fall out—not for lack of “truth,” but for lack of depth. Our truth wasn’t true enough. And this will continue to happen until we learn to recenter ourselves on a surer foundation.

In what follows, I want to identify one of the main theological problems that is keeping us from being able to see and participate in the truest truths, both within our churches and more broadly. I call the problem a “blank-slate theology” and the solution a “theology of continuity.”

Blank-Slate Vs. Continuity

The best way to sum up a blank-slate theology is with St. Paul’s famous words in 2 Corinthians 5: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (v. 17). I am quoting Scripture here, because I want to be clear that I am not denouncing this as some false, heretical, or non-Christian belief. On the contrary, almost nothing is more central to the gospel than the reality of a new beginning, of death and new life. No, the question is not whether “new creation” is our reality in Christ, but how. How does new creation work? This is where our two theological frameworks come to radically different conclusions.

In a blank-slate theology, new creation works as a kind of wholesale replacement of the old. Christ came not so much to fulfill the Scriptures as to override them. The familiar formula in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard it said…but I tell you…” is taken as proof that Jesus was introducing an entirely new ethic, even a new religion. In this view, the genealogies in the beginning of the Gospels seem out of place except as a reminder of the old, crude order of things which is being rendered obsolete by the work of Christ. Likewise, as believers in a blank-slate gospel, our own family trees exist only as reminders of what must be left behind and overcome. We were people born into a certain family in a certain place and culture, with our own natural talents, desires, weaknesses, and struggles. But now, we have been born again. Our second birth has little or nothing to do with the first.

By contrast, in a theology of continuity, new creation is understood as the redemption and fulfillment of the old. Yes, the old must die. But it dies in order to become all that it was meant to be. Creation waits, groaning with the pains of childbirth, because God actually likes what he made. It was good when he made it, and it shall be good again—even better than it was. The genealogies at the beginning of the Gospels make clear that we are living in one continuous story in which God has been working all along, and that Christ has entered the picture not merely to overcome the imperfect legacies of his ancestors but to redeem and fulfill them. Likewise, we who are born again in Christ share in his work of redeeming the bodies and lineages we were given.

The highest hope of a blank-slate theology is “heaven when we die,” where all things which could not be made right here on earth will be magically and instantaneously re-made after death. I do not say this is false, but it is a leaky vessel. On the other hand, the central hope of a theology of continuity is “the resurrection of the body,” which is at once more palpable and also more subtle than its blank-slate counterpart. In the Gospels, we find that the risen Christ is so completely transformed as to be unrecognizable to his closest friends (he even walks through walls!), and yet, he is somehow so unchanged as to retain even the holes in his hands from the nails on the cross. Profound transformation is joined with profound continuity. This is the truer truth. And it is also true of us…

Through his resurrection, Christ is making “all things new,” but he is making new things out of the old. We are who he wants to raise. You and me. Yes, our mortal bodies are corrupted by sin and destined for death. We must be born again. But we are not born again ex nihilo. Yes, we must die. But we awake on the other side of death to find, shockingly, that not all that was put on the altar has been consumed by the flames. The old has gone and the new has come, but the new turns out to be the pruned and purified perfection of the old, rather than its wholesale replacement. The roots of the new creation were already in the ground.

In summary, the resurrection of the body not only gives us a glimpse of how salvation works; it gives us a plausibility structure for how reality works. True things have continuity. Reality, in fact, exists as the joining of transformation and continuity.

But for those of us who have grown up with a blank-slate mentality, this nuance can be hard to appreciate. We moderns have developed a certain distrust for continuity, especially regarding our identity and beliefs. For instance, if your Christian beliefs and practices were passed down to you from your parents and grandparents, this is often seen as less “authentic” than if you had come to it completely independently (as if such a thing were possible). By the same logic, a truly authentic Mexican meal would not be the meal that was passed down to you through generations of Mexican ancestors, but rather the meal that you decided was an authentic Mexican meal “to you,” whether or not it has any continuity with the traditions and people of Mexico. This is, of course, absurd. But we speak this way all the time about things that matter far more than food.

Even in Lewis’s day, ancient pagan myths which closely resembled aspects of the Christian story were often trotted out as proofs of the falsity of Christianity. If hints of the Christian story existed thousands of years prior to the birth of Jesus, the critics argued, then the whole thing must be called into question. Lewis’s response to this was to say that, far from being concerned about the existence of “pagan Christs,” he considered them as powerful evidence for the truth of the Christian message. He would be far more concerned if they did not exist. After all, Christ is the fulfillment of all such myths, offering both continuity with and transformation of the longings of the nations. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.

Balder (the ‘pagan Christ’ of Norse myth) by John Egerkrans

But Lewis’s appreciation for continuity has not been easily transferred to the next generation of Christians who nevertheless appreciate Lewis for many other reasons. Though Matthew and Luke both frame the story of Christ’s life with genealogies dating back to Abraham—and in Luke’s case, all the way back to Adam—we are often invited to imagine the birth of Christ as a kind of jarring interruption to the entire Old Testament narrative, as though Christ literally fell from heaven, rather than being born from his mother’s womb into the family of David in David’s hometown. Though Christ himself emphasized that he did not come to abolish the law or the prophets but to fulfill them, and though he initially rejected the request of the Canaanite woman on the grounds that he came “only for the lost sheep of Israel,” we often speak of Christ’s mission as though he came merely to wipe the slate clean and start over. But this is never the claim of Christ, nor of the writers of the New Testament. Again and again they tell us that the Messiah came to fulfill the Scriptures, a word which implies not transformation-by-replacement but continuity-brought-to-conclusion.

Now, take a moment to appreciate just how much of the thinking of the modern secular world suffers from a kind of “blank-slate” mentality. “I am not defined by who other people say I am, nor even by the way I was born. I am who I say I am, by virtue of my own proclaimed identity.” Notice that this sort of belief proceeds not precisely from an abandonment of Christian truth, but rather from a deeply Christian truth misused, from a leaky-bucket version of “The old has gone; the new has come.” As historian Tom Holland has now famously shown, much of the modern liberal ethos, including especially the “woke” phenomenon, is arguably the product not of anti-Christian notions but rather of deeply Christian notions now-unmoored. Wokeism bears many of the signs of a classical Christian heresy, a doubling down on one side of a Christian truth at the cost of the other, equally true side of the paradox.

I mention this not to lodge an argument against wokeism (which I believe has refuted itself and may already be nearing its end), but rather to show just how much our modern Evangelical modes of thinking have in common with it. We are, in some ways, in danger of becoming the adherents of a blank-slate religion, more true than wokeism, but less true than the kingdom of God. In our gospel, the old has magically disappeared and the new has come. The seed has simply died and given way to some new and different reality. It need not grow—slowly and painfully—from a dead seed, into a shoot, and from a shoot into the largest tree in the garden. We need not learn over time to embody its new life. We only proclaim it, and it is so. But when we open the pages of the New Testament, we find a different story. The kingdom of God is the marriage of continuity and transformation, of the familiar and the fresh. Christ has come not merely to replace the old, but to make it new.

He said to them, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” (Matthew 13:52)

The Cremation Phenomenon

A poignant symbol of blank-slate theology in our time is the modern practice of cremation.¹ In the last fifty years in North America, cremation has become the overwhelmingly preferred method of interment for our deceased loved ones. According to Google, cremation is “a method of body disposal that involves reducing a body to ash by exposing it to very high temperatures in an industrial furnace.” In 1960, the cremation rate for Americans was 3.5%. Today it is over 60%. Canada, which tends to be a harbinger for American social trends, projects their cremation rate to top 80% by 2028. This is no small shift.

It would be an understatement to say that cremation has been uncommon in the history of Christianity. The ancient Church clearly condemned it as a pagan practice. The Eastern Orthodox Church still forbids it today. The Catholic Church has largely done the same, though in recent years it has become more complicated. As late as 1963, the Vatican issued a statement permitting cremation in some instances, though still warning against its symbolic denial of the resurrection of the body. It was not until 1997 that special permission was given to have the cremated remains of the deceased present at a Catholic funeral. Even still, traditional burial is strongly, explicitly preferred.

As for Protestants, we are all over the map. But these days it would seem we are mostly united in our lack of concern about the practice. Though I don’t have the numbers to prove it, it is safe to assume that the Protestant (and Evangelical) rate of cremation follows the national trend pretty closely. A statement from pastor John MacArthur’s website seems to sum up the current mood among American Evangelicals (h/t this Gospel Coalition article):

Scripture says nothing about a required mode of burial for either believers or non-believers…Obviously any buried body will eventually decompose. So cremation isn't a strange or wrong practice—it merely accelerates the natural process of oxidation. The believer will one day receive a new body (1 Cor. 15:42-49; 1 Thess. 4:13-18; Job 19:25-26), thus the state of what remains of the old body is unimportant…What we need to focus on as Christians is not how to dispose of our earthly bodies, but that one day new bodies will be fashioned for us like our Lord's.

I want to note here that those who choose cremation for their deceased loved ones have legitimate reasons. Most notably, the average cost of cremation is far less than that of traditional casket burial. This is a serious barrier for traditional burial today, but it’s also one that could be at least partially overcome if our churches would start trading out their overflow parking lots for graveyards (but don’t get me started). Cremation is also said to be more environmentally friendly. The website “NationalCremation.com” adds the following benefits to the list: “fear of burial/natural decomposition,” “simpler arrangements,” and “flexible service options.” If I were discussing the ethics of cremation here, I might be tempted to push back against such “benefits.” But that is far from my present purpose.

The point I want to make about the cremation phenomenon is not so much a moral point as a religious/symbolic one, not about what Christianity “allows” but about what it is. The Christian faith hinges on the resurrection of the body, that Jesus Christ rose bodily from the grave and that we shall rise with him in like fashion. But, as we have seen, this is a truth more easily professed than embraced. It involves not only the belief in an historical Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but also the painful acceptance of a kind of recurring “Good Friday” in the present which seems to offer no “Easter Sunday” at all except for the one that came once for all, and will come again we-know-not-when. But the modern practice of cremation, whether accidentally or purposefully, offers a detour around some of the more painful parts of this predicament.

It is easier to avoid the chilling physicality of death itself, to avoid seeing and handling the body and throwing dirt on the grave. It is easier to have a “celebration of life” than it is to mourn at a funeral and a burial service. It is easier to imagine that our loved ones do not have to face the judgment of death, nor the judgment after death, to imagine that they have been made whole already, that they lack nothing and await no future redemption of their bodies, nor do we. And the more quickly and impersonally we dispose of their actual bodies—the less attention and respect we give them—the easier it becomes to believe all this is so.

What the aforementioned John MacArthur quote fails to comprehend is that the very fact that “the believer will one day receive a new body” does not render the treatment of our present bodies as unimportant, but as all the more important. As the writers of the New Testament make abundantly clear, we believe in the resurrection not merely by confessing it but by participating in it. As I argued in Creeds, Deeds, & Needs, when what we proclaim with our mouths becomes detached from what we do with our patterns of behavior, we become like the man who looks in the mirror and then forgets what he looks like (James 1:23-24).

Don’t get me wrong. I am not in the least concerned that cremation might introduce a physical problem for God, as though it would be any harder for him to raise a man who dies in a house fire (or is cremated!) than a man whose body decomposes naturally in the grave. Death is disintegration, however you look at it. But how we look at it still matters. The problem with the practice of cremation is not that it makes things harder for God, but that it makes things harder for us. It makes it harder to remember what is already hard to believe: that the very body which dies shall be raised.

Cremation, as far as I’m concerned, is not a sin. It is, rather, a risk—not for the person who has died, but for the rest of us. As our Catholic and Orthodox brethren have reminded us, the regularized practice of cremation by the people of God risks misunderstanding—and perhaps even forgetting—that the resurrection of the body is the truest truth, not only the shape of our salvation, but the shape of our reality. And the more we allow ourselves to become disconnected from this reality, however easier it might be in the short term, the more we will pay the price over time. Pain avoided is pain deferred.

But I will leave it there as regards cremation. I have probably already been more offensive than I intended to be, and if so, I apologize. Suffice it to say, my case is not against cremation as such but against the blank-slate theology which it symbolizes. And to be fair, this theology probably had its roots in us long before our modern funerary rituals followed suit. To this deeper problem I now return…

Conclusion: Resurrection-Shaped Reality

In Make Christianity Confusing Again, I pointed to a temptation among us Evangelicals to remake the gospel into a kind of Gnostic religion of heaven-without-earth, where believing the good news allows us to “rise above” the very real problems on the ground, in the world and in ourselves. In this view, the gospel is information-centric and disembodied. We simply hear and agree with it, and everything changes. Yes, life on the ground can still be complicated, but if we just keep reminding ourselves of the truth of the gospel, we can rise above our doubts and anxieties. If we “just believe,” the bad habits that have mis-shaped our lives for years will begin to disappear. Obviously, there is a deep element of truth in all this. But at best, it’s a half-truth: heaven without earth, resurrection without…well, without the body. This is what I mean by a “blank-slate theology.”

Then, in Be Perfect, I tried to depict a more down-to-earth view of heaven by reclaiming the biblical notion of perfection not as “flawlessness” but “finished-ness.” In this view, salvation is no mere blank slate. Believers are not magically transferred to heaven when they die, but rather mature into perfected citizens of the New Jerusalem as a mustard seed becomes a tree. “I am aware that this defies modern imagination,” I wrote.

Our push-button culture has tricked us into believing in a push-button salvation. But as the story of the Bible (and the story of our lives!) slowly and painfully reveals, no such salvation is available to us. If, by the sudden flip of a switch or wave of a wand, all creation were made magically flawless, that might seem wonderful at first. But it would be a fragile salvation, prone to another fall (and then another and another). The Bible’s vision isn’t like that. […]

The New Jerusalem is not so much magically flawless as it is perfectly finished. It cannot fall again any more than an adult could suddenly become an infant again. I cannot hate what my heart has learned over time to love, nor love what my heart has learned to hate. There is no going back. Perfection-as-a-flipped-switch is fragile, but perfection-as-maturity cannot be undone. It can only grow more and more perfect through all eternity.

All this points to a “theology of continuity,” to a resurrection-shaped salvation and a resurrection-shaped reality. But, unfortunately, that opens up a whole new can of worms. Because, if the doctrine of the resurrection of the body really means transformation-with-continuity—walking through walls while still eating fish—such a powerful paradox may prove harder to swallow than we first assumed. But if we can swallow it, I think we will find a truth that actually holds water, whose practical applications abound.

But I have taken enough of your time today. Tune in next time for: “How To Save Your Father and Mother: A Theology of Continuity Applied”

1. To be clear, I mean to pass NO moral judgment on the practice of cremation in general. Many (most!) of my closest friends and family members in recent years have chosen cremation for their deceased loved ones, and I know they’ve had good reasons.