The decidedly conservative theological character of Korean Protestant Christianity has led both its conservative constituency and its liberal critics to view the Church as inherently antithetical to Korean religious traditions. Conservative Korean Christians and their critics alike cite as the origin of this present reality an overdrawn characterization of the conservative theology of early North American missionaries and the form of Christianity introduced by them at the turn of the twentieth century. Whether revered as missionary founders or challenged as orientalist imperialists, it is North American missionaries who are typically given primary agency in these assessments of the history and character of Korean Protestant Christianity.
The Making of Korean Christianity is an important response to the simplicity of these oft-repeated claims. Though Sung-Deuk Oak is not the first scholar to localize the history of Korean Christianity, or to highlight Korean agency and the indigenization of Protestantism in Korea, Oak's work is groundbreaking in its method of examination of the formative years of Protestantism in Korea and the nature of its encounter with Korean religions. Drawing on a wide array of archival materials, Oak includes a detailed examination of the influence of Chinese Christianity directly on mission theology and practice in Korea, and on the reception and theology of Korean Christianity via written materials brought to Korea. He rightly claims that what was encountered by Koreans was “Anglo-American-Sino Christianity,” and from that basis explores the indigenization of Christianity in Korea, finding “a particular Korean-created hybrid of indigenous Korean religious cultures, Chinese Protestantism, and Anglo-American Protestantism” (p. 305).
Following an introduction in which Oak presents and critiques current assessments of this early encounter, Oak organizes his examination of the indigenization of Christianity in Korea around key theological terms, images, issues, and materials. The first two chapters explore Protestant Christian conceptions of God as monotheistic (chapter 1) and as messianic savior (chapter 2), and points of conflict and contact made with Korean religious conceptions (the transformation of Hanŭnim from shamanistic high deity to Christian God), use of symbolic imagery, and prophetic traditions. Protestant approaches and responses to Korean shamanism and Confucianism are detailed in chapters 3 and 4, including a history of Protestantism's prohibition of ancestor veneration and discussion of the development of Korean Protestant practices of exorcisms and memorial services. Chinese Protestant written materials used in Korea are the focus of chapter 5. Oak details the messages contained within Chinese literature, the product of several generations of localization in China, and presents a convincing case for their role in the indigenization of Protestantism in Korea. Chapter 6 explores two well-known characteristics of early Korean Protestantism, revivals and communal prayers, tracing the roots of these indigenous expressions of Christianity to Daoist Christians in Pyongyang.
The breadth of materials brought to Oak's analysis leads me to recommend this work to serious scholars of religion and early modernity in Korea. His exploration of the “Trans-Yellow Sea diffusion” of Protestantism to Korea in addition to the more familiar “Transpacific Diffusion” enables Oak to detail the elements and processes of indigenization of Protestantism within Korea. Moreover, by moving beyond social and historical explanations of religious conversion or growth, Oak (following David Jordan's work on Chinese conversion)Footnote 5 examines individual motivations of conversion and logics of belief as experienced by Korean converts and mediated by symbols, imagery, and prophetic tradition.
Much of the strength of this volume may be lost, however, due to its uneven presentation, reliance on theological and obscure jargon, and inconsistent arguments. It is Oak's discussion of North American missionary approaches to local religions that this reader (a missionary descendant) finds particularly problematic. Although he appropriately challenges the overstated and politicized assertion that Korean Protestantism's conservatism is rooted in the adoption of a conservative missionary theology, Oak similarly imposes his own flawed analysis of missionary theology. Oak, who has translated numerous volumes of missionary writings, nonetheless uses scant and selective evidence to make unwarranted claims as to the attitudes and positions of individual missionaries and to generalize to missionaries as a whole. He presents Appenzeller's vision of a civilizing mission, for instance, as illustrative of “the first stage” of the Protestant missionaries' approach in Korea (p. 16). He asserts that Underwood “despised” shamanism, drawing almost exclusively on a dissection of definitions used in his 1890 dictionary (p. 142). This critical method is highly inconsistent. For instance, the definition of “kwishin” as “evil spirit” is presented as biased and problematic in chapter 3, yet used by Oak himself in other chapters. He interprets an article describing “a mental revolution . . . throughout the land” and the call to “work today in [God's] vineyard in Korea” as a proclamation of war (pp. 24, 169). These and other tenuous examples are used by Oak to outline a staged transition from an oppositional civilizing theology of mission to an accommodating pluralism, ignoring substantial evidence that both theologies were present among Protestant missionaries in Korea across and beyond the decades he examines.
Fortunately Oak mostly abandons this theme and timeline in later chapters. His presentation of the confluence of Korean religions and Protestantism in the formation of indigenous Korean Protestant Christianity is an important and unique contribution to the study of early-modern Korea, to religious indigenization more broadly, and to discussions of Christian identity in Korea today.
