Radix et hospitium: The dialectic of prophetic radicalism and hospitality as a paradigm of religious moderation in the ecclesiology of the early church

Abstract

This article proposes an alternative paradigm for the discourse on religious moderation by exploring the dialectic between prophetic radicalism and hospitality in the early church’s ecclesiology. Through a narrative–theological analysis of the texts of Acts and the Pauline epistles, this study demonstrates that the early Christian community did not embody moderation as a middle ground that avoids extremes but rather as a creative tension between the depth of rooted identity (radix) and radical openness to the other (hospitium). By integrating insights from the theology of friendship (befriending), this research argues that the early church’s dialectical model offers a constructive critique of Indonesia’s approach to religious moderation, which tends to be pragmatic–accommodative and lacks theological depth, and proposes the paradigm of religious mediation as a more dynamic alternative.
Contribution: Within the intradisciplinary field of systematic and historical theology, this article offers a constructive contribution by formulating the paradigm of radix et hospitium as a coherent ecclesiological framework that unites prophetic radicalism and hospitality in a dialectical relationship. The article advances Pentecostal pneumatology by demonstrating that the Spirit’s work in the early church inherently generates communities that are both prophetically bold and hospitably open, thereby providing a pneumatological corrective to ecclesiological models that treat these as competing impulses. Interdisciplinarily, the article engages the sociology of religion by critically examining Indonesia’s state-constructed, pragmatic–accommodative framework of religious moderation through communal formation theory, while incorporating insights from political theology on religious identity and civic coexistence in pluralistic democracies.