Baptism for the Dead

Baptism for the Dead--A New Look at an Old Problem

THE TOMB was no longer a one-way street. The grave was no longer a dead-end road. The resurrection of Christ was breaking the way into a new life. Now there was a way out, a way of escape to life. Incomprehensible? Yes. Unbelievable? No.

Hans-Gunther Leib received the Ph.D. degree from the California Graduate School of Theology. He also holds the M.A. and M.Div. degrees from Andrews University.

THE TOMB was no longer a one-way street. The grave was no longer a dead-end road. The resurrection of Christ was breaking the way into a new life. Now there was a way out, a way of escape to life. Incomprehensible? Yes. Unbelievable? No.

Yet how fast we forget. Hardly had twenty-five years passed when Paul was forced to remind the church in Corinth that faith in Christ's resurrection was the only basis for their personal resurrection. Only if Christ is risen are those who bind themselves to Him by faith resurrected with Him.

By logic, dialectic, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, sometimes even irony, Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 attempted to convince the skeptics, intellectuals, and forgetful church members that the resurrection is the center of the Christian faith. Give it up, and all the preaching about Christ be comes nonsense, faith in Christ becomes pious self-deception. And baptism? Why be baptized? "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?" (verse 29).

Embedded in this dramatic discussion we find this problem text. And what an eventful past it boasts throughout its history of interpretation. What does Paul mean by bringing baptism, death, and resurrection into such a close relationship?

In order to understand this problem text we must first ask, Do the Scriptures anywhere propose a vicarious saving faith? A vicarious baptism? A vicarious life of faith that is able to accumulate so much credit that the "bank of salvation" can transfer from a "faith-full" account to a debtor's account?

The faith even of a hero of faith, of a celebrated saint, cannot substitute, neither can it be accounted to another person (Eze. 14:14). Faith in Christ is a highly personal matter. It is nontransferable.

"For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad" (2 Cor. 5:10).

It is important to keep this Biblical conception of the personal responsibility of the individual before Cod in mind if we want to explore the meaning of a "baptism for the dead."

C. Clemen separates Paul's conception of baptism from that of the Corinthians. Just as Paul does not mean to recommend drunkenness in 1 Thessalonians 5:7, though using it as an argument, so he does not necessarily sanction the Corinthian baptismal, practice. He simply uses it as a handy argument in his discussion, without any evaluation.

Karl Barth in his book Die Auferstehung der Toten (The Resurrection of the Dead) suggests that we let the vicarious baptism stand if it cannot be avoided as a "hellenistic-Christian fringe possibility in all its ambiguity" (page 104). It is interesting to hear him lecturing: "Nothing I would rather do than join this august company [Luther, Calvin, Bengel, Hofmann] too" (page 102). Unfortunately, their exegesis cannot be maintained.

With verse 23 ff. you have seen that I am not insensitive to the subtleties of Hofmann's exegesis and how I wish he could help me out of this dilemma, but I think: it just can't be done in this case. That "the dead" here all of a sudden should become those "dead in sins," . . . this alone to my feeling is an act of violence making it impossible for me to come along as much as I would like to. . . . Page 103.

Paul Dtirselen in Die Taufe Fur die Toten, Theol. Stud. & Krit., 1903 (The Baptism for the Dead), after investigating different at tempts at solution, comes to the conclusion that Paul's argument in verse 29 can be convincing for the resurrection hope only if it concerns a generally recognized matter that the Corinthian church has in common with the rest of the Christian churches. This can only be the Christian baptism in its normal, literal form, which, according to Romans 6, is tied together with the resurrection.

Diirselen therefore suggests a change of the ordinary punctuation. In the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament there are no punctuation marks to be found, no spaces between sentences, not even between the individual words. One letter follows the other like pearls on a string. Only gradually, centuries later, were punctuation marks introduced according to the best understanding of copyists, theologians, and translators in order to divide this jungle of letters logically. How ever, the introduction of a comma may already represent an interpretation depending upon the theological background and perception of the individual placing it.

B. M. Foschini approaches 1 Corinthians 15:29 totally ignoring any previous punctuation marks, and placing them anew according to his contextual, topical under standing of the New Testament. Thus he divides our two traditional long interrogation sentences into four shorter ones:

For what shall those do who are baptized?

For the dead (perhaps)?

If the dead are not raised at all,

why then are they baptized at all?

For the dead (perhaps)?

When we cut the traditional long sentence into two interrogatory sentences, what have we really won? The dubious phraseology "for the dead" is still with us.

First, the long interrogatory sentence communicates an in herent bias toward the strange practice of a vicarious baptism. When the long sentence is split, this impression can be averted, at least reduced.

Second, instead of a seemingly factual statement about a baptism for the dead, we now get an ironical counter question by employing only the phraseology "for the dead," challenging the validity of baptism as such under the presuppositions of the Corinthians.

The problem of 1 Corinthians 15 centers in verses 12-19: If there is no resurrection of the dead, Christ did not rise (verse 13), preaching is in vain, faith is in vain (verse 14), you are still in your sins (verse 17), you are lost (verse 18), i.e., you are dead. In short: either there is a resurrection or you remain dead. This resurrection-death issue is all of a sudden enlarged by involving baptism. What has baptism to do with the resurrection and death? Baptism is a symbol of the burial of the old man of sin and the resurrection of the new man in Christ. Thus the objective of baptism is precisely not that of remaining among the dead. If, however as they contend falsely there is no such thing as a resurrection (verse 12), well, why then be baptized at all? Therefore Paul's ironical counter question: Be baptized what for? For the dead, perhaps? To remain dead, to remain among the dead after all? Are you baptized to belong to the dead? As if that made sense! Was your faith in your baptism in vain? "In vain" can be considered almost synonymous with "for the dead."

Diirselen, furthermore, pulls the last one of the two similar counter questions of verse 29, for the dead, over to our traditional verse 30:

"Is it for the dead why we are in danger every hour?"

Is it in vain what we have sacrificed?

Diirselen is not acting arbitrarily. We must not overlook the fact that the verse division of our Bible, just like its punctuation, is not found in the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The verse division retained in our Bibles today was introduced first in 1551 by a Frenchman, Stephanus, and therefore is not part of the inspired text of the New Testament.

Instead of squeezing and twisting to shift the whole problem to a symbolical level, it is possible with Diirselen's and Foschini's suggestion to read verse 29 in a new light in the simplest and most natural manner. Thus verse 29 remains in harmony with the New Testament position on baptism, on man (state of the dead), on righteousness by personal faith in Christ alone (nontransferable faith or "human" righteousness), and on the resurrection as the central concern of the whole of chapter 15. In these two verses Paul confronts the Corinthians with the inter dependence between baptism and the belief in the resurrection, forcing them, as it were, to face the decisive question: If there is allegedly no resurrection at all, what are they baptized for at all? For the dead? To remain among the dead?

Although it may be impossible to produce a 100 percent satisfactory solution, this interpretation would appear to be the most adequate. The history of exegesis has offered us many an arbitrary interpretation for this problem text. But our text can be interpreted only within the framework of the view that Christ is at the center of our salvation, and we must also take the following into consideration:

Personal baptism "into the death of Christ."

Personal life of faith and accountability to the Lord.

Personal faith in the resurrection to life eternal through Christ.


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Hans-Gunther Leib received the Ph.D. degree from the California Graduate School of Theology. He also holds the M.A. and M.Div. degrees from Andrews University.

October 1973

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