Korea's Confucian Culture of Learning as a Gateway to Christianity: Protestant Missions in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

As Protestant missionaries landed on Korean shores in the late nineteenth century, a great deal of effort went into creating a Christian identity using literacy and literature as cornerstones of missional strategy that would become the benchmark of the Christian experience for Koreans. The relationship between the Protestant missions' emphasis on reading and Korea's Confucian culture of learning is of particular importance for an understanding of the growth of Christianity in Korea because Christianity's close association with literacy and sacred writings energised the Confucian imagination of Korean culture. Perceiving the reading of Christian literature, including the bible, as a salient way to salvation, Koreans turned to reading and memorising the scriptures to experience the manifestation of God's revelation. The high respect afforded to education and learning as a dominant cultural value constitutes an important, if overlooked, element in the replication of faith in Korean society that reproduced the gospel under their own familiar terms.