[KS] most Christian city in Asia

[Timsanglee at aol.com]

Dear List:
 
Thanks to Mr. Ruediger for initiating this interesting thread.  Messrs 
Driscoll and Underwood’s replies have prompted me to contribute my own two cents.
 
First, I don't think Mr. Driscoll’s reply is well informed.  For one thing, 
it would come as a surprise to Korean Catholics if they were told that they 
didn't count among the Christian population, since they are not so ignorant as to 
not know that Catholicism is a species of Christianity—though I would not 
rule out some exceptions.  No Korean scholar of religion worth his or her salt 
would reckon Korean Catholics in such a way, either.  To be sure, a Korean 
Catholic wouldn't call herself kidokkyoin. But that's not because she doesn't 
consider herself to be Christian but because the word has become so identified with 
Protestants—especially the Evangelical Protestants, who comprise upwards of 
ninety percent of South Korean Protestants—that to refer to herself in such a 
way would be to invite misunderstanding.  One can verify how widely the 
Protestants now monopolize kidokkyo just by perusing some Korean newspaper reportage 
on Protestantism.  True, Korean Catholics generally refer to themselves as ch’ŏ
njugyoin, but they also have another term—kŭrisdokyoin—that they use as a 
more comprehensive term to refer to themselves and Christians of other 
communions.  Indeed, the trend among Korean religion scholars is to shun kidokkyo when 
referring Christianity in favor of kŭrisdokyo, regardless of what the 
dictionary says.  
 
Mr. Driscoll’s account of how the Catholics ended up with Ch’ŏnju and the 
Protestants with Hananim is problematic.  One of the best authorities on this 
subject outside Korea is Dr. Oak Sung Duk, currently a research scholar at UCLA. 
 In this year's Association for Asian Studies meeting at New York, in a 
session entitled Koreanizing Protestantism, Dr. Oak presented a paper entitled “Hană
nim: The Term Question in Korea, 1881-1911.”  In it he persuasively showed 
that during the first twenty years of Protestant missionary work in Korea, the 
missionaries could not reach consensus on what Korean term to use for God.  The 
first widely used term was hanŭnim, due to the efforts of John Ross, the 
Scottish missionary to Manchuria who was the first Western missionary to make a 
lasting contribution to building a Protestant church in Korea, through the 
gospels of Luke and John that he, Yi Ŭngch’an, and other Koreans translated in 
1882 and had secretly distributed in Korea. Hanŭnim later came to be pronounced 
hananim, not because it had much to do with hana— “one”—but because that's 
how the old hangŭl word for hanŭnim was pronounced by Koreans of Pyongyang and 
its environs, and since this area constituted the “Jerusalem of Korea” (I am 
more familiar with this expression that the other one that got this thread 
started), hananim became the normal pronunciation for the term.  Both hanŭnim and 
hananim did not initially have much to do with the notion of “one,” though 
such a notion may have been one of its more faint connotations.  The terms 
referred to what anthropologists call a high god—the god who is at the top of a 
hierarchy of gods—and had associations with the sky.  Thus in its original form, 
hananim hardly denotes a transcendent monotheistic deity.
 
>From the start, many missionaries followed Ross’s recommendation and used hanŭ
nim/ hananim to refer to God, since the word provided enough of a conceptual 
base to develop their notion of God and was readily understood by Koreans.  
But a minority of them resisted this usage, bothered by the term's polytheistic 
associations.  And this was a powerful minority since its leader was none 
other than the venerable Horace G. Underwood.  Guess what term Underwood preferred 
instead?  It was T’yŏnjyu, the older form of Ch’ŏnju.  It was only in 1904 
that Underwood also switched over to hananim.  This happened only after his 
colleagues James S. Gale and Homer B. Hulbert had done some creative exegeses on 
hananim and the Tangŭn story.  Gale persuade Underwood that the original 
meaning of hananim was indeed the “One Great One” that the Koreans had lost sight 
of; Hulbert that Tangŭn story was really a reflection of the Trinity, with 
Hwanin as the Father God, Hwanŭng as the Spirit, and Tangŭn as the Messiah—the 
bear woman then had to stand in for the Virgin.
 
It is also wrong to assume that Korean Catholics use only Ch’ŏnju to refer 
to God.  They quite openly use hanŭnim as well.  Anyone in doubt should check 
out the Catholic Bible, kongdongbŏnyŏk sŏngsŏ, which, by the way, was 
published in 1971 as a result of an ecumenical translation project undertaken with 
the more liberal segment of Korean Protestantism.  Consequently, given that “hanŭ
nim” is truer to the original native meaning of the word than what “hananim” 
has now come to mean, one can argue that nowadays the Catholics’ term for God 
is truer to Korea's tradition than the Protestants’ term. 
 
Now, a few words on Mr. Underwood’s reply.  Christians, be they Korean or 
not, should deplore that “Jesus Presbyterians” wouldn't speak with the “Christ 
Presbyterians.” (Actually, these days a great many Presbyterians from both 
camps get along quite well with each other.)  But that Christians split into 
groups is neither anything new nor anything peculiar to Korea (I am aware this is 
not what Mr. Underwood implies).  Well into the mid twentieth century, 
Catholics and Protestants tended to deprecate each other.  Even among the Protestants, 
the division occurred from early on.  The year 1529 is an infamous year for 
Protestant solidarity, in that that year—just twelve years after the outbreak 
of the Reformation— Martin Luther and Urlich Zwingli, the founder of the 
Reformed/Presbyterian tradition along with John Calvin, split over their inability 
to agree on the meaning of a single verse in the Bible, Matthew 26:26, which 
dealt with the Eucharist.  This split had grave consequences since it prevented 
the Lutherans and the Reformed from forming a common front against the 
Catholic Counter Reformation. Even in more recent periods, examples of split among 
Protestants abound.  It could be argued that the alleged Jesus Presbyterian–
Christ Presbyterian split in Korea, for example, started out as a reflection of a 
similar theological split that had occurred in the United States, between the 
Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Presbyterian Church of America (later 
renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church).  Isn't a little pun in order here as 
well?: How deplorable is it that the Presbyterians of the USA wouldn't talk to the 
Presbyterians of America!  
 
Finally, until 1965 or so, I don't think Korean Catholics were any more 
tolerant of other religions than their Evangelical counterparts were.  But the 
Second Vatican Council, which ended that year, changed all that. This council's 
inclusive stance towards non-Catholic Christians and other religions enabled 
Korean Catholics, for example, to participate in ancestral rites that they had 
shunned previously for fear of committing idolatry.  They also actively pursue 
interreligious dialogue, even as their Evangelical counterparts continue to 
belittle the native religions.  The council's activist stance on social justice 
was also significant since it enabled the Catholics—formerly living a more or 
less ghettoized existence—joined their liberal Protestants (the Minjung 
Protestants) in overthrowing the dictators of the 1970s and 1980s, with the Myŏngdong 
Cathedral and Cardinal Suhwan Kim emerging as icons of the Korean democratic 
movement.
 
Sincerely,
 
Timothy S. Lee
Brite Divinity School (TCU)
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