The first and chief puzzle is in the twenty-ninth verse : "Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?" What is meant by being baptized for the dead?
The idea naturally suggested by the original phrase is that of a vicarious baptism; the baptism of one person in the place, or room, or stead of another.
It is known to have been at one time a practice in the church, if a convert to Christianity happened to die unbaptized, that a Christian brother might volunteer to be his substitute and representative, and to have the baptismal rite administered to him, on behalf of his deceased friend. This was held to make up for the loss which the dead man might sustain in consequence of his not having been himself baptized, while yet alive. It was held to be equivalent to his having been in his own person made partaker of the initiatory sacrament of the church. It was a posthumous baptism by proxy.
Some interpreters of high name, including one of the most recent and most eminent, have been inclined to understand Paul as alluding to that practice; and they have admired his allusion to it as an instance of the tenderness with which he dealt with a usage, to say the least of it, of dangerous tendency, as well as of the skill with which he turned it to argumentative or oratorical account in pleading with those among whom it may have partially prevailed. Out of your own mouth I argue with you. There are some of you who have received baptism as personating and, to use a familiar phrase, standing in the shoes of the dead. For what good end did you do so, even on your own theory of what such a procedure might mean and might effect, if the dead rise not and survive not at all?
There are grave and obvious objections to this view. It shocks one's sense of propriety. It seems unlike the apostle's usual manliness and genuine truthfulness, that he should deal thus with so fond and frivolous, not to say foul and fatal a superstition; employing it merely to point a rhetorical appeal, without one word of warning or denunciation against it. Besides, there is not a trace of the usage in question, till many years after apostolic times, and then only within a very narrow section of the church, suspected with good reason, on other grounds, of unsoundness in the faith. And it is far more probable, that in a subsequent age of declining spirituality and increasing corruption, the practice originated among a few heretics, misinterpreting perhaps the apostle's language, than either that it existed at all in Paul's day, or that if it did, he could treat it so lightly. "The practice was never adopted except by some obscure sects of gnostics, who seem to have founded their custom on this very passage."* The text, misconstrued, may have suggested the usage, not the usage the text.
Of the other meanings that have been put upon the phrase, none are entirely satisfactory and unobjectionable.
That which, perhaps, most commends itself,—at least to the fancy and the heart,—is the one which, retaining still the general idea of substitution, gives it a different turn, making it not a vicarious representation of the persons of the dead, but, as it were, a vicarious occupancy of the position which till death they filled.
The vacancies left in the ranks of the Christian army, when saints and martyrs fall asleep in Jesus, are supplied by fresh recruits, eager to be baptized as they were, and pledged by baptism to fall as they fell, at the post of duty and danger. It is a touching sight which the Lord's baptized host presents to view, especially in troublous times. Column after column advancing to the breach, as on a forlorn hope, in the storming of Satan's citadel of worldly pomp and power, is mowed down by the ruthless fire of persecution. But ever as one line disappears, a new band of volunteers starts up, candidates for the seal of baptism, even though in their case, as in the case of their predecessors in the deadly strife, the seal of baptism is to be the earnest of the bloody crown of martyrdom. It would seem surely to be somewhere in the line of this thought that the key to the perplexing phrase, " baptized for the dead," is to be found. It implies that somehow baptism formed a link of connection between the baptized living and the baptized dead—committing the living to the fortune or fate, whatever it may be, that has already overtaken the dead.
Your baptism constitutes you the substitutes and successors on earth of the holy men and women who have gone before you. It binds you to do their work in life; and to share their destiny in death. But what destiny is that, if the dead rise not at all? What means, in that case, your being baptized for the dead?
*Conybeare and Howson, Life and Epistles of St. Paul, vol. ii. p. 59.
Ed. 1853.
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