Mormons practice a ritual substitutionary baptism for relatives who have already died. They base this practice on the text quoted above. In Mormon thinking, family relationships last forever; even death does not undo them. Through baptism for the dead, deceased relatives are offered an opportunity in the hereafter – as a voluntary choice afterwards – to accept the gospel of Christ, and to be received into the fellowship of believers. For Mormons, then, this ‘baptism for the dead’ is a substitutionary baptism of living people, acting on behalf of ancestors who are no longer alive. This also explains why Mormons are so preoccupied with tracing their genealogies. Their headquarters in Salt Lake City has access to the most extensive collection of genealogical records in the world.

Not a Substitutionary Baptism⤒🔗

Is this what Paul had in mind? Indeed, there are Biblical scholars who interpret 1 Corinthians 15:29 in this way. In the Greco-Roman world, people did try to assist deceased relatives in their relocation to the other world. Sacrifices were brought to the gods, and memorial meals were organized. In the same way, so goes the explanation, there would have been believers in Corinth who underwent a substitutionary baptism for the benefit of relatives or friends who had not (yet) been converted; posthumously they were then regarded as Christians.

Substitutionary baptism, however, was unknown as a Christian practice or in the early church, with the possible exception of sectarian groups such as the Marcionites, who, according to some church fathers, practised this baptism.

In addition, the term ‘the dead’ in this chapter always refers to an unspecified group, as distinct from ‘the living’. Paul says nothing about the identity of these ‘dead’. We simply do not know whether they might have been relatives of Corinthian believers. Neither does Paul offer any comment about his own opinion of the practice of baptism for the dead itself; it appears that there was a fairly limited group within the church that had this view of baptism, just as there was another group that denied the resurrection from the dead (v 12).

Other Interpretations←⤒🔗

A number of alternative explanations of this puzzling text have been advanced. For instance, ‘baptism’ is sometimes understood to be a symbolic expression, describing either an involuntary experience, something which washes over you (see Mark 10:38; Luke 12:50) or an immersion in the practices of attending to the dead. For pagans, these practices consisted of sacrifices and memorial meals; among Jews this would refer to the ritual washings prescribed for those who had touched a dead body (see Sirach 34:30, Hebrews 9:10).

However, such a symbolic interpretation seems unlikely: after all, the first chapter of this letter addresses a concrete issue concerning baptism that was playing out in the church of Corinth. Who has baptized you is not important, writes Paul: the one Christian baptism must transcend all partisan divisions within the congregation (1 Corinthians 1:14-17).

In the footsteps of the early church fathers, we might best think of this as the normal baptism with water. In a manner that the context points us to: people were baptized for the benefit of their own body, which in Adam is under sentence of death (ch. 15:22). After all, do we not all stand with one foot in the grave? In other words, they were not baptized for the benefit of others, those who had already died, but for themselves, so that when they died, they would be physically set free from the power of death. Thanks to their connection with Christ in baptism, believers come to share in the resurrection and eternal life (in that case, the Greek preposition huper would have a causative meaning here: ‘because of’, or ‘on behalf of’, as in 2 Corinthians 1:11b or Philippians 1:29). It may be that some believers delayed their baptism until death was imminent, but that is not clear from the text.

Did Paul regard this view of the Corinthians as tending towards a form of superstition, as if baptism itself had magical power to save from death? In any case, he seems to take some distance from it, referring to its adherents in the third person: ‘those who are baptised for the dead’. Nowhere in his letters does Paul himself make such an explicit connection between baptism and belief in the resurrection. Still, he does not deny this relationship, and he uses this somewhat peculiar view of baptism among the Corinthians as an argument to highlight the reality of the resurrection. If the dead are not raised in the future, then being baptized loses all significance, even for the present!

Baptism and the Resurrection←⤒🔗

Whatever ‘baptism for the dead’ may have been taken to mean, and whatever the motives for this practice might have been, it is clear that Paul constructs his argument concerning the resurrection by asking rhetorical questions that his readers could easily answer for themselves. On the basis of Christ’s resurrection, he had argued that death is not invincible (vv. 20-28). What are people who are baptized for the dead trying to accomplish, Paul now asks his readers; why would they do such a thing? The implied answer is clear enough: they do so from a conviction that there is life after death, not just a continued spiritual existence, but also a resurrection of the body. And their aim is that they, like every baptized Christian – in the words of the Reformed Form for Baptism – “may finally be presented without blemish among the assembly of God’s elect in life eternal”.​