The God who seems to depart Noncoercive revelation and self-withdrawing presence as a critique of proselytism and religious spectacle in Luke 24:28–31
Abstract
The Emmaus narrative is commonly read through the lenses of paschal hermeneutics, pastoral accompaniment, or table hospitality. Chauvet and Marion have highlighted Jesus’s vanishing, yet his gesture of acting “as if he were going farther” (prosepoiēsato) has rarely been developed into a category for the ethics of witness. Through a New Testament study employing narrative criticism, in limited dialogue with Louis-Marie Chauvet’s sacramental theology and Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of revelation, this article reads Luke 24:28–31 as a threefold pattern of restraint, table fellowship, and withdrawal. This pattern of “the God who seems to depart” yields a twofold critique: of coercive proselytism in plural Indonesia and of religious spectacle that measures witness by visibility. Constructively, drawing on the pneumatology of Luke–Acts and its Pentecostal interpreters, the article proposes a “pneumatology of consent”: the Spirit opens eyes and hearts as a gift, elicits a free human welcome, and sends witnesses. It thereby offers a framework for attractive witness, distinguished from the attractional church model, and for a church not centered on itself.
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