A. C. W.
Answer: “Baptized for the dead” means, in my judgment, simply those that entered (“that are being baptized”) taking the place and filling up the ranks of the deceased saints. For grace in the face of all dangers keeps up God’s standing army here below. It refers to ver. 18, as 30 to ver. 19 (20-28 being an evident parenthesis of great value and positive), which resume the apostle’s interrupted argument. The resurrection is the key to suffering and deaf itself for Christ’s name. Without such a hope it were folly to join such a devoted band; but with it, His name will never lack recruits in faith even for a death or life of suffering. To suppose (like Dean; Stanley and Alford) a superstition alluded to, and the apostle dealing gently with such folly as “survivors getting baptized on behalf of friends deceased without baptism,” seems as contrary to his character as in itself strange. In all probability what Bishop Hall calls “the usual but ungrounded practice” was a conceit grafted on this verse misunderstood. Again, Luther’s idea of “over the dead”—i.e., over their graves, is another imaginary superstition, worthy of the middle ages. Nor is it a tolerable interpretation that the plural is used for the singular and refers to the Lord. Sir R. Ellys seems to have first suggested the true thought in his “Fortuita, Sacra” (1728), adopted and popularized by Doddridge in the “Family Expositor.”