Wesley, Wesleyans, and Reading Bible as Scripture

7. Scripture among Korean Methodists

99 7 Scripture among Korean Methodists Meesaeng Lee Choi and Hunn Choi From the beginning of Korean Christianity, the Bible has been accepted without question as the sacred text of the Christian faith. In fact, “Bible” in Korean is sung-gyung, “holy sacred book.” This essay will, first, briefly trace the history of Korean Hangul Bible in Korean Christianity. Then, we will examine how Scripture has functioned authoritatively among Korean Methodists and Wesleyans within the social context of a marginalized group looking for upward mobility. We will discuss then an approach to Scripture that addresses the fact that the immigrant community stands at a liminal point. The Korean Hangul Bible in Korean Christianity Korea had three dominant religions throughout its history—Animism or Shamanism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—until the twentieth century when Christianity became the largest religion in the country. Korea’s first contact with Christianity goes back to as early as the sixteenth century.1 From the end of “The Catholic Century” (1784–1886),2 the Bible was made available in hangul (the Korean native alphabet). The translation of the Bible into hangul was launched in 1872, and the first entire Bible, The Korean Bible, was published in 1911. According to Samuel Hugh Moffett, “The Protestants had landed with [a hangul ] Bible in hand [from 1882] and an enthusiasm of evangelism that 100 ✧ Meesaeng Lee Choi and Hunn Choi was destined to change Korea in a way that few could have imagined during the hundred years of terror so recently ended.”3 As missionaries visited Korean villages, many “had already come to Christian faith through the reading of the Scripture and . . . about 600 people were candidates for baptism and about a thousand families were reading the Bible every day in their family devotions.”4 In the 1890s, the same number of Bibles was distributed in ten years in Korea as had been distributed in China in fifty years.5 During the period of 1908–1940, the British and Foreign Bible Society distributed in Korea 85 percent of all the Bibles they sold.6 In Asia, “people in no other country more welcome the Bibles . . . than people in Korea.”7 Thus Korean Christianity has been known as “Bible Christianity” or “a Bible-loving community .”8 A missionary leader even exclaimed: “I wonder that there would be any Christian in the world who knows the Bible better than the Korean Christians!”9 The love of the Bible and the tradition of the Bible studies were hallmarks of early Korean Christianity.10 Furthermore , as William Blair and Bruce Hunt reported, the Bible has shown to be the single most important contributor to the birth and growth of the Korean Christianity.11 As a result, now Korea has become the second largest missionary sending nation in the world.12 Such a phenomenal growth of Christianity is seen not only in Korea but also in the Korean American community in North America . The growth of the Korean American church, from its beginning in 1902 to the present, is both a social and spiritual phenomenon. Korean American immigrants are “one of the most ‘churched’ of all ethnic groups in the United States.”13 They are known as “the champion church builders.”14 A little over a century after the first two churches were founded—one on October 14, 1902, in San Francisco and the other on January 13, 1903, in Hawaii (after the arrival of the first Korean immigration, which brought 101 Koreans to work on Hawaii’s sugar and pineapple plantations)—their followers and descendants have established 4,100 churches across the 50 states, about one church for every 500 members of their community.15 As R. Stephen Warner rightly comments, “Overwhelmingly Christian, for the most part evangelically inclined Protestants, Korean immigrants are avid churchgoers.”16 When Koreans migrate to America, they find a new world and context and churches for multiple purposes, as places of worship, social gathering places, employment centers, travel agencies, and centers of local and transnational politics.17 Away Scripture among Korean Methodists ✧ 101 from their homeland, these churches provide them with an important means of negotiating the circumstances of life. For many Korean American Christians, Christianity informs the dilemma of their racial status in the U.S. For them, religious life through church involvement is a source of acceptance and community. The confluence of faith and race helps them engage the complexities and contradictions of their experiences...