0:02
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to my course,
Re-imaging God in Korean Context.
In the last module,
I argued that private representations and
collective social cultural representations of God should be explored
together to arrive at a comprehensive explanation of religious phenomenon
in religiously and culturally pluralistic societies such as Korea.
It must be remarked that
the only Korean Christians without any theological support and in the face
of the missionaries' resistance staged
anti-Japan struggles for the sake of national independence.
In fact, in many cases of anti-Japan demonstrations in the provincial areas in 1919,
Christians took the lead.
At that time, there appeared a new phenomenon in Korean society.
This was the public's departure from the church.
A renowned Korean church historian remarked,
"The church now faces a crisis in Korea.
The people's general attitude toward Christianity is strikingly different from the past.
This is something not surprising but shocking."
Many people left because the church was too otherworldly.
The church remained within the churchyard trying to
proclaim transcendent messages through preaching and bible-reading.
Around the 1920s, intelligent youth no
longer believed that the road to national survival lay in Christianity.
Those youth who had thronged to the church before now slipped away.
As Korean Christianity remained within the pressings of
the church refusing to take part in the historical scene,
an unusual phenomenon occurred within the church itself.
Mysticism swept Christian circles during the 1920s and 1930s.
Actually, this was the initial orientation of the missionaries.
In general, people in the church focused on
otherworldly and transcendent God without any human or social concerns.
The God representation of heaven,
that is notions of Chon in Korean Confucianism,
reflected the biased image focused on just one side of
the understanding of heaven embedded within the Korean collective psyche.
Other interpretations, the imminent and naturalistic interpretation of Chon-myung,
may occur when Chon-myung is understood as the way of heaven.
Here, the way of heaven came to be equated with the way of the human.
National liberation took place on the 15th day of August 1945,
and the Korean war began on the 25th day of June 1950,
thus, making a turning point in Christianity and in the history of Korea.
The fratricidal Korean war raged for three years before a truce was signed in 1953.
However, the land remained divided.
And unrest persisted in politics,
the economy and social life with the people
unable to find any stability in their spiritual life.
As people's expectations of established religion waned, religious sect emerged.
Amidst the rise of these new sects,
the independent church of Reverend Kim Jae-Jun who studied at
Princeton Pittsburgh and Washington Theological Seminaries
began to draw many of the elite youth.
These Christians who believe that there cannot be
any individual redemption without the salvation of their society and
country gradually began to engage in social participation in the 1960s.
The liberal theology of Reverend Kim has been
developed by his theological successors into Minjung Theology,
the Korean indigenous liberation theology.
Soo-Young KwonProfessor
