246 Dimensions of Baptism
people free from other gods—but only into the sole lordship of God.^38
Like Tertullian, Moltmann links calling to discipleship and discipleship to
freedom, but the freedom is that of the kingdom and of the creator. Then
again, discipleship is family and friendship, not oppressive demand. In his
more recent writing, Moltmann retrieves human freedom from its demise
at the hands of 'ever-progressing individualism' which isolates people from
each other and from community in life and even death.^39 Freedom can bepreserved only through dependability and loyalty. The free human being is
'the being that can promise' (Friedrich Nietzsche). Freedom is not escape
but steadfastness. Personal freedom must change from 'choice' and indi-
vidualism to a stress on promise, covenant and community.^40 So Molt-
mann can take on board ethics, discipleship and lordship precisely because
they also imply liberation. But does he link them to baptism?
Like Tertullian, Moltmann is clear that, through baptism, the Church is
called to freedom, for just 'as the Christian Church is called into being
through the proclamation of the Gospel, through baptism it is called to the
freedom of the messianic era'.^41 We should, therefore, hesitate about ad-
ministering baptism typically to infants for they know little of the respon-
sible decision of freedom. Rather baptism should spring from the notion of
'calling' and from practice. We 'should increasingly pay attention to the
freedom of decision and the voluntary nature of faith'.^42 Like Tertullian,
Moltmann thinks baptism most typically belongs to an age when one is
capable of responsible decision. His work, 'The Liberating Feast', is pri-
marily about the sacrament of the Lord's Supper but he generalizes about
the sacraments in it with important results for baptism too. His methodology
is that issues hang together: worship, resurrection, breaking free and human
transcendence all belong to the sacrament in his scheme.^43 Logically these
define baptism too, an approach fully consistent with his handling ofbaptism as outlined above. Moltmann keeps this theme going right into his
- J. Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom God: The Doctrine of God (London:
SCM Press, 1978), p. 219. - J. Moltmann,' Christianity and the Reevaluation of the Values of Modernity and
of the Western World', in M. Volf (ed.), A Passion for God's Reign: Theology, Christian
Learning, and the Christian Self (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 23-43, 37. - Moltmann, 'Christianity and the Reevaluation', pp. 34-38.
- Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, p. 226.
- Moltmann, The Open Church, p. 124.
- J. Moltmann, 'The Liberating Feast', in J-B. Metz and J. Moltmann (eds.),
Faith and the Future: Essays on Theology, Solidarity and Modernity (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1995), pp. 100-108(105-106).