PERCEPTION AND DISCOURSE OF RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH IN KOREA

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate using CDA as the main research tool the image and discourse of Russian Orthodox Church and its missionaries on the Korean peninsula by the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as their interpretation of such concepts as “religion”, “faith” and “believer”. Since Orthodox Church commenced its activities there almost simultaneously with Western Christianity, transformed by the Reformation, but attracted only a relatively small number of followers and had a somewhat “non-modern” understanding of the above concepts, it provides a representative case for studying the relationship between religion and modernity. In fact, Russian missionaries could not withstand competition from Protestants, who had remarkably fast subjugated discourse and common sense of religion in the region, and eventually gained the image of “old religion.” The author argues that one of the key reasons was its incompatibility with modernity from the perspective of many Koreans. Furthermore, in contrast to Protestantism, which at that point earned the status of truly rational and “ideal” religion, Russian Orthodox Church, full of complex rituals and traditions, could not become the so-called “problematic Other” and thus was assumed as archaic and unhelpful relic of antiquity.