A Remedy for Transhumanism
Society’s approach to death and dying has fallen on hard times. Euphemisms such as “passing away” and “celebration of life” aim to ease the sting of death. Death and dying are frequently outsourced to nursing homes and hospitals, preventing the mortality of loved ones from serving as a memento mori–remembering that you shall likewise die. One cultural trend running parallel to this that I’ve noticed is the decline of the longstanding custom of burial and the rise of its alternative: cremation.
This shift is evident to anyone who attends funerals somewhat regularly, and statistics confirm those observations. According to the Cremation Association of North America, the percentage of Americans who chose cremation rose from 38% in 2009 to almost 62% in 2024. The National Funeral Directors Association expects that number to eclipse 80% by 2045. To put those numbers in context, only 3.6% of Americans chose cremation in 1960.
Prior to the 20th century, Christians had practiced the custom of burial exclusively since the time of Christ. Why such a drastic transformation, in such a short amount of time, in how we approach the death of the body? To be sure, it can be explained in part by the rise of secularization–pagans have practiced cremation for centuries. But the data necessitates an uptick in cremation among professing Christians as well, not just among unbelievers.
Many justify the choice to cremate financially, or for reasons such as concern for the environment or familial flexibility. These, however, fail to explain the aforementioned universality of Christian burial–at least until very recently–regardless of time, place, cost or convenience.
These may indeed be secondary motivations for cremation, but I would contend that the Christian acceptance of cremation is just one effect of a more serious underlying cause–an understanding of Christian anthropology that diminishes the value and goodness of the body in a way that is at odds with both Scripture and the Christian tradition.
Body and Soul: A Biblical Doctrine of Man
Christians have always professed the foundational belief that man is created as both body and soul. While angels are exclusively spiritual and animals exclusively physical, mankind has been uniquely created by God as a composite of both the physical and spiritual. Possessing both a body and a soul is central to what it means to be human.
The church today has little difficulty with the soul. It is eternal, important, and in need of redemption. The body, on the other hand, is where uncertainty sets in. Is the body temporary, eternal, or partly both? If it’s temporary, then how important is it? Is the body in need of redemption? The answers to these questions will affect how we handle the physical bodies of those whose souls have departed this world.
The Reformed tradition provides some helpful clarity on the state of the body after death. Citing 1 Thessalonians 4:14, Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 37 states that the bodies of believers “being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection”. Speaking of believers who “sleep in Jesus”, Matthew Henry comments that “Their souls are in his presence, and their dust is under his care and power”. Chapter 32 of the Westminster Confession of Faith adds that “all the dead shall be raised up with the self-same bodies, and none other, although with different qualities,”. The body, in short, remains in union with Christ and under His care after death, and that same body will itself be raised in glory and power at the resurrection. While we must balance these truths with passages that emphasize the mortality and lowliness of our earthly bodies (2 Cor. 5:4; Phil. 3:21), it is also true that our body is eternally a part of who we are. Our body is perishing, not into nothingness or replacement, but rather into death and resurrection.
This ought to impact our view of cremation. Why, if our future hope is the resurrection of our “selfsame bodies”, would we burn those bodies as if they were no longer a part of us? Why would we incinerate that which is “still united to Christ”? Why destroy that which will be redeemed (Rom. 8:23)?
When those of us in Christ die, our souls depart to heaven. But a part of who we are will remain in the earth, awaiting its redemption and reunion with our souls in the New Heavens and New Earth. Christ can, of course, still resurrect a cremated body, and our bodies as believers will always be in union with Christ and under His care, whether reduced to dust or ashes. But Christian burial is far more consistent with our resurrection hope. Like seeds that must die in the soil for more abundant life to spring forth, we sow our perishable, natural bodies into the ground, waiting with hope for the resurrection of a body that is spiritual and imperishable (1 Cor. 15:42).
The Coming Battle With Transhumanism
The implications of an improper understanding of body and soul are, of course, far-reaching. Ben Dunson recently explained its importance in combating radical transgender ideology. Likewise, just as cremation diminishes the natural body in comparison to the soul, many today neglect political involvement by diminishing the natural kingdom in favor of the spiritual kingdom alone. Physical discipline is ignored in favor of spiritual disciplines, forgetting that each supports and strengthens the other. The list could go on. Ultimately, we need an understanding that is “both/and”, not “either/or”.
One fight that Christians appear to be particularly unprepared for is the ethical debate surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and transhumanism. Transhumanism is a movement that seeks to hasten the coming of “Humanity 2.0”, a more evolved form of mankind that combines man and machine. The philosophy has found its way into mainstream discourse due to the rapid development of AI in recent years, as well as its support from some of the world’s most powerful entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Google co-founder Larry Page.
Cremation and transhumanism make the same anthropological error in that both suggest a belief that the body is ancillary to our existence as humans. While cremation handles the problem of death by destroying the body, transhumanists aim to solve the problem of death by offering cheap counterfeits to the Christian understanding of the intermediate and eternal states of believers after death.
Take the concept of mind uploading, for example, where transhumanists advocate for scanning the human brain and then copying its contents onto a computer, enabling the immaterial components of a person to live forever in digital form. This simulates the intermediate state, when the souls of believers are separated from their bodies. For Christians, the intermediate state is when the body is united to Christ in the grave, and the soul is present with Him in heaven. In mind uploading, there is a similar separation of body and soul, but the body is deemed irrelevant and discarded, and the “soul” is present in a computer rather than with Christ.
The transhumanist notion of bodyhacking, on the other hand, aims at the enhancement of the body through technology, and thus pursues an imitation of the eternal state. For believers, the eternal state is when our souls will be reunited with our bodies, and those bodies, as the Westminster Confession states, will have “different qualities”. The different qualities of our resurrected bodies will likely include things such as increased knowledge and physical ability, both pursuits of transhumanists. While it seems as if the transhumanists place some value on the body in this case, they err in that they pursue these higher qualities on their own terms rather than through God’s appointed means of death and resurrection.
As AI continues to advance at a breakneck pace, it won’t be long before humans can increase their IQ, enhance their strength, and slow the aging process through technology. Will we succumb to the allure of this pseudo-resurrected body, or cling to our hope in the true resurrection to come? One can see that the near future in which we have the ability to continue talking to an immaterial, AI-generated version of a deceased loved one is already here. Will we settle for this cheap substitute, or wait in hopeful expectation of truly seeing our loved ones again, both body and soul, in the resurrection?
Conclusion
By rejecting transhumanism, we affirm that death–the separation of body and soul–is a reality that cannot be circumvented by technology. In rejecting cremation, we affirm that this separation of body and soul is not final, and we anticipate the day when Christ will bring redemption to both body and soul in His second coming. Historic Christian anthropology rejects the subordinate treatment of the body that is evident in both.
As usual, modern problems require ancient solutions. Customs, being pedagogical, teach us vital truths through their practice. Cremation implicitly teaches the false notion that the body has no future after death. It comes as no surprise, then, that a society that cremates its dead would also pursue an inferior transhumanist version of immortality that is devoid of the hope of bodily resurrection. Recovering the ancient custom of Christian burial will teach our people the goodness of the body and its status as a necessary component of man, proclaiming our hope of its future resurrection and reunion with the soul.
Image Credit: Unsplash
