Question

I have a family member that a couple of years ago was taken in by the Mormons (she had a very bad experience in her life).  My grandmother that lived up there died and they had converted her.  She was very senile, so I have no doubt in my mind where she went, she didn't know what she was doing.  But I know they probably went through the Baptism of the Dead.  Now, she quoted to me, some time back, 1 Corinthians 15:29, and I have looked at that and tried to study it and figure out what they are saying, because she said, "It says, right in the Bible, that you baptize for the dead."  But yet Scofield says down below in the footnote, that they are not talking about that.

Answer

Well, Paul is saying, "Why are people baptizing for the dead if there is no resurrection?"  And we are saying, "What in the world does he mean by that?"  Right?  "What is the Baptism for the Dead?"  It isn't even important what he means--to us.  People then knew what he meant.  There was some pagan cult at that time that was doing Baptisms for the Dead, today it would be the Mormons.  But, all Paul is trying to say is, he is trying to prove the validity of resurrection in general.  In other words, the whole chapter is to prove that there is a resurrection, and all he is saying is, "Even the pagans understand that there is a resurrection, or else why would they be baptizing for the dead?"  In other words, he is only using what we would call a natural argument rather than a supernatural one. 

Like we say, for example, the old story of immortality that is told about the little blind boy that was sitting on the top of a hill and he had a kite, and the kite was pulling against the wind.  Somebody said to him, "Can you see the kite?"  He said, "Oh, no sir."  And then he said, "Well then how do you know that it is in the air?"  "Well," he said, "I feel the tug on the string that I hold in my hand."  The old adage was that's the way it is with immortality--even pagan people feel the tug of immortality--that there is life after death.  That is why Indians buried ponies with the dead braves.  That's why people in Greece put a coin in the mouth of the dead body, so that they could pay their fare across the Mystic River of Death.  That's why they put a canoe in a Pharaoh's pyramid, so that he could go down the River of Life in his canoe.  In other words, there is something in the human heart that longs for immortality, and Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 15, "If there is no resurrection, then why are these people baptizing for the dead?  Even the pagans feel the pull of immortality."  And of course it [Baptizing for the Dead] was in error, and it still is with the Mormons that do it.