The Problem of Body-Soul Dualism and Funerals

This posting from the issue of Liturgy dealing with “Death and the Liturgy” is by Lucy Bregman, professor of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and author of Preaching Death (2011). Her excerpt here explores the question of body-soul dualism.

The Introduction to the Episcopal Church’s new burial liturgy, Enriching Our Worship 3: Burial Rites for Adults. . . insists that the body or the ashes of the dead ought to be present at the funeral based on Christian belief in the incarnation and the bodily resurrection of the dead. Above all, “the Christian liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy,” patterned directly on Jesus’ death and resurrection. 

 These ideas are commonplace today. . . Indeed, the editors of Enriching Our Worship 3 desire to banish memorials and personal “celebrations of life” to non-Christian, secular spaces and times.

 For the past decades. . . discussions of Christian understandings of the person have emphasized that Christians are holists, not dualists, when it comes to incarnation and embodiment. That is the primary reason for the preference for whole-body burial and for the presence of the dead at his or her own funeral. These assertions arise from stress on death as disruption, loss for the mourners, and attention to the presence of God in the mourners’ sorrow.

 While these ideas and practices may seem uncontroversial today, they were not previously emphasized. In fact, based on funeral sermons and advice manuals for pastors until the middle of the twentieth century, some of these themes would have seemed foreign and even offensive. It was unquestioned that a person consists of soul and body such that the funeral director dealt with the body; the preacher, the soul. . . The soul was the real person, the person who mattered to God.

 Funerals sermons did not argue for this understanding; they assumed it. It was conveyed by the pastor’s words, the poems that supplemented sermons, and the messages in songs. To support this theme, preachers had a rich emotional imagery of natural transitions, so that the soul was actually part of a regular, expected, and universal order ordained by God.

 The universality of attention to the soul overshadowed the connection to Easter, especially since “bodily resurrection” would have distracted worshipers from the focus on the soul’s immediate after-death destiny. Significantly, when the preacher’s sermon directly addressed the dead, it was with regard to the heavenly abode, never to the body lying in the church.

 This view is now dismissed as Platonism by those who find its dualism unbiblical or sub-Christian. Recent writers on funerals, especially Thomas Long [Accompany Them with Singing (WJK, 2009)], would be mystified or offended by such dualism, not to mention the content of most of the sermons that supported it. . .

 . . . In this essay, I will be agreeing with Long, who, with Thomas Lynch, emphasizes that the dead ought to be present as a participant in his or her own funeral. While Long and Lynch, building on the earlier work of Oscar Cullmann, want a return to embodied funerals, I also look at the messages sent by the sermons, songs, and poems of such traditional funerals. These sources tell a different story, because, in spite of the presence of the corpse, they proclaim that the real person was always the soul.
 

The full essay is available in Liturgy 33, no. 1 available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Lucy Bregman, “The Soul, the Body, or the Whole Person? Christian Anthropology’s Major Makeover,” Liturgy 33, no. 1 (2017): 19-25.