Baptism for the Dead: “It’s a Beautiful Thing”

I’ve long liked this brief video explaining “Why Mormons Build Temples.”

At about the 1:16 mark, the late Krister Stendahl — an eminent New Testament scholar, as well as a former bishop of Stockholm in the (Lutheran) Church of Sweden and a former dean of Harvard Divinity School — has some extraordinarily positive and appreciative things to say about the Latter-day Saint practice of baptism for the dead.

At a time when such vicarious baptisms are being widely portrayed in the news media and on the web as unbiblical, occultic, ghoulish, bizarre, shameful, vicious, anti-Semitic, immoral, hateful, and possibly illegal — when, to choose just one specific example, the odious political commentator Keith Olbermann has just named President Thomas S. Monson “one of the worst people in the world” for presiding over the practice — it wouldn’t be a bad thing if believing members of the Church and their friends gave this little video, and Professor Stendahl’s wonderfully affirmative remarks, even wider circulation on the Web and via e-mail than they have already had.

Posted from Santa Clara, California.