276 Dimensions of Baptism
divine which will in some way complete us, make us more whole. This is
equivalent to creating religious idols. But God was in Christ and in the
second person of the Trinity we have the second mode of God's hidden-
ness, the God who comes to us on the cross and in the exile.
Then we come to the Spirit, whom Jenson properly identifies as the one
whose being is almost defined as hiddenness: 'Thepneuma blows where it
wills, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or
where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit' (Jn 3.8). In
trinitarian terms this means that the Spirit is God's personal freedom as the
third person of the Trinity whose self-giving frees the Father to be the
Father of the crucified Son and frees the Son to be the Servant of the Father.
Here Jenson is at his most creative and he is worth quoting at length:
The Spirit is God as his own future. Since God is his own future, that future
cannot be alien to him or beyond his will, as ours can. But, though it strains
the capabilities of language to say it, somehow God the Spirit is truly a
future for the Father and the Son, that is, surprising when it comes and
present only in anticipation... Here I suggest is the encompassing mode of
God's hiddenness. God after all 'is Spirit'... As we are creatures and chil-
dren of the triune God, we are involved in the play of an infinite freedom.This greater emphasis on the trinitarian dimension of the hiddenness of
God, especially the understanding of the Spirit as the 'encompassing mode'
of God's hiddenness, takes us well beyond Luther's theology of the cross
and also marks an important move beyond Barth's dialectical deployment
of the concept which, I have argued, understates the role of the Spirit.
Jenson's insights on the action of the Spirit as the freedom of God's future
lend themselves to application to a theology of baptism, to which we now
turn.
IV
It is my contention that Christian baptism must be viewed fully as a human
action which is grounded in and only properly constituted by God's action.
It is perfectly possible to regard such human action as free yet, at the same
time, as an expression of the true freedom granted by God's action in the
Spirit. If baptism is the supreme place where the hidden work of God is
celebrated openly, then we see in the public act of human promise a
response which is only made possible by the Spirit drawing us into par-
- Jenson, The Hidden and Triune God', p. 12.