The Making of Korean Christianity: Protestant Encounters with Korean Religions, 1876–1915 by Sung-Deuk Oak (review)

The dustcover photograph of missionary Samuel A. Moffett standing with Kil Sŏnju, the charismatic leader of the Pyŏngyang revivals, is a fitting introduction to Sung-Deuk Oak’s narrative of the engagement between Christian theology and the religion and culture of early modern Korea. Oak sets out to correct the impression that the first Protestant missionaries to Korea were proponents of cultural imperialism and a rigid theology that molded Korean Christianity into the conservatism for which it is known today. Oak introduces his thesis by pointing out that this faulty impression results from scholars’ over-reliance on Arthur J. Brown’s disparaging comments of 1919 depicting Protestant missionaries as austere and intellectually conservative, and the first Korean Christians as blindly imitating this attitude. Oak suggests that Brown’s comments were likely tainted by his conflict with missionaries in Pyŏngyang over administrative issues, and are not supported by the historical evidence, which he then presents in the body of this monograph as a process of theological exploration and negotiation between missionaries and Koreans, resulting in a distinctly Korean Protestantism.

Oak draws a variety of related elements into each section of his discussion, thematically organized around topics such as, “God,” “Saviors,” “Spirits,” and “Ancestors.” Some chapters are more coherent than others, but overall, Oak’s multifaceted approach, drawing on a wide range of material new to contemporary English-language scholarship, offers an informative and thought-provoking glimpse into the formative period of Korean Protestantism, helping to correct simplistic assumptions about the missionary-Korea encounter.

Appropriately, the narrative opens with the search for a Korean name for God. In Chapter One, Oak relates how Protestant missionaries and Korean converts finally settled on “Hanănim,” drawn from the pantheon of Korean folk religion, but given the new meaning of “The One Great One,” thanks to the similarity between the various spellings of the original term and hana (one). The Koreanization of God went further than simple terminology, however. Prominent missionaries ascribed to a “fulfillment theory” that attributed the origin of Korean religions to a primitive monotheism, and offered a biblical interpretation of the Tan’gun myth that suggested the Christian Hanănim was the god worshiped by Korea’s founders. Thus, Christianity was a fulfillment of Korean religious aspirations. This Christian-inspired “rediscovery” of Korea’s religious roots coincided with a growing nationalist sentiment against the traditional domination of China and the new threat of Japanese imperialism, further wedding Protestant Christianity to an emerging modern Korean identity.

Chapter Two describes how the symbol of the cross and Christian messianism coincided with cryptic messages in the Chŏnggam-nok, a popular book foretelling the end of the Yi dynasty and the coming of a messianic figure. Oak suggests that the rapid growth of Protestantism corresponding to a series of political and natural disasters leading up to the end of the Chosŏn may be partly attributed to this coincidence between Christian iconography and popular imagination. For instance, references in the Chŏnggam-nok to mysterious sipsŭngjiji (“place of the victory of ten”) as places of refuge during the coming disasters drew many people to the Protestant churches with their crosses, shaped like the Chinese character for ten. Images of Korean patriots executed by the Japanese on cross-shaped frames also linked the cross to Korean nationalism, further associating Christian iconography with popular hopes for the future.

The next two chapters focus on encounters between missionaries and the traditional Korean practices of shamanism and ancestor worship. In Chapter Three, Oak describes how the Protestant missionaries’ “initially rationalistic and modern worldview was transformed by [the encounter with] shamanism” (p. 183), compelling them to develop a theology that accounted for spirit possession and exorcism. Missionaries such as Hulbert, Gale, and Underwood were among the first to study Korean shamanism. One outcome of this Christian approach to spirit manifestation was that Korean “Bible Women,” some of whom had been...