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2 / The Theological Orientation of the Protestant Church Its Formation and Transformation D ivergent theological or doctrinal opinions may be advanced as an attempt to rationalize individual interests or gloss over underlying personal conflicts, which often result from regional clashes of loyalties or divergent goals based on self-serving motives. However, since a church is a religious institution in which members share a common theological and doctrinal system, its theological orientation deserves close attention . There has been a tendency to view a church’s social and political position in terms of its support for a conservative or liberal theology: that is, conservative Christians are generally thought to be disinterested in political and social issues, but liberals more concerned.1 Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the theological orientation of Korean Protestant churches in order to understand their political activism. Han Wansang, a politically active Christian sociologist during the 1970s, lambasted his fellow Christians who had conservative leanings and avoided political involvement. He criticized conservatives for blithely ignoring sociopolitical realities while singing the praises of pure faith (sunsu sinang) and individual salvation (kaein kuwon). The conservatives, Han said, believe that “so long as salvation of ‘I’ and entry into the Kingdom of Heaven after death are ensured, nothing else much matters.” He went so far as to say that the conservatives, by retreating into “abstract” theology, were indirectly strengthening the “authority of the Caesars of this world.”2 Following the Western liberal theological tradition, liberal Christians in Korea during the 1970s and 1980s seemed more concerned than their conservative counterparts about sociopolitical affairs. According to them, since developments in modern science and technology had brought far-reaching changes in society, the church needed to make an about-face in its traditional theology, which was concerned only with individual salvation. If the church’s chief concern was the salvation of humanity, they argued, it should 50 be concerned with people and society, and set up a new mission to guide people in this changing society. Christians should be more concerned with the here-and-now than the afterlife. The way to know God is through one’s neighbor, and the other world can be approached through this world. In other words, not only spiritual salvation but also the union with invisible God can be obtained through concern and love for neighbors. Therefore, the church should divert its concern from God to people, from the Heavenly Kingdom to this world, and from spiritual salvation to social salvation. The followers of this liberal theological teaching urged greater involvement in social and political issues.3 To counter liberal criticism, Pak Hyongnyong, the leading conservative Protestant theologian in Korea, and his followers condemned the political activity of liberal Christians. They claimed that focusing on this world would automatically nullify the transcendence of God, which in turn would subvert the authority of the Bible and the church. Liberal theology was nothing but a self-serving misuse of the Bible; immersed in social and political issues, liberal advocates lost sight of the other world. Pak and his fundamentalist conservative followers opposed all the liberal theological trends, including Christian concerns with worldly issues.4 Although there is some justification for studying the church’s social and political activism in terms of theological differences, it is important to avoid stereotypical thinking. It is worth remembering that the attitudes of a church, fundamentalist or otherwise, toward political issues do not remain consistent . Theology alone does not determine how a church will react to a sociopolitical issue at a given time. The same theology may play a “liberal” role in one period and a “conservative” role in another.5 The theological orientation of a church should be seen in its historical context: how it came about, how it evolved as circumstances and its followers’ social status changed, and how the programs of the church were affected as a result. Although the early missionaries and Korean converts were theologically conservative fundamentalists,6 they were determined to turn Confucian Korea into a Christian nation. They were thus devoted to winning new converts and to reforming social customs to conform to Christian ethics. Korean converts, who had long searched for some means by which to overhaul Confucian society, discovered in Protestantism an appropriate answer and began to make changes according to the teachings of Christianity. As a result, conservative fundamentalist theology worked not as a force for conservatism , but as a force for social reform and change in nineteenth-century Korea.7 51...

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