This study examines a deep-seated anti-missionary sentiment of Korean theologians and church historians. Chai-Choon Kim and Jong-Sung Rhee were arguably most responsible for popularizing anti-missionary sentiment among Korean Christians. The main reason for the criticisms of both Kim and Rhee against the American Presbyterian Korea missionaries was the supposedly fundamentalist schisms of the Presbyterian Church of Korea in the 1950s, which both Kim and Rhee reasoned to have been originated from their Old Princeton theology. The theological rationale of both Kim and Rhee was the Barthian triumph frame that the Reformed Orthodoxy including the Old Princeton theology, which had been suspected of having a fundamentalist tendency, was overcome by Karl Barth’s Neo-Orthodoxy. These theological anti-missionary criticisms facilitated some younger Korean church historians, especially both Kyung-Bae Min and Man-Yul Lee, to view Korean church history from an anti-missionary, Korean ethnic nationalist perspective. Min emphasizes some seemingly good but anecdotal works of individual Korean native Christians, hence resulting in depreciation of the works of the missionaries and their Korean coworkers. Following Min, Lee goes even further, praising what some individual Korean Christians did for socio-political (anti-establishment) purposes and ignoring what the missionaries and their Korean coworkers did cooperatively for their Korean churches. Those Korean theologians and church historians with quite a strong anti-missionary sentiment might have succeeded in arousing Korean Christians’ ethnic nationalism, but in so doing, they have quite surely deprived Korean Christians of their critically significant and rich ecclesiastical and theological elements which have been originated from the missionaries.
The purpose of this study is to present an in-depth understanding as well as a critique of some notable Korean theologians’ apparently very negative estimation of the past Western Protestant Korea missionaries, who made a decisive contribution in establishing Korean Protestant churches during their formative first 60 years, roughly from 1884 to 1945. The Korean Protestant churches, whose majority was Presbyterian and Methodist, were established and rapidly developed principally by North American Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries, all of whom might number over 2000 during the period. Thus, the Korean Protestant Christians in general have been quite interested in who and what the missionaries were, and many conservative theologians have published books and articles treating their positive works. Yet the majority of somewhat liberalist Korean theologians seem to have had a considerably strong anti-missionary sentiment. So we examine why and how some notable liberalist Korean theologians have so undervalued who and what the Western missionaries were in Korea. We deal with those Korean theologians who have been very critical of the missionaries for a theological, Barthian Neo-Orthodoxy-based reason, on the one hand, and for a Korean ethnic nationalist one, on the other hand. There has been no detailed study of Korean theologians’ negative assessment of the missionaries, which makes the present study necessary and useful.
Some Korean liberalist theologians, notably Rev. Chai-Choon Kim and Dr Jong-Sung Rhee, began to spread an anti-missionary sentiment against the Western Presbyterian Korea missionaries on the basis of their Barthian theology. The Presbyterian Church of Korea (PCK), which was organised in 1907 independently from the missionaries’ four Western Presbyterian home churches (American North and South, Australian and Canadian), is the mother church of some tens of Korean Presbyterian denominations. The PCK’s predominant leaders in its formative period, therefore, were naturally North American Presbyterian missionaries, whose theology was a considerably conservative, Old Princeton theology. Especially significant was their doctrine of biblical inspiration and inerrancy, which profoundly influenced Korean Protestant Christians, bringing about their churches’ rapid growth. Nevertheless, this conservatism of the PCK has been believed to have caused two critical schisms between apparently liberalist and conservative wings in the 1950s. And both the American Presbyterian Korea missionaries and their conservative, Old Princeton theology have been severely criticised by the PCK’s liberalist wing as being the culprit for the schisms. Thus we have the two most important theologians, Rev. Chai-Choon Kim and Dr Jong-Sung Rhee, who began and fostered a theological anti-American missionary movement in Korea from a supposedly Barthian position.
Then this theological anti-missionary effort coalesced with Korean ethnic nationalism, which was based on an anti-foreigner sentiment and deeply spread especially amongst Korean anti-establishment intelligentsias.
Here, two Korean ethnic nationalist church historians, Drs Kyung-Bae Min and Man-Yul Lee, have been working effectively, drawing quite a large following. As a result, some 2000 American Korea missionaries have been regarded as imperialist and even fundamentalist, becoming ‘others’ for liberalist Korean theologians and Christians. In a sense, the American Korea missionaries have been expelled from their adopted home country called Korea, a tragic legacy not only for the missionaries themselves but for Korean Protestant churches, which have been deprived of their own great church history involving these missionaries. This study examines how this tragic event happened in Korea, focussing on Chai-Choon Kim and Jong-Sung Lee, who began and led this movement on a theological – allegedly Barthian – ground, as well as on Kyung-Bae Min and Man-Yul Lee, who have deepened it for Korean ethnic nationalist reasons.
Rev. Chai-Choon Kim (1901–1987) was surely the most responsible for the anti-Western missionary sentiment in Korea, starting it in the 1930s and making it bloom from the 1950s up to the present. He was not only absolutely critical of the American Presbyterian Korea missionaries’ conservative, Old Princeton theology, which he derogatively identified with the 17th-century Reformed Orthodoxy, but he was also the most important theologian for having succeeded in replacing the Orthodoxy by a new, largely Barthian Neo-Orthodoxy. From Kim and his numerous followers, we can find an interesting, close correlation between an anti-missionary sentiment and a supposedly Barthian theology. In other words, the more Barthian a Korean theologian becomes, the more anti-missionary he or she becomes.
Rev. Chai-Choon Kim had notable educational and ecclesiastico-political reasons for his deep aversion to the conservative, Old Princeton theology of the American Presbyterian missionaries in Korea. Firstly, he had an exceptional educational background for his deeply ingrained liberalist theological orientation. He grew up in the Eastern and Northern province (
The majority of Korean conservative Presbyterians, who were then even more conservative because of the turmoil of the post-liberation and Korean War period (1945–1953), did not welcome the liberalist and modernist orientation of the
Two significant elements led Kim to denounce the American Presbyterian missionaries: firstly, Kim’s experiences of bitter conflicts with and eventual expulsion from the PCK, and secondly, his (since 1949) knowledge of H.R. Mackintosh’s condemnation of the Reformed Orthodoxy on the basis of Barthian theology.
Firstly, it is clear that Kim’s bitter battles against and consequent expulsion from the PCK caused him to depreciate the missionaries and their Reformed Orthodoxy or Old Princeton theology.
Secondly, by 1949 Kim came to know about H.R. Mackintosh’s Barthian condemnation of the Reformed Orthodoxy, which became Kim’s most convincing theological cause for his fights against the PCK’s Orthodoxy as well as the American missionaries. From Mackintosh’s book (
This almost fatal judgement against the Reformed Orthodoxy on the basis of the Barthian triumph frame was in fact what Kim, who had been fiercely fighting against the PCK’s Orthodoxy, desperately needed. This is clearly shown in Kim’s considerably grave address (Kim
Although Mackintosh (
[
So by using Mackintosh’s Barthian triumph frame, Kim (
The late 19th century American Presbyterian missionaries from Princeton Seminary and their kind came to Korea. Planting their Orthodoxy in Korea, although it was about to be defeated in America, and making a ‘curtain of iron’ for it, they had indoctrinated Korean Christians under their tutelage for the first fifty years. (p. 6)
Here it is plain that Kim’s condemnation of the missionaries and their Orthodoxy was founded on Mackintosh’s Barthian triumph frame against the 17th-century Orthodoxy, as Kim (
It was the Western [
In this way, in many places, Kim (
What the Korean church leaders learned from their missionaries for the first 50 years was nothing but their blind submission to the missionaries’ indoctrinating, Orthodox teachings. There was no freedom or critique; neither anything personal, nor scientific studies [
Kim (
Dr Jong-Sung Rhee (1922–2011) went almost the same way as Chai-Choon Kim: getting to know Karl Barth and his profound influence in Japan, deepening his knowledge of Barth in the USA and disregarding the American Presbyterian Korea missionaries and their Old Princeton theology from his Barthian standpoint.
As the most influential theologian of the PCK from the 1960s to the 1990s, Rhee exerted an immeasurable influence in leading the next generations to depreciate the missionaries, on the one hand, and to promote Barthian theology, on the other hand. Through their combined influence, Kim and Rhee succeeded in replacing the Reformed Orthodoxy (Old Princeton theology) of the missionaries by a new, Barthian theology. Rhee seems to be considerably more sophisticated and informed than Chai-Choon Kim. Although they were theological rivals, having been the top leaders of the two competing liberalist Korean Presbyterian denominations, Rhee and Kim had a common, deeply embedded presupposition, that is, the Barthian triumph frame, resulting in the far-reaching depreciation of the missionaries.
Because Rhee and Kim were critically influenced by the Barthian predominance in Japan, we will examine it shortly. A Japanese theologian suggests that it was because of the Japanese Christians’ guilty feeling about their religious involvement in the Shinto Shrine worships. In Japan before and after the Second World War, Christians were forced to participate in the Shinto Shrine worships, which meant the union of church and state. So, as a Japanese theologian (ed. Furuya
[
It is unfortunately this Barthian dominance in Japan that deeply affected Chai-Choon Kim and Jong-Sung Rhee, as well as Dr Sung-Bum Yun, another staunch Korean Methodist Barthian. However, Rhee and Kim seldom talked about the Barthian predominance in Japan. Rhee (
Jong-Sung Rhee does not directly condemn the American Presbyterian Korea missionaries, as Kim did, but he indirectly condemns their Reformed Orthodoxy (Old Princeton theology). However, in so doing, he succeeds in leading Korean Christians to devalue who and what the missionaries were for Korean churches. So here we pay attention to how Rhee condemns the missionaries’ Orthodoxy. In denouncing the Orthodoxy, Rhee shows the following five distinct tendencies. Firstly, Rhee also profoundly takes advantage of the Barthian triumph frame that Kim did dearly. Secondly, he uses scholarly and theological sophistries. Thirdly, he overly criticises the missionaries’ Calvinist theology as a corrupt form of John Calvin’s. Fourthly, he condemns the Orthodoxy, even by identifying it with fundamentalism. Fifthly and lastly, he denounces the missionaries in terms of their seemingly inferior theological education for Koreans.
Firstly, as Kim did, Rhee deeply utilises the Barthian triumph frame against the Reformed Orthodoxy, which naturally leads one to depreciate who and what the American Presbyterian Korea missionaries were for the Korean churches. Although the PCK’s largest schism between its liberalist and conservative wings was still going on in 1959, Rhee (
Here Rhee (
Secondly, Rhee significantly uses scholarly and theological sophistries in condemning the missionaries’ Reformed Orthodoxy. Although Chai-Choon Kim uses mainly H.R. Mackintosh’s criticisms against the Orthodoxy, Rhee sophisticates them by adding seemingly scholarly sentences and references. For instance, Rhee (
While Calvin understood the doctrine of predestination and election under the circumstances of the doctrine of grace [
Whether this judgement is true or not is a matter of controversy, yet with those supposedly scholarly and sophisticated sentences, it surely causes one to doubt the position of the Reformed Orthodox Calvinists.
Thirdly, Rhee (
While Calvin said that all doctrines are to be tested by the contents of the Bible, the Calvinists said that the doctrines rule over the interpretations of the Bible; While Calvin emphasized the working of the Holy Spirit, the Calvinists did not do it, and became intellectualist; While Calvin did a lively theology, the Calvinists did a speculative one (Hyper-Calvinism). (p. 51f.)
By blaming the Calvinists for being ‘intellectualist’ and ‘speculative’, Rhee means that the Calvinists and their followers – the missionaries and the conservative wing of the PCK – are all following a corrupt form of John Calvin’s theology.
Fourthly, Rhee, of course, tends to differentiate between the Reformed Orthodoxy of the 17th and 18th centuries and the fundamentalism of modern America, yet in important cases, he also tends to identify the one with the other. Whilst talking about the fundamentalism of the late 19th century, Rhee (
Fifthly and conclusively, Rhee (
The missionaries lectured with their awkward and insufficient Korean. In Biblical studies, they focused themselves on Biblicist interpretation, and in systematic theology, they relied on confessions of faith. So the theological education for Korean churches was like that in a low-level Bible study school. (p. 45)
So the missionaries, Rhee believes, provided Korean students not only with an elementary theological education but also with a Biblicist – fundamentalist – and Orthodox (Old Princeton) theology.
The missionaries’ theology was principally Biblicist and Orthodox (Old Princetonian), as Rhee said. But what else could they teach? Like everyone else, they were also the product of their own era – the era of the Old Princeton theology by the turn of the 20th century. The Neo-Orthodoxy, which is the theological standard for Rhee, came much later. Rhee is absolutely biased in judging against the missionaries from his own era’s standpoint. On the other hand, the missionaries’ Biblicist theology worked superbly for Korean Protestant churches’ growth through the so-called Nevius Methods (self-propagation, self-support and self-government).
Although Chai-Choon Kim and Jong-Sung Rhee depreciated the American missionaries with their Barthian triumph frame, they influenced their junior theologians to criticise them for another, Korean ethnic nationalist reason. Korea’s 1980s saw some progressive and nationalist Korean theologians who had begun to devalue who and what the Western missionaries did for Korean churches by emphasising native Korean Christians’ works and suffering experiences from their Korean ethnic nationalist perspective. The theologians were, in fact, Christian representatives of those intelligentsias who were consciously or unconsciously concerned with or participated in the so-called democratisation movements in South Korea in the 1970s and subsequent decades. Having been sympathetic to the democratisation movements under the allegedly dictatorial leadership of President Chung-hee Park (1963–1979), they naturally had a strong tendency towards a spirited anti-establishment nationalism. Their nationalism, nevertheless, was ‘ethnic nationalism’, having ‘a strong sense of oneness based on shared bloodline and ancestry’, as Professor Gi-Wook Shin (
It was in this context that some Korean progressive and nationalist theologians began to see Korean Christians as the ruled versus the Western missionaries as the rulers. And some even more progressive theologians began to popularise the now-famous Korean word
As one of the most influential Korean church historians, Dr Kyung-Bae Min (1934–) has been arguably the first who has succeeded in rewriting the Korean church history from a Korean ethnic nationalist (
This history of missions in Korea, as the author [
Min (
Firstly, Min (
Min (
Secondly, Min has a strong Korean ethnic nationalist, utopian and unrealistic view of the church that there must be one unified, Korean ethnic nationalist church, which might embrace all Protestant denominations and mission organisations. Although he treats the historic establishment of the PCK in 1907, he (Min
But having been lost in that hollow idea of a unified ethnic nationalist church, Min does not take seriously the socio-political limitations and characteristics of Korean people as well as the missionaries. He also does not see the importance and magnitude of the existing churches, whether Presbyterian or Methodist. For instance, the PCK had quite a miraculous beginning and development, as an international Presbyterian polity consisting of the Korean Presbyterian leaders and the Western Presbyterian missionaries. Furthermore, Min does not even mention the historic establishment of the Unified Korean Methodist Church in 1930, which was also a wonderful and glorious event in Korean modern history. In this regard, Min’s (
Thirdly, Min (
Man-Yul Lee (1938–) has gone quite further than Kyung-Bae Min: whilst repeating anecdotal happenings of some courageous Korean Christians, he not only consciously devaluates what the missionaries did even in cooperation with their Korean co-workers but also has a definite tendency to highlight the Korean ethnic nationalism over against the Christian faith. Like Min, Lee (
The historical studies like Paik’s are based mainly on foreign sources, their historical standpoint being that of the missionaries or that of their mother churches in the West. So those studies naturally lack the responses of Korean Christians in the mission field. (p. 11)
Already having had this Korean ethnic nationalism from the 1980s, Lee (
It was pioneering Koreans that brought Christianity into Korea in the 1880s, but in other countries, it was the foreign missionaries that took the initiative. Christianity came to the vicinities of the Korean peninsula, that is, Manchuria and Japan, where the Bible was translated into Korean, some Koreans voluntarily accepting Christianity, and bringing the Korean Bible into Korea, and hence causing conversions to Christianity. Many other countries first accepted the foreign missionaries, who in turn did mission works, but in the case of Korea, it was Koreans themselves that accepted and spread Christianity. (p. 115)
According to Lee (
What Lee says, however, is a distortion of the facts. Although they did quite significant works for the Korean churches, the pioneering earliest Korean Christians in foreign lands as well as the Korean colporteurs needed the missionaries to make their works effective through a nation-wide system. If those Korean Christians were left alone without any cooperation with the missionaries, they might not have become so fruitful, having no organisation and discipline at all. Lee (
The colporteurs were role models for Christians, because they were proud fathers of faith, who journeyed bearing the yoke of the Gospel on their backs. They also tried to participate in the national suffering under the Japanese colonial rule as well in the
Seeing almost everything in Korean church history from his Korean ethnic nationalism, he is insisting that ethnic Koreans are innocent and good, having fallen victim to imperial and oppressive foreign powers, including the Japanese as well as the Western missionaries.
Moreover, Lee thinks that the Christian faith for Koreans is ultimately an instrument for their Korean ethnic nationalism, which, he thinks, should be the ethical and theological standard for Korean Christians.
Whilst speaking of a short history of Korean Christians, Lee (
We have examined two different positions of Korean theologians’ anti-missionary sentiment: the theological, Barthian-based one and the Korean ethnic nationalist one. Representing the former, Chai-Choon Kim and Jong-Sung Rhee condemned the American Presbyterian Korea missionaries for their Reformed Orthodoxy, or Biblicist, Old Princeton theology. They presumed that this theology was the primary culprit of the PCK’s conflicts and schisms. Then, to condemn the Old Princeton theology of the missionaries and Dr Hyung-nong Park, the archrival of both Kim and Rhee, as well as to justify their own liberalist theology, Kim and Rhee took advantage of the Barthian triumph frame that the Orthodoxy and its subsequent Old Princeton theology were overcome by the Barthian Neo-Orthodoxy, even regarding it as a universal and irreversible law. Although Kim condemned the missionaries as dictatorial and indoctrinating, Rhee regarded them as fundamentalist, a tragic evaluation of those who were, in fact, their ecclesiastical and theological fathers and mothers. As the co-founders and co-builders of the Korean Presbyterian churches, the missionaries and their works encompassed more than half of the whole Korean Protestant history. What will remain if we eliminate them on the basis of what Kim and Rhee have said? Kim and Rhee have deprived Korean Christians of their own rich ecclesiastical and theological history, which was created by the missionaries.
The Barthian triumph frame, which was the unshakable foundation of both Kim and Rhee, has recently been proved by Richard Muller and others to be unfounded and biased. The frame emphasises the discontinuity between John Calvin and his Orthodox successors or the so-called ‘Calvinists’, overly simplifying both the former and the latter. Most of all, denying the concept of ‘Calvin against the Calvinists’, Muller (
Calvin was not the sole arbiter of Reformed confessional identity in his own lifetime – and he ought not to be arbitrarily selected as the arbiter of what was Reformed in the generations following his death. (p. 8)
Therefore, provided that the Barthian frame itself is an unfounded and false thesis, the concerned assertions of Kim and Rhee must not be accepted.
Min and Lee largely succeeded in presenting their ethnic Korean nationalist view of Korean church history, but in so doing, they made some profound mistakes. Firstly, their Korean ethnic nationalism certainly includes a martyr complex or a victim mentality, as Min and Lee are crying out that Koreans were innocent, falling victim to the imperialists, who were, in fact, not only the Japanese but the foreign missionaries. Whether this kind of ethnic nationalist crying out is true, it attracted a large following, simply because it appeals emotionally to the same ethnic Koreans of whom the majority was, in fact, victims under Japanese colonial rule. The Korean ethnic nationalist theology, therefore, has been very influential, and many Korean theologians and pastors have adopted it, naturally coming to regard the missionaries, too, as others, if not imperialists, like the Japanese.
Secondly, Min and Lee are surely against the law of cause and effect. It is undeniable that the Western missionaries in Korea were certainly the principal agents in establishing some central churches and organisations from which local churches were planted and guided. Here it is natural, necessary and never a shameful thing for Korean Christians to be followers and helpers of the missionaries. Both Min and Lee, however, seem to feel shame for Korean Christians being helpers, and they try hard to argue that they, not the missionaries, were the leading agents. The Korean Catholic and Protestant churches, as a matter of fact, were essentially the churches that were missionised by Western Catholic and Protestant missionaries. All Korean Christians in those early days, with no exception, had direct or indirect help and guidance from the missionaries and their mother churches in the West. Nay, the powerful and living presence of historical Christianity in the West itself was the source of hope and courage for all non-Western Christians, particularly in that unstable era.
Surely, the past Western missionaries tended to have what Bonnie Sue Lewis (
Acknowledging who and what the Western missionaries were in Korea is also critically important to understand the theological nature of Korean Protestant churches. For example, to figure out the theology of the Korean Presbyterian churches, one must understand the theology of the American Presbyterian Korea missionaries, simply because it was they who laid the churches’ ecclesiastical and theological foundation. Nevertheless, Min and Lee lead us to fix our attention to what native Korean Christians did externally for socio-political purposes, resulting in indifference towards the missionaries.
Thirdly, Min and Lee have no deep understanding of what a church is. What they both want to do primarily in their writings is present anecdotal narratives of what some brave Korean Christians did without the weighty help of the foreign missionaries. Min and Lee seldom pay attention to the fact that Korean Protestant churches are the result of cooperation between the missionaries and their Korean converts. In fact, the PCK, the single largest Protestant denomination in Korea, was the cooperative organisation of four different Western Presbyterian missionaries (American Presbyterian North and South, Canadian and Australian) and Korean Presbyterians. Moreover, the Church as a cooperative organisation planted and organised numerous local Korean Presbyterian churches and led them to grow, even disciplining them sometimes. Min and Lee, however, seldom consider these critical roles of the church as an organisation: they seem to think that Korean Protestant Christians naturally and without any ecclesiastical polity and discipline came to form a faith community only in the name of their indefinite, ethnic nationalism.
The author has declared that no competing interest exists.
I declare that I am the sole author of this research article.
This article followed all ethical standards for a research without direct contact with human or animal subjects.
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated agency of the author.
This book (eds. Eiselen & Lewis
For a detailed description of the denominational conflict, see Conn (
Rhee (
‘Chapter 18. The Beginnings of the Korean Churches’ Sectarian Movements and Union Movements’. This is in stark contrast to Min’s treatment of the first President Dr Syngman Rhee, who was surely one of the most important Korean Christians who ever lived. Min does not write even a page concerning President Syngman Rhee’s heroic efforts in the nation building of Korea as an independent country.