I think it's a misstatement. The body is normally committed to the deep; the soul is commended to God. But "commend" here means "entrust to", so there's a reasonable reading either way.

Safire probably just misspoke but it looks like the OG 1549 Book of Common Prayer somehow manages the full cartesian product - there's a commend of body and soul, the commend-and-commit phraseology often used today and a commit of soul.

http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1549/Burial_1549.ht...

Christianity maintains that the soul will be restored to the body on the last day, the day of resurrection. Jesus talks several times about raising people up on the last day, and he refers to his late friend Lazarus of Bethany as having "fallen asleep" before raising him. Paul speaks extensively, e.g. in 1 Corinthians 15, about how Jesus was the "firstfruits" of a more general resurrection, and about how a buried body is like a seed that will grow into an imperishable / immortal body. The Nicene Creed (the historic test-suite of Christian orthodoxy) speaks of "the resurrection of the body". Even Job claimed (19:26-27) that even after his body was destroyed in the grave, he would nevertheless see God with his own eyes in his own flesh.

This is why, for instance, Roman Catholicism forbids scattering ashes (and until recently forbid cremation at all). Of course no one claims that God is somehow incapable of resurrecting a mutilated, cremated, scattered, etc. body but can resurrect an ordinarily decomposed one. But the act of scattering ashes demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian burial practices. Human remains are placed in safekeeping for the last day, in expectation of resurrection on earth. It is not the case that the soul departs to heaven and the body becomes irrelevant, and that therefore doing something symbolic and/or environmentally responsible with the ashes is reasonable. Christian burial, under normal circumstances, involves putting the remains in some definite place and putting a headstone on it.

So in turn the traditional Christian burial rites have used text about committing the body to the earth, in normal cases, or to the sea, for sailors lost at sea, trusting the earth or sea with that safekeeping. Here's a 1789 Book of Common Prayer rite, which quotes a few of the passages I mentioned: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1789/Burial_1789.ht...

In particular, burial at sea involves the following prayer:

We therefore commit his body to the deep, looking for the general Resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose second coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working where by he is able to subdue all things unto himself.

That's the sort of prayer being referenced by Nixon's speechwriter.

I'm genuinely baffled at the popularity of the idea that your soul immediately goes and lines up at the Pearly Gates, and then you stay in either heaven or hell forever. It's possible to find evidence to support that model, yes; for instance a literal reading of the the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (no relation to Lazarus of Bethany) would imply it. But there's quite a lot of direct statements saying otherwise.

> the historic test-suite of Christian orthodoxy

Huh, even to the extent of adding explicit test cases for observed bugs (heresies).

> The Nicene Creed (the historic test-suite of Christian orthodoxy) speaks of "the resurrection of the body".

I was too distracted by the test-suite point to notice that I should quarrel with this: it refers to "ἀνάστασι[ς] νεκρῶν" (Lat. "resurrectio[] mortuorum"), where νεκροί are the dead, not specifically their bodies (σώματα).

Whoops, I had it confused with the Apostles' Creed, which does say "resurrection of the body" ("carnis resurrectionem"). Good catch!

Hard to reconcile this with Luke 23:43

https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Luke%2023:43

I don't see how? The view I am objecting to is that once you go to heaven, you stay there forever and your body is irrelevant. There's nothing in that verse stopping the repentant thief from having gone to Paradise that very day, where he awaits a return to his earthly body on the last day.

(It's true that some Christians who believe in the resurrection at the last day believe in "soul sleep" until then, and they'd answer you that the repentant thief will not perceive passage of time between death and resurrection and that's what "today" means; I'll gladly acknowledge that that's a shaky argument. But the concept of the resurrection is far more universal than the concept of soul sleep.)

>> of those who sleep in him Interesting. I've always thought of the ocean as being female, like the earth.

Where are you from?

The gender of objects depend a lot of the language you speak (and culture). For example in Spanish the Sun is male and the Moon is female, but in German the Sun is female and the Moon is male.

I asked someone who had a Catholic childhood, and they had the impression that the souls would go to heaven or hell after death, but on the day of resurrection they'd rise again on Earth to fight the final battle between the two teams (good and evil). What happens after that isn't specified, but probably depends on who wins.

Interesting, thanks.