BAPTISM THEN AND NOW:
DOES MOLTMANN BURY TERTULLIAN OR PRAISE HIM?Roy Kearsley
If you were asked for the names of two theologians unlikely to get on
together in the afterlife, Tertullian and Jiirgen Moltmann could easily
spring to mind. But is it also possible that they could surprise us with an
unexpected concord in their theology? Although poles apart on their
understanding of God's relation to the world, might they actually turn out
to have a shared agenda on the function of baptism? And if they did,
would it not furnish us with an illuminating case-study in comparative
contextualisation? The contrast of culture between these two writers is
certainly stark. Tertullian pits Christ as emperor against such enemies as
Caesar, paganism and liberalising trends in the Church. Moltmann, on the
other hand, pits essential Christianity against the very idea of hierarchical
power, as well as against exclusivism and conservatism in the Church. But
might they, at heart, actually apply baptism in similar ways to their respec-
tive world-settings? And might a comparison lay bare some core baptismal
ingredients surviving across centuries, so giving us important ecumenical
insights? It would be interesting to test this idea by starting in the present
time at Moltmann and working back to Tertullian in the distant past (to
mimic Moltmann's own eschatological method). But it is less distortive to
start with historic baptismal belief and practice as exposed in Tertullian,
and to explore if Moltmann later applies a facelift to them.
The setting for Tertullian's handling of baptism comes crisply defined
from the hands of P. Cramer in an analysis of what it meant in the first
four centuries CE to become a Christian. Chiefly, he says, it meant con-
tempt for paganism, conversion of the 'sick soul', and absorption into the
Christian vision and ethics. It also meant absorption into 'the apparent
paradoxes of its doctrine, into its highly emotive Apocalypticism and...
into its language'.^1 Tertullian fits this pattern perfectly, and more espe-
- P. Cramer, Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages, c. 200-c. 1150
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 46.