기독교의 죽음과 화장(火葬)례에 대한신학적 이해에 관한 연구

Abstract

Christianity, as a interpretative faith that reflects on and re-form human lives in its essential dimension, is an intellectual tradition that provides us with transformative enlightenment in the critical moment of life and a clue to open up the possible way of being in our marginal situations. As an interpreting practice for the faith, Christian rituals are very close to our lives in every life cycle of individuals and the church and build up them revolutionary again. And the critical moment in which the re-formation of life happens in depth is death. Death is a life cycle that allows us to re-understand of ourselves and invites us to a natural and truthful way of being in the world. In this sense, Christian funeral ceremony is a passage of rite that is located at the center of human life and re-interprets it from a fundamental point of view. However, Christian funeral service today drifts off its right way. Along with mis-understanding of Christian death, the absence of a theological understanding of cremation, which has been popularized in the Korean church, gets the inherent function of the Christian funeral to reflect on and re-construct the life of the faithful shrink and weakens its ritual role in the life of individual and the church. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to re-understand cremation from the Christian perspective, based firmly on the right understanding of death in faith, and to provide the Korean church with a theological interpretation of cremation, which is the foundation for building up the ceremony of Christian cremation suitable to the Christian tradition. Even if Christian funeral follows the way of burial in its tradition, not cremation, the Church’s scripture has lots of images of fire. Interestingly, unlike Hindu and Buddhist tradition, the Bible has ‘fire’ as a theological image or symbol that represents God’s action that reveals himself, judges and delivers human world, fulfills his reign. Thus, when the Korean church attempts to theologize cremation using the biblical images of fire, it promises a more productive and meaningful practice of faith to the Korean church.