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

Introduction

1 Introduction Christianity was introduced to the world, as common property of all the world, under Oriental forms and as the blossoming and full perfection of a religion purely Oriental. Japanese, Chinese, and Korean thinkers have assured me that to the Oriental mind there is not only no difficulty whatever in Christianity but that it is all marvelously simple to them, and that obstacles to its reception as elsewhere, are not inherent in the Christian religion but in the materialism which has incrusted it, in the “fact that Westerners have not understood Christianity and prove it by their mutual divergence and animosities; by their insistence on making Christianity a vehicle for the furtherance of their political views and the advancement of their national ambitions,” and finally, in the “impertinence of Westerners attempting to explain an Oriental message to Orientals” anyway, even if they had understood it themselves. —William F. Sands, 19301 On Easter Sunday afternoon, April 5, 1885, Henry Gerhard Appenzeller (1858–1902), the first American Methodist clerical missionary to Korea, arrived at Chemulpo, a small open port to Seoul, with his pregnant wife and the first Presbyterian clerical missionary, Horace Grant Underwood (1859–1917). Appenzeller believed that he had landed “upon 1 William F. Sands, Undiplomatic Memories: The Far East, 1896–1904 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1930), 83. Mr. Sands (1874–1946), a Roman Catholic, served Emperor Kojong as an advisor of diplomacy from 1899 to 1904, after working in Japan from 1896 to 1898 and in Korea from 1898 to 1899. 2 — The Making of Korean Christianity terra firma as yet untouched and unimproved by the hand of man,” and prayed inside the Japanese Great Buddha Hotel: “We came here on Easter . May He who on that day burst asunder the bars of death, break the bands that bind this people, and bring them the light and liberty of God’s children.”2 Appenzeller considered himself to be a chosen vessel, commissioned to bear the Christian light of liberty to the Koreans who lived in that den of slavery: Asian heathenism. His first encounter with the Korean belief in shamanistic spirits demonstrated a pioneer missionary’s typical attitude toward Korean religions.3 When the Korean laborers were digging the foundations for Paejae School at the mission property of Chŏngdong, Seoul, near the palace in 1886, they worked in abject “fear” of the ghosts and spirits that lurked in the soil. No one dared to clear the remains of the large elm tree, planted during the Japanese invasion in 1592. They believed that a strong spirit lived in the tree. But Appenzeller chopped down and burned this sacred tree, and also removed a stone tablet buried under the ground. He remained unscathed, and Appenzeller believed this proved that he was right, and that the God from America was stronger than the spirits of Korea. His first power encounter with shamanism relieved the Korean workers’ fear of ghosts. Afterward the missionary compound in Seoul became a “spirit-immunized” area. He intended to “make this end of the city a little bit of America.”4 Chopping down the sacred spirit tree, that is, destroying traditional “superstitions” and replacing them with Christian religion and civilization, was Appenzeller ’s initial mission method and policy. Postcolonial Discourses of Protestant Encounter with Korean Religions It is no wonder, then, that most scholarship in recent decades has claimed that fundamentalism or conservative evangelicalism was predominant among pioneer North American Protestant missionaries, and that their belief in white supremacy, religious triumphalism, cultural imperialism, and a mechanical worldview of body–soul dichotomy crusaded against 2 Henry G. Appenzeller, “Our Mission in Korea,” GAL 10 (1885): 328; Annual Report of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: MSMEC, 1885), 237. 3 William E. Griffis, A Modern Pioneer in Korea: Henry G. Appenzeller (New York: Revell, 1912), 239–40. 4 Griffis, Modern Pioneer, 101. Introduction — 3 traditional Korean religious culture. It has been claimed that their premillennial vision of the evangelization of the world in their generation merged with a strategy for propagating “Christian civilization,” to eradicate Korean religions. American mission scholars as well as Korean historians and theologians have reinforced this interpretation since the 1950s. In particular, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and amid ongoing disillusionment with the Vietnam War, American revisionist historians in the 1970s severely criticized American foreign policy and missionaries’ collaboration with American expansionism during the heyday...