Baptismal Integrity Resource Pages

Funereal Integrity?

Roger L Brown, Vicar of Welshpool and Rector of Castle Caereinion

The members of Baptismal Integrity believe, quite rightly, that the indiscriminate baptism of infants dishonours God, trivialises spiritual things, requires parents and godparents to be hypocrites, and encourages people to believe that a person is made a Christian by a ceremony rather than by the expression of faith. If we are to be true to the things of God, then clearly reform is needed with regard to infant baptism.

Reform is equally needed with respect to the funeral office.

When Cranmer wrote the burial service, and even when it was revised in 1662, it was within the context that every person in the land was required to attend the public worship of the Church. The presumption of the service, “in sure and certain hope”, and the words “that when we shall depart this life, we may rest in Him, as our hope is this our brother does”, are within this context, while the rubric to the service declared that it was not to be used for the unbaptised, the excommunicated, or those who had laid violent hands upon themselves.

The underlying theology of this service is that there is a heaven to gain and a hell to avoid. The phrase about “the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection” was within the context of a resurrection for all, followed by a judgement, and then the final separation. Furthermore, the language of pious supposition was used to indicate that this is what the Church teaches and people should believe, rather than to have immediate application to the corpse being buried.

Today we live in a different world. In spite of the clearest claims made by our Lord, the majority of people believe, if they believe in an after-life, that if can only consist of heaven or paradise. Hell is totally discounted from their calculations. The continual stress of the New Testament that a person is saved by grace, expressed by faith, is denied in favour of some kind of sufficiency based on the merits a person has obtained. “If anyone deserved heaven, this person did”, proclaimed one of my clerical predecessors at every funeral service, so articulating popular feeling and denying the very foundation of Biblical faith.

The now unguarded words of our funeral service reinforce this message. It enables people to believe that certain words, said over a dead body, can perform a sort of sacramental magic, and translate the most evil of livers into a paragon of Christian virtues whom the Lord will welcome with open arms.

Even worse, the funeral service has become in this age a memorial service. A tribute has to be given, and the dead person eulogised into instant sanctity.

Even when the minister speaks of Christian things and the claims of Christ at a funeral service, the other words which are said minimise all his good intentions. If we say, as people hear us to say, that the dead person is a Christian and has the certainty of eternal life in heaven, whatever their moral life has been, then whatever we say in contradiction will be dismissed as irrelevant, because they are our words and not the words of the liturgy.

It was said of Edward VII when he died, that archbishops, bishops, clergymen and many others spoke of him as though he was one of the finest Christians whe ever lived. Yet his lifestyle and contempt of religion indicated quite otherwise.

In using such words of assurance over people who have no connection with the body of Christ, and who are not regular attenders at its worship, we are deceiving people about salvation itself. We are offering a false hope. In Maurice Roberts’ words, as we put the deceased person “easily to heaven”, we allow his/her relatives to remain “unwarned, uninstructed, unprepared for their own last end.”

It may well be said that it is not for us to judge. We must be charitable. A person may well have repented at the end of his life, so it is argued. But we must also be honest, and proclaim the Gospel, and in charity remind people of its imperatives - there is a heaven to gain and a hell to avoid.

Others will argue there is no hell. If God is a god of love then he must accept us all. The Scriptures say something quite different. God in love will accept a person’s own choice of living for Christ, or of ignoring him and thus facing the consequences of so doing. Heaven is a place of grace, not of contamination, or else it would not be heaven. C S Lewis once wrote of the new arrivals in hell being allowed an afternoon in heaven: they couldn’t wait to get out of the place!

One of the main issues we have to face is that the C of E is an established Church, and its clergy are required to officiate at the funeral of every parishioner if requested. In a missionary age the whole ethos of the Church of Christ is destroyed by establishment, and we see the leaders of that Church desperately hanging on to the few privileges which remain while insisting that the responsibilities once conveyed by the full privileges are maintained. Even worse, it seems clear that the C of E is motivated by financial demands rather than theological, for funeral fees enter central funds.

The Nonconformists are little better. Many chapels, which have an attendance counted on the fingers of two hands, can have a membership of a hundred or so, who see it as their burial club.

I maintain that an open policy regarding funerals deceives people, diminishes the Gospel, and says to many outsiders that the Church is hypocritical in its attitude. Far better if the Church abandoned them save for its own members, and encouraged the use of secular funerals.

“Where a man has lived a godly life, let this be stated at his funeral and let all who love his memory be assured that he is now indeed ‘at rest’. But if there was no godly life, no life in Christ, no final repentance, let nothing be said. A wise silence concerning the dead may convey a powerful message to the living who are still foolish. The funeral service is an occasion when the preacher should remind worldly people of their own need to prepare to meet God. At funerals we never affirm that a soul has gone to hell; but we must not state that a soul has gone to heaven if there was no evidence of grace, not even a little, in their lifetime.” [Maurice Roberts, The Banner of Truth October 2001 p2.]