Living Dialogical Conversation: Reading John 4:1–42 through the Lens of Post-colonial Indonesian Christianity

Abstract

This article is an analytical description that aims to scrutinize John 4:1–42 to understand how the Gospel of John describes a theological perspective within a certain socio-political context and, conversely, how the socio-political context determines the theological meaning through John’s storytelling model. By using post-colonial imagination as its framework for text analysis, this article aims to construct a dialogue bridge between the text and the context of multicultural Indonesian society. The imaginary bridge as such functions to provide a critical biblical interpretation such as this text, which is often read as the representation of conflictual socio-cultural and religious identities such as in Indonesian society. This article is a biblical-based theological contribution to interpretive biblical studies in countries such as Indonesia with a majority Muslim population, which exposes the construction of socio-religious identity vis-à-vis othering tendencies based on different representations of identity.