Two Approaches

Among the images of Jesus now articulated in Indonesia, a number of the same approaches surface time and again. Generally speaking, we see two divergent perspectives in the several variations: an approach that attempts to bridge the gulf between Christianity and Islam as much as possible by taking its starting point in concepts that it shares with the Muslims, and an approach that uses images from the religious tradition of Indonesia more or less as a bridge between Islam and Christianity. The first approach is called the dialogue approach and the second the contextual, even though we are of course aware that in Indonesia dialogue also has a strongly contextual character, and that the contextual approach on Java has certainly not lost sight of the aspect of dialogue. We have just stated that that approach even constitutes indirectly the bridge to dialogue. In the case of the contextual approach, we must point out that, sometimes, the “traditional Indonesian” can no longer be precisely distinguished from the Islamic. Indonesian Islam has sometimes (not always) simply become too Indonesian for that and the traditional Indonesian too Islamic. It is nevertheless meaningful to introduce this distinction for the sake of the bridge function.

It is clear that the two approaches can also give rise to the necessary questions. It should be asked critically if the Islamic interpretations of Jesus and the old Indonesian religions do not in fact determine the space for the “Indonesian Jesus.” In a certain sense, that is in fact the case, as that was also the case with the New Testament Jesus and the early Christian Jesus.