The Making of Korean Christianity: Protestant Encounters with Korean Religions, 1876-1915

Conclusion

305 Conclusion Korea has been called the surprise of modern missions. The rapid rise of a church community now approximating 300,000, the early naturalization of Christianity in the Korean environment, and its expression in distinctive and original national forms have challenged the attention of the Christian world. —G. H. Jones, 19121 World Christianity has migrated across cultural, ethnic, national, and religious boundaries. A study of the nativization of Protestant Christianity in Korea at the turn of the twentieth century must consider not only the transpacific transmission of Anglo-American Christianity, but also the trans–Yellow Sea and trans–Yalu River diffusion of Sinicized Protestantism into the Korean Peninsula. It needs to consider the fact that Chinese Protestantism had acculturated various European and North American elements for two generations before its transfer to Korea. In considering this multifaceted process of inculturation, however, the third synthesis should be scrutinized to identify the agency of Korean Christians . This is the main thesis of this book— that early Korean Protestantism was a particular Korean-created hybrid of indigenous Korean religious cultures, Chinese Protestantism, and Anglo-American Protestantism. 1 G. H. Jones, “Presbyterian and Methodist Missions in Korea,” International Review of Mission 1, no. 4 (1912): 412. 306 — The Making of Korean Christianity This book began by dealing with postcolonial master narratives on the initial encounters between Protestant missionaries and Korean religions, as well as the precolonial discourses on Korean religions produced by missionaries and Korean Christians from 1884 to 1910. Thorough analysis of these two spheres reveals the development of the biased understanding of the first generation of Korean Protestantism in post– Korean War Korea, and the forgotten layers of meaningful encounters between Anglo-American and Chinese Christianity with Korean religions and their role in the indigenization of Christianity in Korea. This hidden legacy challenges the stereotype of the first-generation North American missionaries and Korean Christians as conservative evangelicals and cultural imperialists who crusaded against traditional religions. The previous chapters have emphasized the history of the localization of Anglo-American Christianity in Korea through the medium of Chinese Protestantism. A paradigmatic caricature by Arthur Brown in 1919— describing strongly conservative missionaries and the Korean Christians who mimicked them—has been inexhaustibly quoted by the conservative camp to buttress their fundamentalist position, as well as the liberal camp in order to justify an antimissionary stance. But neither the polarization between conservatives and liberals nor the reiterated term “conservative fundamentalism” correctly represents the theology of the early Korean Protestant church. Its image as a destructive force against Korean religions is incompatible with historical evidence of their diverse efforts to establish indigenous Korean Christianity. Transpacific Diffusion North American Evangelicalism to Korea In the eighteenth century, educated Christians rarely became missionaries . Until 1813 missionaries were chiefly Germans from the peasant and artisan classes, paid with English money. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the North American Protestant churches sent their best young people to Korea. This new breed of missionaries was made of seminary, college, or Bible school graduates. Socially, they were under the influence of capitalist and moral values of the Anglo-Saxon middle classes. Culturally, they were convinced of the superiority of “Christian civilization”—including Western science and technology. While abroad, they were protected under the flags of extraterritoriality and Western imperialism. The increase in female missionaries was another feature of this new breed of missionaries. At the start of the twentieth century, Conclusion — 307 the number of female missionaries, including single women, surpassed that of male missionaries. Female missionaries were armed with Victorian ideas of home and family. These well-educated young missionaries from mainstream North American denominations—Methodists and Presbyterians—dominated the Protestant missions in Korea. The American and Canadian Presbyterian and Methodist mission boards sent about 540 missionaries, comprising more than 75 percent of all Protestant missionaries to Korea by 1910. They were part of the wave of late nineteenth-century North American evangelicalism, whose diverse yet distinctive features included aggressive activism and ecumenism in the social reform and foreign mission movement, revivalism and the holiness movement, millennialism, and democratic orientation. By 1910, more than 55 percent of Protestant missionaries in Korea were the products of interdenominational student missionary movements—the American Inter-Seminary Mission Alliance and the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions. Before coming to Korea, they believed that speedy evangelization of the world would “usher” in the premillennial second coming of Christ. Theologically, they...