is it a sin to be cremated?

Answer 1

Only if you do it more than once a week.

Seriously, if you are asking if the practice of cremation of the dead is prescribed in the Bible, I would simply say it is not the given pattern for treatment of the dead. Burial is the Biblical pattern.

Answer 2

Scripture clearly favors burial over cremation. The Old Testament pattern was always burial except in highly unusual circumstances. The exception that best proves the rule is the partial cremation of King Saul and his sons -- and even in this case the bodies were burned, but the bones were buried (1 Samuel 31:12-13).

Likewise, the New Testament pattern is always burial. The apostle Paul includes burial as an essential part of the gospel itself when he repeats a very early Christian creedal statement, "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3-4).

Additionally, Paul equates baptism with both burial and resurrection when he says that we were buried with Christ "through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life" (Romans 6:4).

Furthermore, burial symbolizes the promise of resurrection by anticipating the preservation of the body. Cremation, however, symbolizes the pagan worldview of reincarnation. As Geisler and Potter put it, "The Christian has escaped the judgment by fire presented in the Bible (Revelation 20:14). Cremation is the wrong picture to remind believers of salvation in the body by resurrection (cf. Romans 8:11)... Cremation better symbolizes pantheism, which in its Eastern forms is usually associated with a salvation from the body by escaping the cycle of reincarnation." Thus, while resurrectionists look forward to the restoration of the body, reincarnationists look forward to being relieved from their bodies.

Finally, burial highlights the sanctity of the body. Geisler and Potter emphasize that in the Christian worldview, the body is incredibly significant in that it has numerical identity to the resurrected body and is "uniquely designed to give expression to the image of God in man" (see Genesis 1:27; 9:6; cf. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

While God has no problem resurrecting the cremated, cremation does not point to the resurrection of God.

Admittedly there is no direct command regarding burial or prohibition of cremation. While the act of cremation, as such, is not a sin or an intrinsic evil like murder, burial is the general pattern set down in Scripture.