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.

Funeral Preaching from Holy Saturday’s View: Another Reason to Observe the Vigil of Easter

This posting from the issue of Liturgy dealing with “Death and the Liturgy” is by Todd Townshend, dean of the faculty of theology at Huron University College in London, Ontario, and Canon Theologian for the Diocese of Huron. The excerpt here explores the valuable insights a preacher can glean from Holy Saturday for funeral sermons.

Everyone who has experienced the death of a loved one will know what Good Friday feels like. A number of years ago, while working pastorally with a family who had lost an adult child, I was given tremendous pastoral assistance while reading Alan E. Lewis’s book, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Eerdmans, 2003). . . to prepare for Lent and the great celebrations of Easter. The pastoral implications were almost limitless. Holy Saturday is a powerful perspective from which to preach, because Jesus is dead in the tomb. By sundown Friday, the first of the Great Three Days of Easter, Jesus was buried in a dark silent tomb. . .

 The followers of Jesus would not have known that this was “the second day” of the Three Great Days of Easter; they would only have known it as the day after the end. . . . Unless we celebrate the Vigil, we may tend to skip right from Jesus dying on the cross on Friday, to the empty tomb and resurrection on Sunday, maybe because nothing is said about the second day, or maybe because nothing was said on the second day. It was dark, and silent. God said nothing.

 . . . It is a moment of vulnerability. . . The manner of speaking in those moments of life is similar to the way we speak when we present ourselves before the cross or at Jesus’ tomb. We want to avoid overconfidence and giving the impression that we comprehend it all. God’s powerful weakness resists explanation.

 As those whose lives are bound to Christ in baptism, we know that we have died with Christ and so we also rise with Christ. Therefore, the preacher may explore what it means for us to live out of the Holy Saturday perspective. This takes time and some space for the imagination to work. If we want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, we go where Jesus went in our theological imagination so that we might better recognize the terrain in our own lives and choose the path of life and promise when death comes near.

 This imaginative work can be shared with worshipers, guiding them on similar paths, through the preaching. The theology, messages, and images offered to the faithful about death cannot be absent nor without ambiguity. Two or more contradictory or opposite truths can be true at the same time. “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” When preachers and others use comfortable but worn-out phrases such as “Heaven as Home,” “Journey to the Angels,” and “Natural Immortality,” claiming that “death cannot defeat us,” we miss the creative tension that is revealed in the narrative of Christ’s death, entombment, and resurrection. The time of entombment, Saturday, is the time that many people experience in their own lives right now. This perspective can hold us in a better tension—with better integrity—as we seek to offer hope in the Gospel.

The full essay is available in Liturgy 33, no. 1 available by personal subscription and through many libraries. Here are some resources available for understanding the development and transformation of funeral sermons and funeral rituals (from a primarily Protestant American perspective):

• Lucy Bregman, Preaching Death (Baylor Univ. Press, 2011)
• Thomas G. Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (WJK, 2009)
• Luke Powery, Dem Dry Bones: Preaching, Death, and Hope (Fortress Press, 2012)
• Melinda Quivik, contributing ed., In Sure and Certain Hope: A Funeral Sourcebook (Augsburg Fortress, 2017)

 

Todd Townshend, “What Can Death Teach Us About Preaching,” Liturgy 33, no. 1 (2017): 49-55.