An Insider’s Church for Outsiders: The Johannine “Come and See” Passages and Christian Engagement with the World

Abstract

The Gospel of John has a reputation among some New Testament scholars as a factional text designed to reinforce the Johannine Community’s unity amid persecution and excommunication. Recent work, however, has proposed that John is in fact deeply ethical, with an outward-facing mission. This essay builds off this work to propose that John has a definitive missional praxis that he hopes his community will embody as it engages with the world. Examining specifically the “come and see” passages of John 1:39, 1:46, 4:29, and 11:34, this article suggests that John’s method is dialectical: he simultaneously wants those in the church to remain in the church and resist assimilation with “the world”, but he also wants those in the church to go into the world to understand it, empathize with it, and even befriend it, all for the sake of discipleship.