3. A grief contained or buried? - A reflection on changing ritual practice at funerals within an historical framework and its effect on human understanding of hope and meaning.

The history of death is a history of self-reflection.1

From the earliest records of human reflection questions

of self identity arise, as Davies posits: ‘Identity [is]

the way people understand themselves in relation to

other persons, to the world around them and to

supernatural realms.’2

Davies goes on to comment that human identity is a

consequence of self-consciousness within particular

social networks, in a particular language. Our identity

and purpose in the world become combined to form an

understanding of human destiny as an important factor in

our developing world view; this understanding of our

destiny provides ontological security. Therefore

questions arise such as ‘Who are we? Where do we come

from? And where do we go to after death?’

For much of human history either popular myths or formal

theology, or indeed a mixture of the two, have offered

individuals and communities explanatory narratives

concerning life and death and the relationship between

the living and dead. More recently philosophers and 1 Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, p. 12 Davies, D.J., Death, Ritual and Belief, (2nd Ed.), Continuum, London, 2002,p. 4

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social scientists have entered the discussion with their

own agendas. Both of these narratives I shall explore in

this chapter.

At the heart of this reflection and emerging ritual

practice has been and continues to be not only the

emotion of grief at the separation caused by the

breaking of bonds between each other by death, but an

understanding of our place in the world and the

persistent search for hope and for meaningfulness for

the life lived, with all its injustices and

disappointments, that may only be fulfilled in the

afterlife.

Ancient Narratives on DeathThree of the most longstanding and influential accounts

of mortality are those of the ancient Babylonian epic of

Gilgamesh, the Judaeo-Christian Adam and Eve narrative

found in the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament,

and the Christian account of the life, death and

resurrection of Jesus Christ, found in the New

Testament.

The Gilgamesh epic presents a philosophical reflection

upon the human condition set in mythical form. It is a

narrative of human friendship describing the devotion of

one man, the princely Gilgamesh for another, the noble

Enkidu, both created through Aruru the goddess of

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creation.3 These principal characters in this drama are

attributed in some measure with divine and animal

characteristics, posing the question of how these mixed

features underlie humanity. Their meeting was

manipulated by the gods and took place in the city of

Uruk where the men fought one another and then ‘Enkidu

and Gilgamesh embraced and their friendship was sealed.’4

Their bond of attachment is only strengthened through

the adventures and conquests they undertake together,

such as when they felled the Bull of Heaven and Humbaba,

the guardian of the great cedar forest during their

forest journey.5 They set out on this journey when

Gilgamesh declares with thought about his destiny and

the heritage he may leave behind:

I have not established my name stamped on bricks as my destiny decreed; therefore I will go to the country where the cedar is felled. I will set up my name in the place where the names of the famous men are written, and where no man’s name is written yet I will raise a monument to the gods…Then if I fall I leave behind me a name that endures…6

Gilgamesh experiences and expresses deep emotion

associated with these conquests and receives vivid

visions. Yet it is in Enkidu’s dream that it is revealed

3 Sandars, N.K., (trans) The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin, London 1972, p 624 Ibid p 695 Ibid p 836 Ibid p 70

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that the gods have decided that one of this pair must

die for the conquests they have made; Enkidu is chosen.

In tears Enkidu addresses Gilgamesh:

O my brother, so dear as you are to me, brother, yet they take me from you.I must sit down on the threshold of the dead and never again will I see my dear brother.7

After twelve days of sickness Enkidu dies. The ravages

of separation by death are emphasised, with the

surviving character, Gilgamesh, mourning deeply for his

lost friend. Gilgamesh tells how he wept for seven days

and seven nights before a worm ‘fastened on him’ and he

finally gave him up for burial.8

In the process Gilgamesh senses his own mortality and

ponders the very essence of human nature. He journeys to

escape the terrors of death, and searches to find the

hope of eternal life. He crosses the waters of death,

assisting the ferryman in the process and still

rehearses his grief to all.9 He learns how eternal life

was granted to his forefather for having built a great

boat and surviving the world-flood. Gilgamesh is also

then rewarded for having overcome the water by diving to

obtain the rejuvenating plant named The Old Men Are Young

7 Ibid p 898 Sandars, N.K., (trans) The Epic, p. 96 or as George translates this section, ‘ until a maggot dropped from his nostril’ (Line X 60), George, A., The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated and introduced by Andrew George, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1999.9 Sandars, N.K., (trans) The Epic, pp. 97-107

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Again.10

Yet tragically it was a short lived victory as Gilgamesh

had it stolen from him by a serpent as they stopped to

bathe at a convenient pool on his homeward journey.

Gilgamesh weeps at having lost this hope of new life.11

On returning to his home city, Uruk, he reflects (to the

ferryman) that the city walls that he had rebuilt

himself would be his only memorial.12

These themes could have been written today, as Davies

posits ‘so freshly do its ancient themes touch the

ongoing problems of love, loss, hope and a realistic

acceptance of the way things are.’13

It is indeed a perceptive reflection upon the

contemporary secular way of life in its search for the

elixir (via modern medicine) to avoid the terrors and

hopelessness of death, and the eventual realisation that

the physical memorials one leaves behind may indeed be

one’s only memorial.

While Gilgamesh’s journey brought him home again ‘a

wiser, if lonelier man,’14 with a sense that his life

will be remembered only for the physical buildings he

10 Ibid p .11611 Ibid p. 11712 Ibid13 Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, p. 314 Cf. Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, p. 4

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has contributed to the life of the community, the

Biblical book of Genesis gives an account of the origin

of human death and begins a history of a journeying and

multiplying people who would extend beyond the original

individuals. Death is recorded and explained as an

outcome of disobedience to divine commands committed

first of all by Adam and Eve, who, after having been

told by God not to eat the fruit of the tree of the

knowledge of good and evil,15 do so.16

… in the day that you eat of [the tree of theknowledge of good and evil] you shall die.17

The humans do not die immediately but are sentenced to

impaired relationships and to difficulties in bearing

children and raising crops. The sentence on humankind

concludes: ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall

return.’18

Humankinds’ mortality is confirmed, they are expelled

from the garden where the ‘tree of life’ resides, which

bears the necessary fruit for immortality.19 The

development of this journey from the Garden of Eden is

of a people travelling hopefully and finding meaning in

covenant relationship with their God. The journey of

Noah in obedience to God’s instructions leads to his

(and that of his extensive entourage) survival of the

15 Genesis 2:16-17 NIV16 Genesis 3:1-1917 Genesis 2:1718 Genesis 3:1919 Genesis 3:22

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global flood and has clear parallels with Gilgamesh and

yet is distinct in that the story revolves around an

obedient and fruitful relationship with God.20 In Genesis

chapter 9 God makes a covenant with Noah, instructing

him and his family to ‘be fruitful and increase in

number and fill the earth21… I now establish my covenant

with you and with your descendents after you22… Never

again will all life be cut off by the waters of a

flood.’23

Such meaning is significantly developed in the whole

community journeying hopefully to reach the promised

destination – a homeland, and not in individual

admittance to a heavenly paradise.24 This is perhaps well

illustrated with the developing journey of Abraham

spanning fourteen chapters of the Genesis narrative.25

God’s covenant with Abraham is introduced in Genesis 15:

‘… a son coming from your own body will be your heir.’ ‘Look up at the heavens and count the stars –if indeed you can count them… So shall your offspring be.26

20 Genesis 5-9; cf. Gilgamesh chapter 521 Genesis 9:1,7 22 Genesis 9:923 Genesis 9:1124 The books of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua are rich with this imagery.25 Genesis chapters 11 to 2526 Genesis 15:4-5

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‘I am the LORD, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.27

This covenant was affirmed and expanded upon in Genesis

17 where again Abraham is promised that his legacy will

be offspring who will be numerous.28 The notion that

offspring are important appears to be founded on two

principles. Firstly it will be they, or rather future

generations of offspring who will take possession of

this Promised Land,29 and secondly they will continue the

family name and in so doing will keep in remembrance the

name of the deceased ancestor. This is perhaps best

illustrated in Deuteronomy with the creation of levirate

marriage whereby if a man died and had no children his

brother should marry the widow and provide children to

continue the deceased’s family name.30 The winsome story

of Ruth, where Boaz becomes the destitute woman’s

‘kinsman redeemer’ illustrates this law in action.31 In

Isaiah Yahweh promises Israel that their descendants and

their name shall remain before him:

For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I shall make, shall remain before me, says the LORD; so shall your descendants and your name remain.32

Contrastingly, the fear of not leaving this legacy is

27 Genesis 15:7f28 Genesis 17:1629 Genesis 15:12-2130 Deuteronomy 25:5-631 Ruth 432 Isaiah 66:22

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exemplified in Saul’s rare moment of remorse when he

asks David to swear not to cut off his descendants and

destroy his name.33

These, then, are the significant hopes of the journeying

and multiplying people of the Old Testament. Most often

this journeying motif did not extend beyond life, ideas

of individual life after death are rare and shadowy

throughout most of the Old Testament.34 Where it is

mentioned, the dead are located in Sheol,35 the Hebrew

name for the underworld deep below the earth. Very

occasionally, no more then ten times, are the dead

referred to as ‘shades’, so rare a Hebrew term that it

does not warrant further mention here.36 The Old

Testament gives virtually no description of the fate of

the dead in the underworld.37 Yet better charted is the

fact that like all societies, the Israelites displayed a

variety of attitudes to death and this is worthy of

further exploration.

Death is often portrayed as the natural end of life.

Both Joshua and David know that they will

‘go the way of all the earth’,38 and Job knows that God

‘will bring [him] to death, and to the house appointed 33 1Samuel 24:2234 Cf Johnston, P.S., Shades of Sheol, IVP, Leicester, 2002, p.15-16; Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, p. 6; 35 Examples are to be found in Psalm 6:5; Isaiah 38:18; Job 7:936 Cf Johnston, P.S., Shades, p.15, p. 12837 As Johnston’s seminal research in this area demonstrates, cf Johnston, P.S., Shades, p.1538 Joshua 23:14; 1Kings 2:2

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for all the living’.39 Further, a few texts suggest that

death is the complete end of existence:

For now I shall lie in the earth;You will seek me, but I shall not be; 40

‘Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again,Before I depart and am no more’.41

Death is seen as completing the natural cycle of life,

bringing it to an end:

You are dust, and to dust you shall return;42

You turn us back to dust;43

He remembers that we are dust;44

All are from the dust and all turn to dust again.45

As again Qoheleth, the wise man in Ecclesiastes states

starkly, there is ‘ a time to be born and a time to

die.’46

Perhaps more comforting was the portrayal of death as a

natural and peaceful event when it comes at the end of a

long, happy and fulfilled life;

You [Abraham] shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age.47

39 Job 30:2340 Job 7:2141 Psalm 39:1342 Genesis 3:19; cf. 2:743 Psalm 90:344 Psalm 103:14b45 Ecclesiastes 3:2046 Ecclesiastes 3:247 Genesis 15:15

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Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years…48

[David] died in a good old age, full of days,riches and honour.49

Some texts portray death as a friend, bringing rest,

inactivity, welcome relief, and sleep, this is a common

motif in Job:

Now [if stillborn] I would be lying down and quiet; I would be asleep; then I would be at rest.50

There the wicked cease from troubling,And there the weary are at rest.51

Yet more commonly death is seen as a bitter enemy of

life:

The terrors of death have fallen upon me;52

The cords of death encompassed me;the torrents of perdition assailed me;the cords of Sheol entangled me;the snares of death confronted me53

Why is death this enemy, this great terror? Clearly

death separates the individual from the community

physically, there is generally no evidence of any

communication between the living and the dead54, yet the

question remains as to what happens metaphysically. 48 Genesis 25:849 1 Chronicles 29:2850 Job 3:1351 Job 3:1752 Psalm 55:453 Psalm 18:4-554 Necromancy is referred to several times in the Old Testament, mainly in prohibitional terms (e.g. Leviticus 19:31, Deuteronomy 18:10f.). The exception is the tragic story of Saul consulting the spirit of the dead Samuel through a female medium at Endor, recounted in 1 Samuel 28-30.

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Firstly, there is considerable evidence that death was

seen to cut one off from Yahweh:

For in death there is no remembrance of you;In Sheol who can give praise?55

[I am] like those forsaken among the dead,like the slain that lie in the grave,like those whom you remember no more,for they are cut off from your hand.56

For Sheol cannot thank you, death cannot praise you;those who go down to the Pit cannot hopefor your faithfulness.57

In this the hopefulness of the covenant relationship

with Yahweh is broken and the expectation of inhabiting

the Promised Land is ended.

Secondly, as Johnston concludes, there is not ‘any sense

of meaningful interaction, let alone of happy reunion,

among the dead’.58 Therefore death is seen as the great

and final terminus, all the relationships valued in life

end with death.

55 Psalm 6:556 Psalm 88:5; cf. 10-1257 Isaiah 38:1858 Johnston, P.S., Shades, p.33 cf. Ezekiel 32:22-30 where Ezekiel pictures the dead lying inactive in a vast underground cavern. It should also be noted that the terms ‘gathered to his people’ and ‘slept with his fathers’ do not seem to imply any ongoing ancestral reunion but generally is applied to leaders who died peacefully, as opposed to the term ‘he died’ being applied to those who met a violent end. Cf. Johnston, P.S., p.33-35

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In summary, the ancient Hebrews, like all societies,

held a variety of complex attitudes about death. In

general they accepted it as the natural end of human

life when it came peacefully and at the end of a long

life. When death came prematurely and especially

violently, it was seen as a bitter enemy. More

occasionally it could be embraced (as in the case of

Job) as a welcome friend releasing the person from

enduring ongoing suffering. In any case it was the end

to life, no further communion was to be had either with

Yahweh – the Lord of life, or the community of which

they had formerly been part.

Yet whilst this represents the dominant view held by the

Hebrews in their journey of life and faith with respect

to death, there are a couple of references in the Old

Testament that point to some belief in resurrection. The

first comes towards the end of the ‘Song of Moses’, a

hymn of praise to Yahweh, where his power to renew life

is cited as yet further evidence of his

incomparability.59 The second occurs in the ‘Song of

Hannah’, following the birth of Samuel, where Yahweh’s

power to raise from Sheol is another sign of his

reversing the polarities of life60 and is a statement of

absolute confidence in Israel’s god as all-powerful61:

Yahweh kills and brings to life; He brings down to Sheol

59 Deut 32:3960 such as the mighty-feeble, full-hungry, barren-fertile, poor-rich61 As seen in 1 Samuel 2

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and raises up.62

Affirming Yahweh’s greatness and the extent of his power

is a common theme in the Old Testament. Yet references

to resurrection even in this context are rare. There are

no instances recorded in the immediate context of Yahweh

actually raising individuals to life. So in their

historiographical contexts, the songs proclaim something

beyond personal Israelite experience.

So it appears here that potentiality is affirmed rather

than an actuality which has been witnessed.63

The only other references to resurrection in the Old

Testament come in the apocalyptic (or at least proto-

apocalyptic) literature of Isaiah 26 and Daniel 12. In

Isaiah, amongst the characteristically bright

kaleidoscope of vivid images, there are glimpses of

triumph over death:

Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise.O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!For your dew is a radiant dew,and the earth will give birth to those long dead.64

The context is one of national revival and restoration

and as Clements affirms, the imagery of resurrection is 62 1 Samuel 2:663 A view also held by Johnston, P.S., Shades, p.21964 Isaiah 26:19 NRSV

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also best applied to the nation.65 Yet finally one text

speaks unmistakably of and unambiguously of personal

resurrection:

At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise. There shall be a time of anguish, such as has neveroccurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shallbe delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever. But you, Daniel, keep the words secret and the book sealed until the time of the end. Many shall be running back and forth, and evil shall increase.66

Whilst the resurrection theme is clear here, it is

unexplored in the rest of the book,67 as with Isaiah.

Furthermore successive prophets, psalmists, sages and

historians of the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries

ignored it, as Johnston observes:

To them the concept of resurrection was unknown or incomprehensible, and their works maintain the traditional Israelite view of the unwelcome underworld.68

65 Clements, R. E., Isaiah 1-39, New Century Bible, Marshall, Morgan & Scott, London, 1980, p.21666 Daniel 12:1-467 Many scholars link the book of Daniel to the time of the Maccabean revolt, as it appears to reflect and comment on that era. E.g. Drane, J., Introducing the Old Testament, Lion, Tring, 198768 Johnston, P.S., Shades, p.227

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Thus resurrection remained marginal to Old Testament

belief and Israelite death practices.

It was during the Inter Testamental Period, from the

second century BCE that some Jews began to develop the

idea of resurrection of the dead. It is frequently cited

in 2 Maccabees as a spur to faith, by the martyred

family of seven brothers and their mother.69

The fourth brother’s spirited speech to his accusers70

illustrates this point:

…they maltreated and tortured the fourth in the same way. When he was near death, he said, ‘One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!’71

We read here an understanding that resurrection would be

an act of vindication of the righteous and held a

parallel with the notion of atonement – the belief that

suffering could counteract the effect of sin and restore

broken relations with God. This is developed later in

the same book:

He also took up a collection, man by man, to the amount of two thousand drachmas of silver, and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin-offering. In doing this he acted very well and honourably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous

69 2 Maccabees 7:9, 11, 14, 23, 29 (NRSV)70 The Maccabeans were resisting Antiochus IV during the revolt of 167-164 BCE.71 2 Maccabees 7:13-14

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and foolish to pray for the dead. But if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore he made atonement for the dead, so that they might be delivered from their sin.72

By New Testament times, belief in resurrection had

become common among Pharisees and many other Jews.73

Resurrection was envisaged as God’s restoration of

Israel in the present transformed and recreated world.

However, the Sadducees74 could not bring themselves to

accept that the resurrection of the dead was an

authentic part of the Hebrew faith.75 This was ostensibly

because the resurrection of the dead is not mentioned in

the Torah, alone authoritative for them, and it may have

been that they considered resurrection of the dead as a

new idea brought in from Persia after the Old Testament

period. The Sadducees insisted on the authority of

Scripture alone and rejecting oral tradition; the Torah

stressed that correct worship in the Temple would

produce material prosperity and they sought to realise

that promise. Any other agenda, they considered, would

jeopardise their position by encouraging insurrection

and martyrdom. 76

72 2 Maccabees 12:43-4573 Cf. Acts 23:874 It is acknowledged that we know little of this group beyond the pages of the New Testament75 Cf. Mark 12:8; Acts 23:8; and Josephus, Antiquities xviii.16.76 There is well documented evidence of belief in resurrection beingcommon to other Ancient Near Eastern cultures at that time. E.g. Johnston, P.S., Shades, p.230-236

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It is into this context that the New Testament begins

the narrative of life, death and resurrection of Jesus

Christ. In the face of challenges by the Sadducees,

Jesus aligns himself firmly with those who do hold to a

resurrection hope.77 In studying the early Christian

church we find not just a general faith in some future

life, but a very specific and precise faith about Jesus

and his resurrection and about the future life which God

had promised to all his people. This is founded upon a

‘very specific worldview which was generated by the

events concerning Jesus, and supremely the events of

Easter itself.’78

With the incarnation – the embodiment of ‘God with us’

in Jesus Christ, came the understanding that his life

was a saving passion, his death an atoning act for all

peoples bringing into sharp focus a fulfilment of the

divine covenant, and his resurrection brought the sure

and certain hope that individual believers would

experience this resurrection for themselves in the last

days.79 In these pages Jesus Christ was interpreted as

the new Adam, the one who was obedient to God’s divine

will and purposes,80 as opposed to the first Adam who

77cf. Matthew 22:23-33; Mark 12:18-27; Luke 20:27-40.78 Wright, N.T., Surprised by Hope, SPCK, London, 2007, p.9179 Romans 5:12ff; Romans 8; 1 Corinthians 15; Galatians 3; Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, pp. 7-8; Wright, N.T., Surprised by Hope, p.160ff80Romans 5:12ff; Romans 8; Galatians 3; Cf. Hooker, M.D., From Adam to Christ, CUP, Cambridge, 1990; Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, p. 6

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demonstrated humankind’s disobedience to the divine

will, already mentioned above.81 Whilst the actions of

the first Adam brought death to humankind, the second

Adam brought the hope of life to humanity, even in the

face of death. In other words the Christian hope in the

face of death is firmly based upon the death and

resurrection of Jesus Christ. Writing about the unique

place of the death of Jesus Christ in influencing

millions of people, motivating ethical life and

underpinning traditional Christian cultures, Davies

suggests that ‘paradoxically, it is not only a model of

and for death but also of and for life, and it lies

central to the ritual and belief of Christianity.’82

This worldview was rooted in their very Jewish belief in

God as the Creator and Redeemer. The Jewish festivals of

Passover and Pentecost were both agricultural and

salvation-historical festivals, at least in their

developed forms. Passover was the time when the first

crop of barley was presented before the Lord and of

course commemorating Israel coming out of Egypt.83

Pentecost, seven weeks later,84 was the time when the

first fruits of the wheat harvest were presented and

commemorated the arrival at Sinai and the giving of the

81 Cf. Genesis 382 Davies, D.J., Death, Ritual and Belief, p. 12583 Numbers 28:10-23; Leviticus 23:9-14; - the feast of Unleavened Bread and the Passover occur at the same time and became closely associated as they both celebrated the escape from Egypt (Exodus 12 – 15)84 Or 50 days

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Torah.85 The two strands were woven together, since part

of God’s promise in liberating Israel and giving it the

law was that Israel would inherit the land and that the

land would be fruitful.

In 1 Corinthians 15:20 & 23 Paul uses the image of the

‘first fruits’ and applies it to Jesus: He is the first

fruits, the first to rise from the dead but this is not

to be an isolated event; the point of the first fruits

is that there will be many more. Jesus’ Passover is

Calvary and Easter, which of course occurred at Passover

time and has been interpreted in the light of that

festival from very early on. 86 The great slave master

(Egypt) of sin and death had been defeated when Jesus

came through the Red Sea of death and out the other side

into new life. Paul goes on, later in the chapter,87 to

expound the nature of the Christian resurrection body on

the basis of the new body of Jesus.88

Therefore, because they had seen this belief in God as

the Creator and Redeemer confirmed in the totally

unexpected event of Jesus’ resurrection, this caused

them to look forward eagerly to the fulfilment of the

promise that what God had done for Jesus on the first

Easter Day, he would do for each one who is in Christ,

85 Numbers 28:26-31 (or Feast of Weeks). (cf Joshua 21:43-48)86 See Drane, J., Introducing the New Testament, Lion, Tring, 1986, p.85; e.g. in 1 Corinthians 5:7 Paul speaks of ‘Christ our Passover lamb’.87 1 Corinthians 15: 35ff88 I shall return to this subject in chapter 5

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each one indwelt by the Spirit of Christ. Indeed as

Wright is at pains to point out, he was to do for the

whole cosmos.89 In Romans 8:18-25 the Apostle Paul again

uses the imagery of the Exodus from Egypt but this time

in relation to the whole of creation. Whilst creation is

in slavery to transience through decay and death,90 the

day will come when God’s children will be glorified,

when what happened at Easter to Jesus Christ would

happen to all Jesus’ people leading them to their true

identity, and their resurrection will herald new life

for all creation.91 The metaphor of childbirth is used.

This gives a strong suggestion of continuity and

discontinuity: the discontinuity of mother and child

separated but the continuity of the birth of a new

creation out of the womb of the old.

Still the question remains for many both within and

without the church: what form will this resurrection

life take?

This afterlife was interpreted by much of the church,

for much of its history, as being in a heavenly domain,

the Easter hope being the journey through life to the

terminus of the heavenly city,92 with fewer consciously

understanding the eternal future as involving a restored89 Wright, N.T., Surprised by Hope, p.10490 Romans 8:2191 Romans 8:18-2592 Well illustrated by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: Bunyan, J., The Pilgrim’sProgress (in Modern English), Bridge-Logos, Florida, 1998 (original 1678)

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earth and a second Eden, some of which is to be

experienced, or brought into being, however partially,

in this life.93 Very few modern scholars would maintain

this rather Platonic view, and one recent polemic

against it is Wright’s Surprised by Hope,94 which is

something of a condensed version of his more seminal The

Resurrection of the Son of God.95

For Wright, the New Testament, regarded as the primary

doctrinal source by most churches, is crystal clear.

Paul speaks of ‘the redemption of our bodies.’96 In other

words, God’s people are promised a new type of bodily

existence, the fulfilment and redemption of our present

bodily life. Drawing upon 1 Corinthians 15:35ff & 2

Corinthians 4 & 5, this future body is one ‘put on over’

our existing bodies, which are presently subject to

decay and death; the new bodies shall be glorious and

vivid compared to the shadow we now know. They will no

longer be ‘powered’ by the life force we now have,

psychikos, but by God’s pneumos, God’s breath of new life.

The new and eternal life that God gives in that

resurrection is an embodied and a transformed life; the

resurrection body is soma pneumatikon, a ‘body animated by

the Spirit’.97

93 A view alluded to in Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, p. 694 Wright, N.T., Surprised by Hope, SPCK, London, 2007, and a subject to which I shall return in chapter 595 Wright, N.T., The Resurrection of the Son of God, SPCK, London, 200396 In Romans 8:23 This is explored further in Wright, N.T., The Resurrection, p207ff97 1 Cor.15:44

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If that is to be the case at the time of the Parousia, the

Last Day or the coming again of Jesus, what then is the

fate of those who have died before that time? Within the

New Testament there is evidence for two possible

scenarios, subject to scholarly interpretation. First is

the immediate sharing at death of the new life with

Christ (of heaven), and the second is that those who die

‘in Christ’ sleep, or rather enter an intermediate state

until that Last Day, awaiting the fulfilment of

resurrection at the end of this age. Wright posits that

bodily resurrection will happen upon Christ’s second

coming, when he completes his act of new creation. For

him, the Apostle Paul speaks of an intermediate state, a

place where the faithful departed rest from this life

before the resurrection life that commences upon

Christ’s return.98 This is not a view universally held,

as we shall see. For instance Beasley-Murray finds no

evidence to suggest that there is any intermediate

state, rather that resurrection occurs immediately upon

death.99

We therefore need to look more closely at a sample of

the New Testament texts that speak of the promise of

imminent ‘paradise’, of treasure being stored up in

98 Wright, N.T., Surprised by Hope, p.160-169 for his argument on the precise meaning and progression of this new bodily life.99 Beasley-Murray, P., The Message of the Resurrection, IVP, Leicester, 2000, p153

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heaven for us and of our citizenship being in heaven.100

Perhaps the most famous words of hope in the face of

death are given by Jesus to a ‘sinner’ on the cross next

to his: ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’.101

Firstly we need to note that ‘Paradise’ is a Persian

word meaning ‘garden’ and is used in the Old Testament

of a number of gardens.102 Its most important use is for

the Garden of Eden. It came to be used for the home of

the righteous.103 In using the word here Jesus alludes to

two important developments. Firstly this unrighteous man

will be welcomed to live henceforth among the righteous,

and secondly that a work of cosmic re-creation would

mean the Garden of Eden, from which humankind had been

expelled, was being restored. The dwelling of men and

women would once more be with God.104 For Wright the

understanding of immediacy which one may easily read

from the word ‘today’ at the beginning of Jesus’

pronouncement has long been misread.105 He argues that

Luke’s overall theological understanding leaves no room

for doubt that there would still have to be a future

completion involving ultimate resurrection, after all,

this was Good Friday and Jesus would not rise again

until Easter Sunday, so ‘today’ must hold another 100 E.g. such as found in Luke, John and 1Peter 1 and Philippians 3101 Luke 23:43102 Morris, L., Luke Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, IVP, Leicester, 1988, p.359103 Tidball, D., The Message of the Cross, IVP, Leicester, 2001, p. 162104 2 Corinthians 12:3; Revelation 2:7; 21:1-5; 22:1-5 cf. Tidball, Cross, p. 162 and Morris, Luke, p. 359105 Wright, N.T., Surprised by Hope, p.162

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meaning prior to the resurrection.106

With Jesus the future hope has come forwards to the present. For those who die in faith, before the final reawakening, the central promise is being ‘with Jesus’ at once.107

Wright argues that this text need not point to our final

retirement there, but to it as a blissful garden of rest

and tranquillity, where the dead are refreshed as they

await the dawn of the new day. In a two-stage post-mortem

future, Paradise is the resting place prior to bodily

resurrection.108

Similarly, Wright interprets the heaven of 1 Peter 1:3b-

4, as being a way of speaking of God holding our

inheritance until he brings them to us in the new life

in the new heaven and the new earth.109

… we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ fromthe dead and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.110

He is categorical that this heaven is not where you go

to enjoy your inheritance. He uses the analogy of a

friend keeping some beer in a fridge for you and that

this does not mean that you have to get into the fridge

to enjoy it!111 Few commentators address this point 106 Ibid p.163107 Ibid108 Ibid109 Ibid p.164110 1 Peter 1:3b-4 111 Wright, N.T., Surprised by Hope, p.164

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directly here.

Yet perhaps the text that has given rise to major

differences in interpretation, either supporting

Wright’s view or dismissing it, is found in 2

Corinthians 5. Here, Paul uses a metaphor from his part-

time occupation as a tentmaker. He likens this current

life to a vast transit camp of impermanent tents.

However:

… we know that if the earthly tent we live inis destroyed, we have a building from God, aneternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.112

This building is not defined. According to Beasley-

Murray the most natural interpretation is to see the

house as representing the new resurrection body.113

Another possibility is to view the house as a home (even

a heavenly temple) where there is room for many. Whilst

this would harmonise with the teaching of Jesus in John

14:1-3114 it is a less likely interpretation.115 Wright

would concur with Beasley-Murray in this,116 however, it

is not the main point of contention. That relates to the

question of whether or not Paul implies there is an

intermediate state between death and final resurrection,

when Christ returns and finishes his work of re-

creation. The traditional view is that Paul wishes to 112 2 Corinthians 5:1113 Beasley-Murray, P., Resurrection, p152114 Also with Mark 14:58 and John 2:19115 Beasley-Murray, P., Resurrection, , p152116 Wright, N.T., Surprised by Hope, p.165

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avoid having to experience some kind of ‘disembodied’

intermediate state between his death and resurrection at

the coming of the Lord (thus implying that there is such

a state). Paul would much prefer to still be alive when

the Lord returns thus avoiding being ‘naked’ in this

disembodied state, which is abhorrent to any good Jew.

Instead he longs to put on God’s new heavenly dwelling.117

The second view dismisses this, stating that Paul had no

thought of an ‘intermediate state’, rather he simply

longed to be clothed with the new spiritual body118 and

was repudiating the view of some Corinthians who longed

for a ‘disembodied’ existence, denying future

resurrection.119 This is clearly Beasley-Murray’s

preferred option. Whilst Wright firmly protests that we

must think of resurrection as being bodily resurrection,

rather than Platonic disembodiment, he maintains that

there must be an intermediate resting place (the

heavenly garden) for those who are waiting for bodily

resurrection at the second coming of the Lord.120 His view

is not without merit. Whatever conclusion one may come

to, the fact remains that the central teaching of the

Christian faith is of certain hope of life beyond the

grave.

Beyond the Biblical texts, numerous authors have

explored the centrality of Christ’s death as a means of 117 2 Corinthians 5:4; Beasley-Murray, P., Resurrection, p153118 Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:44119 Beasley-Murray, P., Resurrection, p153120 Wright, N.T., Surprised by Hope, p.183 – 187

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understanding both the human predicament and human

destiny. Important and representative historical

examples would include Augustine’s City of God,121 Anselm’s

Cur Deus Homo?122 to James Denney’s influential book The

Death of Christ123 and to John Bowker’s theological account

of death and transcendence.124

More widely recognised is the symbol of the Crucifix, a

cross holding a dying or dead body of Jesus, or the

empty cross – symbolising Christ’s victory over death.

The central act of the Christian community – the

Eucharist or celebration of the Lord’s Supper – is the

place where the death and resurrection of Jesus are

regularly remembered and rehearsed through the symbolic

representation of crucified Christ’s broken body and

shed blood in the elements of the bread and wine, ‘ the

deep fact of death and the high hope of resurrection… is

integrally related to the consumption of sacramental

food’.125

Still further, baptism by immersion provides symbolic

confirmation that those who ‘die with Christ’ by

descending into the waters of baptism (a watery grave

where the old nature dies and is buried) and ‘rise to

new life in Christ’ as they ascend from the water, will 121 Trans Henry Bettenson, Penguin Classics, Harmonsworth, 2003122 Trans E.S. Prout, Religious Tract Society, London (no date) (Section xv)123 Denny, J., The Death of Christ, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1902124 Bowker, John, The Meaning of Death, CUP, Cambridge, 1991.125 Davies, D.J., Death, Ritual and Belief, p126

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similarly rise from death with Christ at the end of this

mortal life. 126

All this has contributed to Christianity having become,

from its earliest days, a religion with a strong concern

for death and ultimate human destiny as a transcendence

of death. Hope and meaning are conveyed for the

faithful, be they alive or departed this life.

Christianity links death to the world of mortality

through its idea of sin, especially in the Apostle

Paul’s doctrine of the Fall of Humanity. This speaks of

sin entering into God’s perfect world through human

disobedience (from the first Adam grasping after

equality with God) and of death emerging as a

consequence of sin. Jesus becomes the second Adam whose

obedient life and willing death brings restoration of

spiritual life to men and women as the sting of death is

drawn through Christ’s resurrection.127

In terms of practical symbolism, as we have seen, death

and decay are viewed as the outcome of disobedience and

sin. This is the origin of the phrase ‘earth to earth,

dust to dust’, for the book of Genesis describes God

126 This is commonly understood within my own tradition, for a more comprehensive exposition of baptism in this tradition see the seminal work G. R., Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1973; It is also acknowledged that other traditions also prefer Baptism by immersion.127 Romans 5:12-17; Philippians 2. It must also be noted that there is continuing and wide ranging debate about the exact meanings of these metaphors with which I do not have the remit or the space to engage further in this thesis.

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informing Adam that his disobedience means that,

henceforth, only hard work will earn bread from the very

soil, for, ‘out of it you were taken; you are dust, and

to dust you shall return.’128

The dominant theme in Christian interpretation of the

death of Jesus is atonement – the belief that this death

restored a disrupted relationship between God and

humanity. There are different theories of atonement

which will not be rehearsed again here;129 suffice it to

say that Christ’s death is a polysemic symbol – bearing

different meanings. But as far as death itself is

concerned, the significance of the traditional account

of the death of Jesus lies in the paradoxical belief

that his body did not return to dust through decay, but

was, divinely, transformed into a resurrection body. The

link between sin and death was broken and a new bond

forged between Jesus’ resurrection and the future

128 Genesis 3:19129 Again I do not have the space in this thesis to do justice to theconsiderable debate on atonement theories. A helpful guide to the contemporary debates surrounding atonement theories is Graham A. Cole’s God the Peacemaker, NSBT 25, IVP, Leicester, 2009, which touches on subjects such as the debate about the centrality of penalsubstitution; the debate about the morality of penal substitution; he considers whether moral influence and exemplarist theories are atonement theories; he further considers whether there is healing inthe atonement, looks at the Holy Saturday debate and briefly surveysnon-violent atonement theories. Cf. Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey, & Andrew Sach, Pierced for our Transgressions: Rediscovering the glory of penal substitution, IVP, Leicester, 2007; Derek Tidball, David Hilborn, and Justin Thacker (eds.) The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement, (London School of Theology),Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 2008, includes contributions from Steve Chalke, Chris Wright, I. Howard Marshall and Joel Green; Chalke, S.,& Mann, A., The Lost Message of Jesus, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 2003.

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resurrection of believers.

Some historical developments post-Biblical times

As the Christian faith spread into the Hellenistic and

Roman world, into a very different context to its Jewish

Semitic roots, it spread into a world which often

believed strongly in the immortality of the soul.130 Greek

mythology, like Egyptian mythology, had been fascinated

by the journey of the soul into the mysterious realm

beyond the grave. In Greek mythology the ferryman,

Charon, conveyed the soul of the departed across the Styx,

the dark river of the underworld.131 Early Christian

funeral liturgy appears to have adapted this journey

theme, such as the anthem In Paradisum which prays that

the angels may lead the departed to paradise.132 Again the

Greek custom of placing a coin in the mouth of the

corpse to pay the fee to Charon for the crossing was

adapted by placing the Sacrament (the Viaticum or food for

130 Rowell, G., ‘Changing patterns: Christian beliefs about death andthe future life’, in Jupp, P.C. and Rogers, T., (eds.) Interpreting Death, Cassell, London, 1997, p. 18; Tom Wright in Surprised by Hope SPCK, London, 2007 (NB. p.39) has recently renewed the challenge onthe view of the Christian ‘soul’ and its immortality as being too much a construct of Greco-Roman thought, Platonic in origin, rather than originating in Christian Scripture. Again Joel Green and NanceyMurphy have sought to discredit the Platonic thought of an Immortal Soul, by reference to both theological understanding and neural-scientific developments in understanding of how the body and mind function: cf Murphy, Nancey, Bodies, Souls or Spirited Bodies, CUP, Cambridge, 2006 and Green, Joel, Body, Soul and Human Life, Paternoster Press, Carlisle, 2008 131 Rowell, G., The Liturgy of Christian Burial, SPCK, London, 1977, p.14132 Rowell, G., The Liturgy of Christian Burial, p.116-17, 61

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the journey) into the mouth of the faithful departed.133

As Rowell states:

Yet, in accordance with Jewish practice, and Christian reverence for the body, Christians buried their dead. Cremation was associated with Roman pagan practice.134

The defence of burial by the Church is understandable in

terms of the traditional imagery it demonstrates. With

burial the image is of seeds placed in the ground, they

appear to die but are resurrected into new life. There

is continuity between what has been buried, for instance

an acorn, and the new life which it is brought into

fulfilment in the oak tree which emerges. Yet at the

same time there is a transformation; the oak does not

look like the acorn.

The analogy is with the body sown in death and raised in

new life as the soma pneumatikon. This idea that from the

earth God may bring new life from a body ‘planted’ in

death is not solely Greek but to be found in Inter-

testamental literature.135

However helpful this symbolism is, it does lead us to

insist that burial is the only legitimate means of

Christian disposal of bodily remains. Davies argues for

a theology of disposal that incorporates many forms

including cremation as being consistent with Christian 133 Cf. Rowell, G., ‘Changing patterns’, p. 19134 Rowell, G., ‘Changing patterns’, p. 19135 E.g. Sirach 17:1

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belief in the resurrection.136 Yet as we shall soon note,

this is a relatively late development in practise.

There are other cross-cultural influences that have

influenced some Christian funeral liturgies. For

instance elements of classical mythology became

intertwined with the funeral liturgy over time. An

example of this is the Roman practice of including

funeral feasts held on anniversary dates at the

graveside which was replaced by the Church establishing

the practice of celebrating a Eucharist at the burial

place of the martyrs. This, again, in time, developed

into the Requiem Mass which commended the soul to God

and prayed for forgiveness of sins and deliverance from

judgement. A theology was elaborated which spoke of a

‘particular judgement’ of each individual after death,

which was uneasily related to the Last Judgement at the

end of time, drawing on the parable of the sheep and the

goats137.

It was during the thousand years of the Middle Ages that

Western Christianity elaborated a conception of the

world into which souls passed beyond death. The ultimate

reference points were the poles of heaven and hell.

Heaven was the place of union and communion with God

open to the righteous in Christ. Hell was the place of

136Davies, D.J., Cremation Today and Tomorrow, Alcuin/GROW Books, Nottingham, 1990 & Davies, D.J., Theologies of Disposal, in Jupp, P.C. and Rogers, T., (eds.) Interpreting Death, Cassell, London, 1997, Chapter 6137 Matthew 25:31-46

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everlasting torment and condemnation where the damned

suffered the twin pains of poena damni (the pain of the

loss of God) and poena sensus (the pains of the

punishment).138 Yet some believed that between these two

destinations was an intermediate category where:

Most of those who believed in the existence of an intermediate category held that the dead awaiting admission to heaven would have to undergo some kind of purgation.139

This appeared to be based on the apostle Paul’s

reference in 1 Corinthians 3:13-15 that at the Last Day

every person’s work would be tested by fire and that the

one who is saved ‘will be as one who has gone through

fire’, and from this the place or time of purgation was

thought of as a purifying fire.

Between the fourth and eleventh centuries the Christian

custom of commending the dead became focused on this

intermediate stage. From the twelfth century onwards

there was considerable growth both in the descriptions

of purgatory and the associated practices of the

multiplication of masses for the dead, and also the

increasing role of the Church authorities in the

regulation of the system of penance beyond death in the

practice of indulgences, granting remission of time in

purgatory in return for devotional exercises, including

giving to the Church, or going on pilgrimage or

138 Rowell, G., ‘Changing patterns’, p. 20139LeGoff, J., The Birth of Purgatory, Scholar, London, 1984, p.133

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crusades. In Dante’s Divine Comedy the medieval geography

of life after death is elaborated in the poet’s journey

through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise and the Vision of

God. Although in many respects Purgatory and Hell

resemble each other, Purgatory for Dante is entered by a

narrow gate, unlike the broad gate of hell, and strains

towards paradise.140 Le Goff notes that as early as the

thirteenth century:

Purgatory dramatised the end of earthly existence and charged it with an intensity compounded of mingled fear and hope. The essential choice between heaven and hell could still be played out at the last moment,since Purgatory was the ante-chamber of Paradise. The last instants of life became man’s last chance.141

Yet by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,

purgatory was often viewed as an out-patient department of hell

requiring prayers to be said by the next of kin each

week for their departed relatives in purgatory. This

cult of the dead meant that:140 Dante Alighieri, Trans: Rev. H.F. Cary's (1772 - 1844) http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/dante.htmIn summary: Written by Dante Alighieri in 1306 - 21. It is divided into 3 sections: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). Dante, the Pilgrim is the main character in the Comedia. Dante Pilgrim has not been a good boy. His dead love Beatrice asks the Virgin Mary to help him see the error of his ways.Mary accepts and Dante is sent on a three-day trip through Hell, andon up Mount Purgatory on the other side of the world, and finally toParadise in the sky. He is spiritually lost at the beginning of the story, so he needs guides to help him along the path. His first guide, through Hell and Purgatory is Virgil. They encounter many interesting sinners on the way. Dante learns to hate sin. His secondguide is Beatrice, the woman he adored while she lived. His final guide is Saint Bernard, who takes him to see God.141LeGoff, J., The Birth of Purgatory, Scholar, London, 1984, p.358

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Funerals in late medieval England ... were intensely concerned with the notion of community, a community in which the living and the dead were not separated, in which bonds of affection, duty, and blood continuedto bind. The means of this transaction between the living and the dead was charity, maintained and expressed in prayer. The dead,whose names were recited week by week in the bede-roll at the parish Mass remained part ofthe communities they had once lived in, and the objects they left for use in the worship of the community preserved their names and evoked gratitude of the living towards them.142

The theology of the Reformation attacked the notion of

purgatory as having no grounding in scripture and as

appealing to a theology of salvation earned by good

works, not faith in Christ. Prayer for the dead was seen

as inextricably linked to the belief in purgatory and

although it survived in the English Prayer Book of 1549,

it had no place in the more Protestant book of 1552.

Attachment to the old Prayer Book rites which marked the

end, as well as the beginning, of an earthly life is

easily discerned in the record of the Church courts,

helpfully outlined and illustrated by Maltby in Prayer

Book and People.143 The intensity of feeling revealed by

these cases invites further reflection on the impact of

the Reformation on attitudes to death and disposal.

Maltby posits:

142LeGoff, J., Ibid, p.474-5143Maltby, J., Prayer Book and People, CUP, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 56-59

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… by destroying the vast and resonant symbolic structures that accompanied dying and surrounded the departed, the Reformers broke the bond the living felt for the dead. The rejection of purgatory continued this process at an intellectual level. Ritually and theologically the living were cut adrift from the dead.144

Duffy comments perceptively on the ‘culture’ of medieval

death and its destruction. For him the greatest moment

of discontinuity with the past in the Prayer Book rite

lay not in its use of the vernacular or the forsaking of

many popular rituals but in the abandoning of any direct

form of speech to the deceased in the liturgy. The 1552

Prayer Book burial service:

was no longer a rite of intercession on behalf of the dead, but an exhortation to faith on the part of the living.145

At the committal the minister turns away from the corpse

to the congregation to address the mourners at the point

where in the past he would have addressed the corpse.

The person is spoken not to, but about, as one no longer here, but precisely as departed: the boundaries of human community have been redrawn.146

All the Reformation orders for burial of the dead were a

severe simplification of the elaborate medieval funeral

ceremonies with the Eucharist no longer to be practised 144Ibid p.59145Duffy, E., The Striping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1992, p475146Ibid

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at funeral services. The Directory of 1644, which largely

reproduces a book of discipline compiled by the English

Puritan divine, Walter Travers, in 1586, states:

When any person departeth this life, let the dead body, upon the day of burial, be decently attended from the house to the placeappointed for public burial, and there immediately interred without any ceremony.And because the custom of kneeling down, and praying by or towards the dead corpse, and other such usages, in the place where it lies, before it be carried to burial, are superstitious; and for that praying, reading,and singing, both in going to and at the grave, have been grossly abused, are no way beneficial to the dead, and have proved [in] many ways hurtful to the living; therefore, let all such things be laid aside. Howbeit, we judge it very convenient, that the Christian friends which accompany the dead body ... do apply themselves to meditations and conferences suitable to the occasion: andthat the minister ... if he be present, may put them in remembrance of their duty.147

The Reformation, then, has deeply affected the English

liturgy of the funeral as it saw the abolition of prayer

for the dead, requiem masses and belief in purgatory. In

so doing it moved the centre of the funeral service

liturgy from a focus on the departed to an exhortation

of the living. This created, it is argued, a certain

discontinuity in community between living and dead.

147Directory for Public Worship, cited in Cressy, D., & Ferrell, L.A., Religion and Society in Early Modern England: a sourcebook, Routledge, London, 1996, pp. 191-192; and Rowell, G., The Liturgy of Christian Burial, SPCK, London, 1977, p.83

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Nevertheless, Beaver gives example of seventeenth

century funerals where attendances appear to be high,148

and whilst purgatory may have slipped out of the mind of

the collective culture, the dead had not done so

entirely. Towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth I,

Richard Hooker observed:

The end of funeral duties is first to show that love toward the party deceased which nature requireth; then to do him that honour which is fit both generally for man and particularly for the quality of his person; last of all to testify the care which the Church hath to comfort the living and the hope which we all have concerning the resurrection of the dead.149

Whilst this view may not have been held theologically by

all, it may be an articulate expression of a widely held

belief then, as indeed now. Yet before we see this as

the theology and paradigm for funeral rites today, we

must note that during the late nineteenth century and

certainly during the twentieth century we have seen the

re-emergence of both prayers for the dead and requiem

masses150. This revival was founded out of a concern to

meet the needs of the bereaved during the slaughter of

the First World War, and was championed by William

Temple in a sermon in Westminster Abbey on All Saints’

Day 1919:148Beaver, D., ‘Sown in Dishonour Raised in Glory: Death, Ritual and Social Organization in Northern Gloucestershire, 1590-1690’, Social History, 17, 3 (1992) pp. 401-404149Cited in Maltby, J., Prayer Book and People, CUP, Cambridge, 1998, p. 61150 Rowell, G., ‘Changing patterns’, p. 26

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Let us pray for those who we know and love and have passed on to the other life… But do not be content to pray for them. Let us also ask them to pray for us.151

Yet, however this resurrection life was interpreted,

this narrative of destiny, of death, atonement and

resurrection, transformed death into a moment of

glorious hope with a litany of meaning. It was because

of this that many could endure martyrdom. Such

transcending journeys provide a powerful experience of

passing from one level of understanding to another, when

ordinary life is given the opportunity to embrace

mystery, awe and wonder, which enables people to see and

experience the extraordinariness of life and death and

to embrace the latent sense of adventure in the human

spirit. This is, foundationally, what hope is, ‘an

attitude towards the future which anticipates greater

knowledge and a wider explanatory vision.’152

In other words hope helps us to find meaning in

situations beyond our previous experience and

understanding. Faith and hope stand closely together,

they promote optimism and create a fertile environment

for human fortitude and endeavour. Whilst death brings

perhaps the greatest challenges to human significance

and dignity, hope fuels the process of finding meaning

even in the face of this final enemy: ‘Hope counters 151 Cited in Wilkinson A., The Church of England and the First World War SPCK, London, 1996 (reprint, 1978 original)152 Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, p. 11

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despair, that sense of impossibility that fosters

inactivity… allowing all that is feared, to triumph.’153

How death is faced is especially important in this

context. Death is one of the prime moments in life. When

individuals, and exceptionally communities, are prone to

a sense of loss of purpose, worthlessness and

hopelessness, it is precisely in these circumstances

that less-stricken members of community bring their

sense of hope to bear upon the hopeless. It is through

the funeral ritual that people tell their stories of the

meaning of life and enact that overcoming in ritual

form. Here it is that the agreed-upon social conventions

of how to deal with the dead and the bereaved come into

play. The perceived reality of the universe is brought

into focus within which death is only a part of the

greater whole. Thus how we deal with death is materially

affected by the world view held.

Modern Narratives on Death

We now seek to bring this historical context from

ancient foundations and developing understanding to a

time closer to today. There have been varied

contributions made by particular academic disciplines to

the study of death.

Historical approaches trace changing attitudes towards 153 Ibid p. 12

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death. Philippe Aries is one of the academics best known

for his analysis of death in European societies. Aries

charts the history of perception about death in Europe,

starting with a pre-twelfth century view that death was

‘tame’ – that is something inevitable and natural; part

of life’s rhythm. Following this came a long period of a

more individual focus on death, until in the eighteenth

century people became increasingly interested in the

death of others. Yet in the twentieth century death

became something ‘unnameable’.154 Aries’ ‘broad-brush’

survey, invaluable as it is, always needs to be

complemented by more detailed analysis of particular

countries.

John Wolffe provided this for patterns of grieving in

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Great

Britain.155 He showed how the deaths and funerals of

famous public figures affected the nation and helped

frame the experience of ordinary people in their own

domestic grief. For example, he paralleled the funeral

of Gladstone with that of Diana, Princess of Wales,

highlighting not only the public outpouring of grief at

their particular funerals but also the patterns

subsequently adopted domestically mirroring elements of

the liturgy of these public funerals.156

154 Aries, P., Western Attitudes towards Death From the Middle Ages to the Present, Marion Boyars, London, 1974155 Wolffe, J., Great Deaths, Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, The British Academy, OUP, 2000156 For example the use of a piece of favourite music that held meaning for the deceased and/or an association with the deceased for

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Whilst again there is great value in these socio-

historical perspectives, theological perspectives of

death provide perhaps more extensive avenues of

approach, largely because religions have provided the

major means of dealing with death in human societies.

Furthermore, theological understandings of death are

intimately bound up with death rituals as, in religion,

as Davies posits:

Death is not simply or even primarily a question of philosophical reflection but of ritual action and of relating wider experiences of worship to the specific of death. Within theological method, then, the history of death also becomes the history of death ritual.157

This is an avenue I will return to in greater detail

later. Yet whilst considering the perspectives of

different academic disciplines we must not overlook the

contributions of anthropology and sociology in our

understanding of how people deal with death. In

particular they have shown how individual identity

relates to wider society, and how that is affected by

the place of ancestors and deities. They have shown how

people’s identities are changed through the death of

each member of society.

One of the early major studies was conducted by Arnold

the bereaved.157 Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, p. 18

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van Gennep (1873-1957) who first employed the term rites of

passage.158 He saw these rites as a means whereby

individuals might be eased, without undue social

disruption, through the difficulties of transition from

one social group to another. In this way, for instance,

Mary, whose husband had recently died, would make the

change from being ‘wife of John’ to being ‘widow of

John’.

Van Gennep proposed three distinguishable and

consecutive stages in this process:

Separation or Pre-Liminal (before the threshold);

Transition or Liminal (at the threshold);

Incorporation or Post-Liminal (past the threshold).

The person or group on whom the rite focuses is first

symbolically separated from his or her old status, then

undergoes adjustment to the new status during the period

of transition.

Finally there is incorporation into society with a new

social status.

The rituals associated with the care of the bereaved and

the disposal of the dead do not replace the grief

process, but rather offer a helpful structure or

framework to aid the process and the transition.

Ainsworth-Smith and Speck posit that the ritual, or rite

158Van Gennep, A., The Rites of Passage, trans. M.B. Vizedom and G.L.Caffee, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1960 (original 1909).

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of passage, to be useful in this must to be relevant to

the needs of the bereaved at three levels:

The Psychological level - by giving a framework for the full

expression of feeling (grief) and to reduce anxiety;

The Theological Level - by which one seeks to make some sense

and meaning out of what is experienced, in relation to

the goal one is aiming for; and

The Sociological Level - through sharing the experience with

others and being re-accepted into society with a new

status.159

Davies echoes this analysis: ‘Ritual, as shared forms of

patterned activity, focuses on significant social values

and helps express how a people view the world and

themselves.’160

Indeed Davies elsewhere defines identity as the way

people understand themselves in relation to other

persons, to the world around them and to supernatural

realms, it is for him a consequence of self-

consciousness within a particular social network and in

a particular language.161

Significant sociologists have contributed to this

discussion of developing understanding of the way

individuals and society react in the face of death. 159Cf. Ainsworth-Smith, I., & Speck, P., Letting Go, SPCK, London, 1994 p.62160 Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, p. 50161 Davies, D.J., Death, Ritual and Belief, p. 4

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Durkheim posited that ‘the foundation of mourning is the

impression of a loss which the group feels when it loses

one of its members.’162

Malinowski countered Durkheim by arguing that death

touches individuals’ private lives (as opposed to social

lives) deeply.163 He speaks of the mixed emotions of

longing, fear and disgust associated with the dead and

focuses on the ‘double edged play of hope and fear which

sets in always in the face of death.’164

For Malinowski religion helped people choose and

emphasise the sense of hope in life rather than the

sense of fear; giving them conviction to continue rather

than despair. His conviction was that religious mortuary

ritual ‘saves man from surrender to death and

destruction’ and reinforces ‘the desire for life’.165

Funeral rites for him serve to assist individuals over a

period of distress as well as expressing the social loss

of a member of society. This reflects a ‘life promoting’

ritual which helps to overcome hopelessness.166

Bauman follows this thread of death being seen as a

profound problem that may swamp human beings and their 162 Durkheim, E., The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, George Allen and Unwin, London 1915/1976, p401 163 Malinowski, B., Magic, Science, Religion and Other Essays, Souvenir Press, London, 1974, p. 59 164 Ibid, p. 51165 Ibid166 A term coined by Hocart, A. M., The Life Giving Myth, Tavistock, London1973, pp 46, 47.

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own will to live.167 For him, society and its institution

conspire to hide death and give the impression that

death is under control. Death rites add to the

conspiracy, speedily removing the dead from the sight

and mind of the living. He proposed that the living

needed to grieve properly for the dead and in this the

community context was important to hold the bereaved

whilst they faced death and find hope. The individual’s

response to death is framed by their social group,

whether comprising of kin, friends, and neighbours or

just paid professionals.

Victor Turner explored this further168, developing van

Gennep’s idea of the liminal period (limen in Latin

meaning ‘threshold’). Turner explored the dynamics of

what happens to people when thrown together in periods

of stress and change of identity. He developed the

concept of communitas to describe shared, fellow-feelings

of unity and empathy, in these circumstances. In his

dissertation, published as Schism and Continuity in African

Society169, he introduced the concept of social dramas,

which he elaborated on in later works. Social dramas

exist as a result of the conflict that is inherent in

societies. Social dramas are ‘public episodes of

167 Bauman, Z., Mortality, Immortality, Polity Press, London, 1992168 Turner, Victor W., The Ritual Process: Structure And Anti-structure Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, 1969, p. 95. 169 Turner, Victor W., Schism and continuity in an African society: A study of Ndembu village life, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1957 (revised & reprinted 1968)

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tensional irruption.’170

Based on his fieldwork among the Ndembu, Turner asserted

that social dramas have four main phases of public

action, accessible to observation: breach, crisis,

redressive action, and reintegration.

The first phase is signalled by the public, overt breach

or deliberate non-fulfilment of some crucial norm

regulating the intercourse of the parties. Once a breach

occurs a phase of mounting crisis supervenes in which the

breach widens and extends the separation between the

parties.

The crisis phase has ‘liminal characteristics, since it

is a threshold between more or less stable phases of the

social process.’171

The third phase of redressive action occurs to limit the

spread of the crisis with ‘certain adjustive and

redressive mechanisms . . . [which] are swiftly brought

into operation by leading or structurally representative

members of the disturbed social system.’172

Turner further identifies the mechanisms of this phase:

170 Turner, V. Dramas, fields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY., 1974, p.33171 Ibid p. 39172 Ibid

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They may range from personal advice and informal mediation or arbitration to formal juridical and legal machinery, and, to resolve certain kinds of crisis or legitimateother modes of resolution, to the performanceof public ritual.173

Some mechanisms may not work; in which case regression

to the crisis phase occurs. The redressive phase is the

most liminal because it is in the middle of the crisis

and the resolution. It is in this phase that the liminal

ritual may be enacted to resolve the crisis and provide

an opportunity for the final phase of reintegration to

occur.

The reintegration phase involves the resolution of the

conflict by reintegrating the disturbed group into

society or by the ‘social recognition and legitimization

of irreparable schism between the contesting parties.’174

This four-phase model fits into van Gennep's phases of

rites of passage. Breach and crisis correspond to van

Gennep's separation phase, redress aligns with the

transition phase of rites of passage and reintegration

represents van Gennep's incorporation phase. Turner

extended van Gennep's phases to include the public

conflict of social dramas.

Another who wishes to develop van Gennep’s theory of

173 Ibid174 Ibid

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rites of passage further is Bloch. He observed the power

of ritual in people’s lives and specifically that

religion and many local traditions turned the biological

fact of death around. Whilst it is obvious that we are

born, grow old and die as a natural progression, these

rituals start with death and proceed to a higher level

of ‘life’.175 This is done symbolically through ritual and

rites of initiation.

Bloch argued that whilst van Gennep focussed on social

status, there should also be an existential element to

the rites. He suggests that through these rituals

individuals encounter some sort of transcendent power or

dimension. This sensation influences their lives, giving

a sense of becoming different people in some way. They

feel empowered and that their identity has in some

positive way changed through contact with the

transcendent power. This becomes especially clear when

the language of ritual speaks of the individual’s old

nature being killed or transformed by a new nature, as

though humanity interrupts the natural process of birth,

growth, and death and replaces it in a symbolic way with

a process of ritual death and ritual rebirth.

For example, in the Christian tradition there is a very

strong belief that because of sin and wickedness human

life ends with death as a natural process. But because

175 Bloch, M., Prey into Hunter – The Politics of Religious Experience, CUP, Cambridge, 1992; Cf. Davies, D.J., Death, Ritual and belief, p. 19ff

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of divinely initiated salvation it is now possible for

people to become Christians and accordingly, to overcome

death. The symbolism is carried in the initiation rite

of baptism, through which the old nature of humanity –

involving death and destruction – come to an end as the

baptised person is born again in a spiritual sense. This

new birth takes place here and now and means that when

the physical body dies, the Christian will not

ultimately die but will, by God’s grace, mercy and

power, be caused to continue to live in an afterlife. In

other words, new birth begins a process that does not

end in death.176

Bloch’s ideas are important as they move us beyond

simply agreeing with Durkheim that funeral rites help us

to reintegrate into society; or assenting to

Malinowski’s view that the bereaved simply need

community support; or even van Gennep’s view that social

changes need to be ritually performed. Indeed Bloch’s

ideas can be extended to consider death rites as a

critical tool in giving new life and hope and meaning

and identity to those left behind. Without that life and

176 It is acknowledged that there are diverse views within the Christian tradition on the fate of the deceased whether or not they make an overt confession of faith or are baptised. These range from Universalist positions whereby all are saved from eternal death, to Exclusivist positions whereby only those confessing Christian faith and baptised into that faith attain ‘heavenly paradise’ whereas those who do not are condemned to ‘hell’. A third group espousing an Annihilationist position acknowledge that only those who die in Christian faith will survive death. These positions are considered further, but still briefly in chapter 5.

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death is relatively absurd and pointless. Indeed

Kübler-Ross highlighted the fact that hope was a

profoundly important part of her dying patients’ outlook

on life in her seminal work in the field of care for the

dying: ‘If a patient stops expressing hope, it is

usually a sign of imminent death.’177

Christian theologies have grounded hope, not in simple

membership of a society, but in the very existence of

God as a transcending fact of life. In this framework,

people most often have hope because there actually

exists something greater than them in the reality of

God.178

Yet when a strong sense of religious belief or a sense

of commonly held and understood values within community

fades, this sense of hope becomes harder to grasp.

Should this lack of belief coincide with minimal

involvement from supportive social groups, as is

becoming evident in early twenty-first century urban

individualism, then the sense of hopelessness that

Bauman discussed is easily fostered.179 Any sense of

history and meaning as a significant dimension in life

is easily lost.

In this context, people can search for a sense of 177 Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, Tavistock-Routledge, London, 1970, p.123 [first published 1968]178 Cf. Williams, R., Dimbleby Lecture 2002, delivered 19/12/2002 www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2002 /dec/19/religion.uk Cf, Moltmann, J., Theology of Hope, SCM, London 1969179 Bauman, Z., Mortality, Immortality, Polity Press, London, 1992

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meaning and purpose in history through attributing blame

and ensuring ‘lessons are learnt so that nobody else

will have to die in such circumstances.’ In this way the

death of a loved one is saved from the fate of being

‘meaningless.’180 This is perhaps a marker of how

important hope is in society.

From this, we may ask: ‘who is the funeral for?’ Many

would answer it is for the bereaved. Augustine said that

all the elaborations that go with burial ‘are rather

comforts to the living than helps to the dead.’181

Certainly in the Twentieth century this view gained

ground, mainly among clergy,182 funeral directors and

other professionals working in the grief field. In law,

too, the funeral belongs to the next of kin. 183 The

deceased may have specified what they wish to happen to

their property and their intentions would have the force

of law, but their wish for what happens to their body is

only a stated preference and has no recourse in law. The

180 This tends to be in situations where the death is premature and unexpected, such as in traumatic events. These types of death are beyond the scope of my survey but Walter considers these in Walter, T., Revival of Death, Routledge, 1994181Augustine cited by Walter, T., in Funerals, p. 115182 Particularly in the Protestant tradition183 See my interview notes with the Crematorium Superintendent and Superintendent Registrar. It is at these points that the legal framework is most evident in the funeral process, although it is also acknowledged that Funeral Directors are well acquainted with the legal framework. It is also acknowledged that I have excluded any consideration of the Last Will & Testament and Probate issues. Suffice it to say here that the arrangement of the funeral is the responsibility of the next-of-kin and that they are not legally constrained by any a priori preferences expressed by the deceased as to the way the funeral is conducted.

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funeral belongs not to the dead but to the living.184 Yet

whilst the professionals focus on the bereaved, the

friends and family of the deceased focus on the

deceased, whether that be as a way of helping them on to

the next world, ‘giving them a good send-off’ or of

simply paying them respect.185 From this perspective then,

it is important to note that this event is more than a

rite of passage. It is at the same time a practical

matter of appropriately disposing of the remains, and it

is a major life event which needs to be understood in

the wider context of life. Again we may draw from the

rich resources of history and theology which at once

both honour the deceased and cater for the needs of

those left in life.

Yet before we consider theological developments and the

associated practice in the conduct of funeral services

and the disposal of the body, we turn to the changing

nature of the practicalities of disposal.

Removal of the dead - a brief survey of practical and symbolic factors in their historic contextRemoval of the dead is universally undertaken, how death

is explained is the variable element. Practically, the

body may be buried or cremated, it may be sunk at sea or184 Cf. Jupp, P.C. ‘Whose funeral is it anyway?’, in K. A. G. Elliot (Ed.) Report of the Joint Conference of the Burial and Cremation Authorities, Swansea 1995 and ‘The context of funeral ministry today’, in Jupp, P.C. and Rogers, T., (eds.) Interpreting Death, Cassell, London, 1997 p. 13185 All of these views were expressed to greater or lesser degrees inmy study, see interview transcripts of clients and summaries in chapter 2.

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in a lake, it may be exposed to the elements or to

animals in a remote place. These choices would not be

open to everyone but would be dependent on context and

physical availability. The physical fact remains that

bodies decay and require disposal. In England today two

choices face most people, burial or cremation, both of

which are long established practices.

For many centuries burial has been the dominant form of

disposal in this country, certainly since the advent of

Christianity. Historically, most people died at home and

were buried in their local and accessible parish

churchyard. Families, with help from neighbours and

perhaps the local joiners, would prepare the body, and

transport it to the Church for the funeral service and

then into the churchyard for burial. Such preparations

may have included the washing of the body as a last

loving action by the family for the deceased, covering

it in a shroud, digging the grave and even the funeral

rites themselves would have been local and familial. The

coffin may have been a common parish box unless the

deceased was particularly wealthy. As Cressy outlines,

the funerals would have been conducted very close to the

time of death, 95 percent within 48 hours and 41 percent

were buried the same day as there was no refrigeration

and no preservative in food to effect a prolonged period

before degradation of the physical remains.186 In 1661

186 Cressy, D., Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, OUP, Oxford, 1999 p.426

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Pepys records his experience of his uncle’s corpse

‘going off’ and writes of the smells and the decay187.

Open coffins were commonly used.

With the coming of the Industrial Revolution and

urbanisation, and indeed the rise of the large

conurbation, the logistics of disposing of the dead

altered and large municipal cemeteries on the edge of

towns or cities replaced the local churchyard as the

place of burial. They were like dormitories, sleeping

places for the dead, where they were laid to rest. This

in turn promoted developments in more efficient funeral

directing, particularly in the provision of transport to

more distant cemeteries. As Jupp asserts:

Just as in the eighteenth century, the role of the clergyman at deathbeds had been steadily taken over by the doctor, so the funeral director increasingly took over taskspreviously performed by families... watching at the bedside and waking by the open coffin has similarly passed to nursing, undertaking or mortuary staff whose ward is not continuous.188

The next major shift came with the promotion of

cremation by local authorities in the 1930s. It

signalled a rising interest in more economic forms of

disposal, which was encouraged by the Welfare State

187 Pepys Diary of 1661, July 6th, www.pepys.info/1661/1661.html also Cited in Cressy, D., Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle inTudor and Stuart England, OUP, Oxford, 1999, p.427188Jupp, P.C., ‘The context of funeral ministry today’, in Jupp, P.C.and Rogers, T., Interpreting Death, p. 8

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provisions of the Labour government of 1945-51189.

According to Jupp, its introduction of a range of

benefits for widowed people and for limited funeral

expenses symbolised a widely-held conviction that

funerals merited far less expenditure of both time and

money190. Cremation had only been legalised in England in

1884. However, there was reluctance by churches to

accept cremation at the end of the nineteenth century as

it separated the Church and the funeral service from the

burial place. Continuity was lost and the symbolism of

burial, which had been a very strong communicator

deriving from and reinforcing the theology of death and

disposal, was also significantly diminished. Rowell

summarises thus:

The churches opposed cremation for a number of reasons – the long-standing tradition of burial from inherited Jewish custom onwards, the association of cremation with pagan funeral rites and, for some, belief in the resurrection of the body.191

This perspective only altered for some the effects of

war in mutilating and destroying bodies. The

consequence, as Rowell sees it, was that ‘cremation and

crematoria which were built to provide for this way of

disposing of the dead, developed with little reference

189 The Death Grant was introduced in The National Insurance Act 1946to assist with funeral expenses and was means tested and first became payable in 1949. cf. Hansard 27 June 1960190 Jupp, P.C., From Dust to Ashes: the placement of Burial by Cremation in England 1840-1967, The Congregational Memorial Trust, London, 1990191 Rowell, G., ‘Changing patterns’ p. 27

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to Christian belief and practice.’192

This being the case, it must then raise the question of

how death and disposal relate to the wider context of

life and to Christian hope of life beyond the grave. It

is to this wider context and its development that I now

turn.

A key to unlocking the future – a brief survey of historical theology and pastoral practice

Our contemporary understanding of dying, death and disposal is one that has been powerfully shaped by what the Christian faithhas had to say about death and the hope of life beyond death. The embodiment of those beliefs in funeral liturgy has been and is powerful.193

Yet, as Davies summarises, ‘even in secular contexts

rites are performed to locate the dead firmly in the

past and in memory.’194

Such beliefs have had a complex evolution. However,

there has been a significant shift to a more secular

view of ‘this worldliness’, with both the United Kingdom

and Australia leading the way in a non-religious

influence on the way we deal with death. Accompanying

the rise in humanist and civil, ‘life-centred’ funerals

in these countries has been a noted decrease in emphasis

192Ibid193Ibid p. 17194 Davies, D.J., Death, Ritual and Belief, p. 3

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by the Protestant Christian churches upon the afterlife.

As Davies comments:

Hell is seldom mentioned while heaven has become an optimistic way of speaking about the enduring nature of human relationships. Heaven is more therapeutic than theological.195

This is a salient point as my study shows. Both

celebrant and the bereaved can conspire to allude to

this popular notion of continuity between the deceased

and the bereaved, the dead and the living. As one widow

expressed, ‘I am sure that we will meet again in

Heaven’.196

The Christian celebrant at the funeral of this client’s

late husband offered:

I try and sort of gently suggest that there is a break and to try and get across that nowyou need to talk to God rather than the deceased. Having said that, I don’t necessarily challenge them when they say thatthey continue to have their conversations with the deceased because I recognise that aspart of the ongoing psyche of the living, as it were.197

Surely there is a way for the Christian celebrant to

speak clearly of the Christian resurrection hope without

the need to embrace what is no more than popular

folklore or a distortion of orthodox Christian theology

195 Davies, D., A Brief History of Death, p. 58196 See Anglican Client transcript197 See Anglican Celebrant transcript

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of death and resurrection? In the above case something

of that conversation happened later, as again the

transcripts of my interviews show. Yet how far one goes

in dispelling comforting, if theologically inaccurate

presumptions, is a matter of pastoral sensitivity in the

context of long term care of the bereaved. I shall

return to offer an answer to this specifically in

chapter 6.

Kin and friends of the deceased are increasingly taking

part in the funeral rites and the choice of non-biblical

material replaces or complements Scriptural material.

This is used to express something of the life and

experience of the one who has died. Though religious

leaders still regularly conduct the proceedings, as

Davies comments, ‘it is far from certain that this is

because of the religious doctrines they represent.’198

Instead it is likely they bring a cultural frame of

formality to a moment of emotional complexity. Or it may

also be expressed as a ‘default position’ for the

bereaved, who may have no active religious belief,

simply making no conscious decision to take another

route, based on their familiarity with the historical

monopoly by clergy.

Whatever the reasoning by the bereaved, the clergy are

increasingly happy to engage with people in their 198 Davies, D., A Brief History of Death, p. 58

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requests for more personal items in the funeral liturgy.

Again a plethora of reasons may have brought the clergy

to such a position. Certainly one is to take the

opportunity to express pastoral care and build a

relationship with the bereaved that may be developed at

a later stage. A second reason may be that it introduces

people to something of church tradition where they have

no such previous experience, and it does so in a way

that they find acceptable. The alternative of imposing a

traditional rite would likely hasten the movement away

from religious funerals and the involvement of the

clergy in the funeral rites of non-church attendees.

This would certainly be borne out by the anecdotal

evidence given by the representative of the civil

funeral movement interviewed for this project:

It was the repeated call for something more personal than the Church was offering that got us going. The story of a vicar turning upand only asking what gender the deceased was before taking a funeral, with no other contact with the family, where the deceased wasn’t even mentioned by name left people more angry than comforted and they deserved more. We provide a much more personal service…. One of the Superintendent Registrars, a man from the South West of England, spoke to me about half way into the 18 months that the working party operated andsaid that he had been speaking to a crematorium manager. This manager had said that he reckoned half of the people coming through his crematorium were not getting the services they want, deserve, need. 199

199From the Interview transcript of the Chair of the Institute of Civil Funerals

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This emphasis on the deceased individual, and the

relationship with the living marks a change from

traditional Christian rites that until relatively

recently tended to treat the dead as part of the great

cloud of witnesses in a general sense by referring to ‘our

dearly departed sister’ rather than a named individual

and family member, friend etc. Hence the only

information some clergy requested prior to conducting a

funeral rite was as to the gender of the deceased.

This marked shift in the importance of the individual

has profound consequences. In one sense it could be seen

as secular culture calling the Church back to aspects of

faith they had forgotten or ignored, namely that all

human beings are made in the Image of God200 and therefore

the ends of their lives are worthy of appropriate

marking, being considered as an ‘individual in death as

in life’ as Davies puts it.201 Certainly, again

anecdotally from my study, there appears to have been a

positive reaction to this move:

You know the Churches Group on Funerals, Cemeteries and Crematoria, Peter Jupp and others, I [the Chair of the Institute of Civil Funerals] went and told them about thisand they were brilliant. They said they thought that the thought that had gone into

200 Genesis 1:26-27; cf. Hughes, P.E., The True Image of God: The Origin and Destiny of Man in Christ, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids and Leicester, 1989; Anderson, R.S., On Being Human: Essays in Theological Anthropology, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1982201 Davies, D., A Brief History of Death, p. 60

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the training was very good. And having talkedto people afterwards, I think that had a bit of a knock on effect in the Church of Englandin terms of funeral training. If that is the case then no-one is more pleased than me because that means that better funerals are happening now.202

There is good cause for celebrating this move towards

including traditional elements and customised, personal

elements, yet it would not be hard to imagine a move to

only customised, personal elements being included in a

funeral service. In so changing the focus of the rite to

the person from traditional theological principles, the

need for clergy to officiate could, and in some cases

has now diminished and has opened the way for other

celebrants to conduct purely personal ‘life centred’

funerals. However, this is not a fait accompli as yet, many

do still look to the Church at the time of a death, and

this offers both a challenge and opportunity for the

Church to do just as Hooker suggested in centuries past:

The Church may offer consolation to the bereaved and

commendation to those who have died and give hope and

understanding to those who seek some meaning in the

ultimate mysteries of human life and human death. After

all, Christian theology emphasises that it is God who is

the horizon both of our human life and our human death;

it is God whose eternal life is the Easter gift and

promise to the faithful. This is precisely what

202 From the Interview transcript of the Chair of the Institute of Civil Funerals

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Christian funeral liturgies strive to express, as well

as trying to be pastorally sensitive to the needs of the

bereaved.

This is certainly the challenge I face as a local church

minister engaged within a local community and frequently

asked to officiate at the funerals of both those within

the church community of faith and those without.

As I have discovered in the process of our historical

survey, the funeral is an extremely important event

since the manner in which we dispose of our dead can be

a reflection of our attitude to death and towards the

person who has died. It is the means by which an

appropriate ending is given to the earthly life of the

deceased and gives a context to an appropriate

understanding of a continuity that may be expected

between the living and the dead, focused for the

Christian in the resurrection hope. With a commendation

and/or the committal of the person to God, in sure and

certain hope of the resurrection of the dead, the third

element to be addressed is both a pastoral and missional

one. The funeral ritual will either help or hinder the

grief process, and it is certainly my contention that it

can be a very significant and helpful element of this rite

of passage. But it is more than a therapeutic aid. It is

also an opportunity to aid the bereaved to engage in a

narrative greater than their own, bringing greater hope

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and meaning to their own lives, reflected in, and maybe

gleaned from their understanding of death. It is a

significant place where the source of ontological

security can be introduced or recalled, where true hope

and meaning to life in the face of death and the shared

eternal future of the hoped- for resurrection life may

be affirmed. This is the ministry the Church has offered

in liturgy and pastoral care for centuries, indeed

millennia.

Yet we find ourselves in this historic position because

of factors I am yet to address, significant factors

which are creating a barrier between the ministry of the

Church and the wider community it seeks to serve. It is

to these sociological factors that I now turn.

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