Walking in Parallel: Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity in Korea, 1899–1945

The history of the Korean Church is marked by its unfailing enthusiasm toward the Bible in general and the OT Prophets in particular. Well before Protestant Christianity was introduced to Korea, Korean nobility had already read the Bible in the late 18th century through their contact with French Roman Catholic missionaries working in China. Some Korean trading merchants participated in the translation of the Bible into Korean by helping John Ross, a Scottish missionary to China and Manchuria, in his translation of the Bible into Korean. Even a Confucian noble man like Yi Soo-Jung himself translated the Gospel of Luke as early as the late 19th century in Japan. No wonder Korean Christianity has been called a Bibleloving or Bible-committed one. Faced with the decline of their mother country, Korean Christians (both Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians) specially put their trust in the OT and its bountiful promises and prophecies designed to sustain the people of Israel in many national crises and tribulations. The OT provided them with many inspiring lessons and convictions because of its apparently nationalistic tone and universal vision of a peaceful world full of freedom, justice, and equality. The book of Isaiah, among others, has for several reasons been one of the most widely read OT books in Korea since Christianity was introduced to Korean people in the late 19th century: its messianic hope, its sociopolitical oracles, and its frequent quotations in the NT. A survey of the uses and interpretations of the book of Isaiah illustrates how Korean Christians and Bible scholars have appropriated its message in close response to their contemporary sociopolitical challenges. The present essay reviews how both the Korean Church and academia have read and interpreted the book of Isaiah these two past two centuries. It also pays special attention to how the socio-religious milieu of Korea influenced Korean people s reading and interpretation of the book. To this end, the present article examines commentaries, monographs, articles, and important books of sermons which deal with the book of Isaiah with attention to themes and methods. For this reason the present essay takes a historical approach to major works on the book of Isaiah and categorizes them into several types in accordance with their exegetical method, focus, and targeted reader. Through its diachronical analysis of major works on the Book of Isaiah, the present essay categorizes all Korean works on Isaiah into three types of interpretation: pre-critical and over-Christological (supercessionistic) interpretation, historical-critical interpretation, and historical-canonical interpretation. The initial stage of the Korean people s reading of Isaiah has been marked by its supercessionistic and spiritualizing tendency. The middle stage of Korean churches and Christians has moved a bit toward the historical-critical reading with relatively insufficient attention to the pastoral and devotional function of the Book of Isaiah. The latest stage seeks to steer a middle road between Christological and spiritualizing reading on the one hand and historical and canonical reading on the other hand. The present essay concludes that the interpretation and reading of the Book of Isaiah in Korea has been undergoing various stages of change in accordance with the societal and cultural environments they have faced.

Black Catholicism

This study offers an analysis of how Protestant Christianity in South Korea incorporated many beliefs and practices of Korean traditional religions in order to make the new faith more appealing to the masses. The paper also examines the way in which specific Protestant doctrines and practices were modified or accentuated to suit the disposition of the Korean people. In agreement with Confucianism, for example, Protestant churches in general emphasized the values of diligence, self-cultivation, righteous living, and, most importantly, filial piety. By overtly and subtly permitting ancestral rites to be conducted by Christians, moreover, Protestant Christianity evaded successfully the potential alienation of the tradition-bound Koreans. From Buddhism, Protestant Christianity syncretized such elements as the daily dawn prayer and all-night prayer as well as the practices of baekilgido (“a hundred-day prayer”) and chunilgido (“a thousand-day prayer”). Hundreds of prayer centers that exist deep in the mountains also manifest a Buddhist influence. Shamanistic influences are also evident in Korean Protestantism, replete with the latter’s emphasis on this-worldly success (health, prosperity, long life, etc.), faith healing, and conceptualization of God as being merciful and generous. What all of this reveals is that Christian conversion in South Korea did not involve an exclusivistic change of religious affiliation, meaning that it did not require the repudiation of traditionally held beliefs. Instead, millions of South Koreans eagerly embraced Protestant Christianity precisely because the new faith was advanced as an extension or continuation of traditional religious practices.

The author examines the changing role of Protestant Christianity in Korea from the time of its introduction in 1884 to the modern era. He argues that this imported faith acted as an agent of modernization in the closing years of the 19th century, emerged as nationalistic during Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945, and became submerged in the social and political climate obsessed with the pursuit of economic development in the 1960s and 1970s. Through these times, Protestant Christianity in Korea has shown great resilience: transformative in the beginning, prominently nationalistic during the middle period, and dominant as a religious group today, yet with little sense of responsibility to transcend the status quo.

This chapter discusses the rituals and beliefs of the Han Chinese majority, their local communities, indigenous popular religious sects, Daoism and Buddhism, as well as Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity. After many years of suppression, since the 1980s these traditions have been revived in many areas of the country, community festivals in honour of local gods are again being carried out, Daoist and Buddhist clergy are once again being ordained, and there are more Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians than ever before. As for Confucianism, its ethical principles permeated late traditional Chinese culture, and have had considerable influence on the beliefs and values of the practitioners of other religious traditions and on the veneration of ancestors by families and lineages. In Taiwan there are still temples dedicated to Confucius, and some popular sects for which he is the chief deity, but during much of the twentieth century he was attacked on the Mainland as a symbol of all that was out-moded and backward. In recent decades, however, there has been an attempt by some intellectuals in China to rediscover his teachings, and the shrine and tomb in his hometown in Shandong Province have been restored. Before we explore these religions, however, a few words should be said about Islam in China. Muslim merchants reached China by both land and sea by the late seventh century, and eventually settled in many parts of the country, mostly in the northwest.

In East Asia during the second half of the 19th century, overseas mission work by Protestant churches thrived. Missionaries built schools and hospitals and effectively used them for evangelism. In the 20th century when Social Gospel Movement was expanding, medical work has been recognized as a significant mission service in and by itself. This article reviewed the construction and characteristics of missions work conducted by Canadian Presbytery; missionary doctors and Korean doctors who worked at the mission hospitals; why the missionary medical work had to stop; and career paths taken by Korean doctors upon liberation from Japanese occupation. The Canadian Presbytery missionaries, unlike other denomination missionaries, were rather critical of Imperial Japan, but supportive towards Koreans. This could have stemmed from the reflection of their own experience of once a colony of British Empire and also their value system that promotes egalitarian, democratic and progressive theology. The Sung-jin and Ham-heung Mission Bases were a community, interacting organically as a 'Triangle of Church, School and Hospital.' The missionaries mobilized the graduates from Christian schools and organized a Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). Some of the graduates were trained to become medical doctors or assistants and worked at mission hospitals. Missionary doctors' approaches to balancing evangelism and medical practice varied. For example, Robert Grieson went through confusion and struggled to balance conflicting roles as a pastor for evangelism and also as a physician. Kate McMillan, on the other hand, had less burden for evangelism than Grieson, and focused on medical work by taking advantage of the opportunity that, as a woman, she can easily approach Korean women. Still another case was Florence Murray who practised evangelism within the hospital setting, and successfully carried out the role as a hospital administrator, going beyond 'women's work' as McMillan did. Korean doctors and assistants who worked at the mission hospitals had seen the spread of Protestantism in their youth; had received modern education; had experienced the fall of own country in 1910 and nationwide protest against Japan in 1919. The majority of them were graduates of Severance Medical College, the hub of missionary medicine at the time. After the resignation from the mission hospitals, 80 percent of them became self-employed general practitioners. The operations of the mission hospitals began to contract in 1930 due to tightened control by Imperial Japan. Shrine worship imposed on Christians caused internal conflict and division among missionaries and brought about changes in the form and contents of the mission organization. The incidence of the assault of Dr. Grieson brought about the dissolution of Sung-jin mission base and the interruption of the operation of Je-dong Hospital. As the Pacific War expanded, missionaries were driven out of Korea and returned home. In conclusion, the missions work by Canadian Presbytery missionaries had greatly impacted Protestantism in Korea. The characteristics of Canadian Presbytery were manifested in their support of Korean nationalism movement, openness for Social Gospel, and maintaining equal footing with Korean Christians. Specifically we note the influence of these characteristics in Chosun doctors who had worked in the mission hospitals. They operated their own hospitals or clinics in a manner similar to the mission hospitals by providing treatment for poor patients free of charge or for a nominal fee and treating the patients in a kind and humanistic way. After the 1945 Liberation, Korean doctors'career paths split into two directions. most of them defected to South Korea and chose the path to work as general practitioners. A few of them remained in North Korea and became educator of new doctors. It is meaningful that former doctors of Canadian missionary hosptal became dean of 2 medical colleges among 3 of all in early North Korea. This article does not cover the comparative analysis of the medical work by the missionaries of Canadian Presbytery and other denominations. It is desirable to include this analysis of the contents and the comparison in a future study of Korean doctors who participated in the mission hospitals, by denomination and by geographical region.

This chapter is about the Protestant part and discusses Protestant history and institutions because they are by far the larger of the two streams of Christianity and, until only very recently, by far the more visible. The early colonial period is an identifiable phase of Protestant civil society because of several well-known cases where Christians and the colonial regime tested each other. While Protestant Christianity in South Korea has established a record of independence and self-sustenance, it is far from realizing its full potential as a force in society. The Presbyterian Church started splitting as soon as the missionaries began relinquishing control in the 1930s. During the democracy movement of the 1980s, many Korean Protestants were forced to put aside their basic social conservatism and automatic anti-communism as their own communities were pressured and even attacked by the state under military rule. Keywords: civil society; colonial regime; democracy movement; Korea; military rule; Protestant Christianity; social conservatism

Reviewed by: Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea Hee An Choi, Clinical Assistant Professor of Practical Theology, Director of the Anna Howard Shaw (Research) Center Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea. By Timothy S. Lee, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010, xvi, 228 p. From 1885 to the present, Christianity has shown extraordinary growth as one of the most influential religions in South Korea. It was rapidly indigenized and transformed through its encounter with Korean culture. Because of the unparalleled success of Christianity and its influence upon Korean society, especially in contrast with other religions, there are numerous theories concerning the nature and causes of its extraordinary growth. Throughout this book, Timothy S. Lee brings a new perspective to this issue and gives special attention to the role of evangelical Protestantism, providing critical and in-depth [End Page 194] analysis of the political, socio-cultural and theological factors involved in the growth of Christianity in Korea. By focusing on specific periods of time in the history of Korean Christianity, he offers three sub-theses in each chapter that he uses to explain the success of Korean evangelicalism: 1) "it appealed powerfully to multitudes of Koreans as a religion of salvation" (xiv); 2) "it interacted sympathetically with Korean nationalism and South Korean anti-communism" (xiv); and 3) it involved unrelenting "proselytization efforts" (xv). This provocative framework brings readers to a broader and more multidimensional understanding of Korean evangelism, its role in the growth of Korean Christianity, and its impact on Korean society. In the first chapter, Lee explores the early history of Christianity in Korea by focusing on a specific historical event, the March First Independence Movement, as well as on the spiritual revivals taking place in the period from the 1880s to the end of the 1910s. He considers this period as a "breakthrough for a new moral order." Because of the social and political turmoil of the latter years of Chosŏn, many national leaders as well as ordinary people sought out new ideologies. Because of this trend, the Catholic Church, for example, persevered, survived, and even grew during this period, even though Catholics were at this time being persecuted and tortured. When Protestant missionaries arrived in Korea during this time of complex national and international upheaval, they promoted the Christian faith as a way of saving the "souls of Koreans." To thwart the Korean independence movement, Protestant missionaries attempted to turn the people's attention to revivals and urged Korean Christians to stay away from political movements. Lee uses the Million Movement and the great revival to illustrate how the missionaries' efforts to save the souls of Koreans also deflected them from involvement in the fight for Korean independence. While missionaries tried to show the superiority of Christianity over Koreanized indigenous religions and culture, they were also caught in a dilemma over whether to support Korean independence or be silent about Japanese colonial violence. However, it was inevitable that Korean Christians would become involved in the political fight for Korean independence, despite the missionaries' efforts to prevent them. Lee illustrates how Korean church leaders actively participated in the Korean political movement and how missionaries were finally compelled to become involved in supporting Korean [End Page 195] nationalism, pointing to the March First Independence Movement as a turning point. In the second chapter, Lee seeks to explain Korean Christianity and its conflicts with other religions and communism during the period from 1920 to 1953. He points to the lives of three spiritual leaders (Kil Sŏnju, Kim Iktu, and Yi Yongdo) as examples of how evangelical thought influenced Korean Christianity during this period. As Korean evangelicalism became involved in conflicts among missionaries, Koreans, and Japanese, it also became a force in the struggle between evangelicals and communists in North Korea. While North Korea persecuted Christians and denounced American imperialism through Christianity, evangelicalism continued to grow in South Korea, with evangelical revivals being used as a major tool for promoting Christianity. In describing these revivals, Lee introduces the three spiritual leaders, Kil Sŏnju, Kim Iktu, and Yi Yongdo. He characterizes Kil Sŏnju as propagating the millenarian belief in the second coming of Christ, Kim Iktu as primarily a faith...

Reviewed by: Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea by Albert L. Park Carl Young Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea by Albert L. Park. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 307pp. Research on Korean activism and nationalism during the Japanese colonial period is often focused on elite and urban movements. This is in spite of the fact that the vast majority of Koreans at this time still lived in rural areas, even though industrialization and urbanization was changing Korean society. Much of the research on the social and political outlook of Korean activism in colonial times also centers on the importance for Korea to not only seek independence, but also to establish an industrial capitalist economy or an industrial socialist economy as the foundation of a “modern” nation-state. Organized religion also played an important role in Korean activism and nationalism, although it is often felt that its influence declined in the 1920s and 1930s. Albert Park’s book Heaven on Earth attempts to remedy this neglect by focusing on Protestant Christian and Ch’ŏndogyo agrarian activism in colonial Korea in the 1920s and 1930s. These movements emphasized the importance of agriculture as the foundation of Korea’s economy and society and called for improvements in agricultural technology and cooperative organization of Korean agriculture as an alternative to industrialization and the social upheaval that it provoked. Park’s book is divided into two parts. The first part is made up of chapters outlining the origins of Tonghak/Ch’ŏndogyo and Protestant Christianity in Korea and their connection with social activism; economic and social changes in colonial Korea and their impact on rural society, agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization; and lastly, the origins of religious social ideology in Korea in [End Page 269] the 1920s and 1930s, especially as a response to anti-religious discourses that were gaining influence after the failure of the March 1919 independence demonstrations and the rise of secular socialist and bourgeois nationalist thought. Park uses the examples of Yi Tonhwa, a prominent Ch’ŏndogyo thinker, Hong Pyŏngsŏn of the YMCA, and the Presbyterian activist Pae Minsu to show how some religious activists reacted to the interactions of social and economic change and the place of religion in relation to modernity. These thinkers, in their different ways, came to the conclusion that modernization did not necessarily imply industrialization or secularization. Instead, a focus on cooperative organization of agriculture infused with religious principles would permit the majority of the Korean population to access the benefits of modernity while remaining in the countryside and thus reduce the social upheaval that came with industrial urbanization. The second part of the book focuses more specifically on the organization of agricultural cooperatives and campaigns of literacy and education to help promote peasant self-improvement. Denmark had become the showcase for agrarian cooperatives and the Ch’ŏndogyo-led Chosŏn nongminsa, Hong’s YMCA and Pae Minsu’s Presbyterian movement all inspired themselves from the Danish model. These movements were not necessarily against capitalist modernity, but instead proposed alternative models that would protect peasants and strengthen their village organizations and more fairly distribute profits from agriculture to producers in order to improve the lives of farmers and their villages. In this way, these cooperative movements were different from traditional agrarian movements that were based on Confucian ideology and which embraced traditional village organization as a way of fighting against capitalist economics and colonial modernization programs. Cooperative financing was also important in order to compete against banks and state funding and also to give more accessible credit to farmers. Religion was important to provide the organizational and moral glue to keep these cooperatives together. In this way, religion could show itself as an important force of social change in a modernizing society, aiming to create both new humans and new alternatives of social and economic organization. All of these organizations also focused on rural education and literacy promotion and published numerous journals and educational aids. Rural youth education was particularly important so as to educate future rural leaders and also to reduce the attractions of migration to the...

This study offers an analysis of the affinity between Korean traditional religious culture and Protestant Christianity in order to bring into sharper relief several important points of contact that strengthened the appeal of the imported faith in South Korea. In particular, Korean Shamanism, the enduring core of Korean religious and cultural thought, is given special attention in order to explain the prominence of its worldview and practices in the uniquely Korean form of Protestantism. The paper also examines the way in which specific Protestant doctrines and practices were modified or accentuated to suit the disposition of the Korean people. What this study reveals is that Christian con-version in South Korea did not involve an exclusivistic change of religious affiliation, meaning that it did not require the repudiation of traditionally held beliefs. Instead, millions of South Koreans eagerly embraced Christianity precisely because the new faith was advanced as an extension or continuation of Korean religious tradition.

The study of Korean Protestantism can be traced back to the writings of missionaries in the late 19th century [...]

Scholars of Christianity in Korea have conventionally emphasized the proactive manner in which Koreans adopted and adapted this religion. In this formulation, the impact of missionaries is downplayed. In contrast, this article argues that not only did missionaries play a critical role in transmitting Christianity to the peninsula, but that they were also engaged in a fundamentally unequal partnership with Korean Christians. Fueling this inequality was the missionaries’ fear that many who sought to enter the church did so for impure motives. Thus, giving Koreans full control of the church was potentially dangerous. This article details one important strategy, the Nevius Method, employed by many Protestant missionaries to systematically test and probe Koreans in order to identify who were sincere and reform those who may have had selfish aims. The Nevius Method classified converts into a hierarchical system of church membership. But, while missionaries occupied the top positions, room existed for Korean Christians to contest missionary power. Keeping this dynamic in mind allows for a reinterpretation of important events in the history of Christianity in Korea, such as the P’yŏngyang Great Revival of 1907.

Postwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The first systematic and detailed study ever published of the socioeconomic backgrounds and career patterns of higher civil servants in early postwar Japan, up to the end of the 1950s. MacDougall, Terry Edward, ed. 1982. Political Leadership in Contemporary Japan. Michigan Papers in Japanese Studies, No. 1. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, the University of Michigan. A collection of essays on the practice and style of leadership exercised by Japanese ruling and opposition party leaders, local politicians, and influential individuals without formal office or title. Spaulding, Robert M., Jr. 1967. Imperial Japan's Higher Civil Service Examinations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Still the most detailed and comprehensive study available in English of the higher civil service examination system in prewar Japan. Takane, Masaaki. 1981. The Political Elite in Japan. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, The University of California. A translation of a 1976 Japaneselanguage book on the determinants and patterns of social mobility and the behavior and performance of the political elite in modern Japan. Verba, Sidney, et al. 1987. Elites and the Idea of Equality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. A comparative study based on survey data of the ideas of equality held by members of various elites and actual practices in Japan, Sweden, and the United States. About the Authors

Indonesian society is a multicultural society that lives side by side with all the differences. In Indonesia, they are presently six official religions-namely Islam, Protestant Christian, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. It is this difference of belief that makes people live in peace and practice their respective religious teachings without any intention of disturbing the beliefs of others. The teaching of tolerance is also applied in one of the villages in Malang Regency, namely Peniwen Village. The majority of the population of this village are Protestant and Catholic Christians. Residents in this village always carry out religious activities in accordance with what has been ordered without any sense of demeaning other religions. The method used in this article is descriptive qualitative using Max Weber's theory of rationality. The purpose of this article is to find out the rationality of the people of Peniwen Village in carrying out religious activities during the pandemic. This happened because during the pandemic almost all activities were limited. The results of this study demonstrate that the Village residents continue to perform religious activities by implementing health protocols and upholding tolerance between different religious communities. The current health protocols regulate the number of congregants who will worship at the church, wear masks, and maintain personal distance.

The background of this research related to Social Interaction is defined as a dynamic mutual social relationship, which concerns the relationship between individuals, individuals and groups, groups and groups. The main problem in this study is to understand the interaction of religious people in increasing solidarity between religious communities in Bukit Nenas Village by looking at the many positive activities carried out in the Bukit Nenas Village area. Cooperation carried out by religious communities is Islam, Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Especially when Muslims are performing worship during the holidays, people who live close to the mosque environment voluntarily help maintain security around the place of worship and who maintain that security from other Protestant and Catholic Christians. To see the benefits of the formation of a sense of solidarity between others, the researcher is interested in further studying the benefits of community interaction and its influence in realizing social solidarity in Bukit Nenas Village. The results of this study show that the influence of community interaction on socio-religious life in the village is very numerous, including from the social side, establishing good communication between communities, both communities around the house and communities that are far away and different environments, realizing and increasing community solidarity, and maintaining brotherhood. The benefit from the religious side is that harmony that has been maintained to this day can be used as an example by many people and other regions. Judging from the culture of interaction between communities that have cultural differences, the community knows about other cultures.