선교사와 ‘하나님’의 만남 - 개신교 용어가 ‘하나님’으로 귀결된 이유 -

Abstract

The issue of translating the Christian god, Yahweh, into what term could greatly influenced the understanding and acceptance of Christianity by indigenous people, so missionaries argued about whether to use the term “general god” or the name of a specific god used in the mission. Therefore, we have looked at the reason why “Hananim” was chosen as the term for the God’s name of Protestantism, even though there were “Cheonju” used by the Catholic Church and the general terms “Sangje” and “god”. In order to find out the view of each missionary in a number of perspectives, we considered how they thought of the origin and attributes of “Hananim” and what emotional feeling they had about the term “Hananim”. As a result, missionaries thought the origin of “Hananim” was “Lord in heaven” or “Great One God,” and attributes were considered to be equal to Christianity's “Yahwe” as they had omnipotence, battery, absence, love, and uniqueness. The missionaries who reached this conclusion not only thanked the term “Hananim” but also even felt the atmosphere of ancient Jewish culture in Korean culture with the term “Hananim”. Missionaries had a degenerative view of religion, which turned out to be a penetrative and holistic look at the reason why they chose “hananim” as the term. From this, we could see that the choice of terms was an important basis for revealing the theology of missionaries.