KEARSLEY Baptism Then and Now 249
bring discipleship out of the closet and drag it into the public realm. He
will not let discipleship and baptism be privatized. This brings us to anotherpoint of contact with Tertullian. Freedom is the golden fleece, not so much
because of modernity, but because of Moltmann's own deep personal
experience of war-time incarceration,^51 the struggle of the Confessing
Church and his growing knowledge of oppression around the world.Baptism and the Christian's Public Calling
Moltmann's position on the function of baptism appears in a few crucial
pages of Church in the Power of the Spirit. They are well-known and
almost as daring as Barth's attacks on infant baptism throughout the twen-
tieth century. Bauckham notes that Church in the Power of the Spirit did
not attract as much theological discussion as other works by Moltmann.
He surmises that one reason for this is that its controversial thrust lay in apractical direction, demanding reform of church life and structure, rather
than in central theological territory.^52 But one suspects that silence was
considered the best reaction to contentions which leaned in the direction of
congregational and 'credo-Baptist' practice. His view on baptism is a good
case in point. But it was not just that Moltmann mirrored Tertullian's con-
cern for responsible decision in baptism. It was also that Moltmann saw
baptism as an occasion for liberation from the power of public orthodoxy.
In baptism the disciple is publicly set in Christian fellowship and the
trinitarian history of God.^53 Baptism is also a public sign of the life of the
Holy Spirit.^54 It welcomes the disciple into a public fellowship, for call-
ings can only be pursued if the Church is a 'recognizable'' 'messianic
fellowship of service for the kingdom of God'.^55
From this perspective, infant baptism now needs much validation. Molt-
mann's understanding of its functioning is basic to everything he says.
Infant baptism is the 'basic pillar of the corpus christianorum, the "Chris-
tian society" which acknowledges—or at least does not reject—Christian-
ity in its widest sense'.^56 But infant baptism forces believer's baptism into
being purely private and inner. Hence baptism loses 'the character of a- Rasmusson, The Church as Polis, pp. 104-105.
- R. Bauckham, The Theology ofJurgen Moltmann (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,
1995), p. 119. - Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, pp. 5-6.
- Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, p. 12.
- Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, p. 242.
- Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, p. 229.