Korea's Confucian Culture of Learning as a Gateway to Christianity: Protestant Missions in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
K. Kale Yu
Keyword(s):  
Close Association ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Confucian Culture ◽  
Korean Society ◽  
Culture Of Learning ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Christian Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Protestant Missions

As Protestant missionaries landed on Korean shores in the late nineteenth century, a great deal of effort went into creating a Christian identity using literacy and literature as cornerstones of missional strategy that would become the benchmark of the Christian experience for Koreans. The relationship between the Protestant missions' emphasis on reading and Korea's Confucian culture of learning is of particular importance for an understanding of the growth of Christianity in Korea because Christianity's close association with literacy and sacred writings energised the Confucian imagination of Korean culture. Perceiving the reading of Christian literature, including the bible, as a salient way to salvation, Koreans turned to reading and memorising the scriptures to experience the manifestation of God's revelation. The high respect afforded to education and learning as a dominant cultural value constitutes an important, if overlooked, element in the replication of faith in Korean society that reproduced the gospel under their own familiar terms.

The Bible and Creationism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Trollinger ◽  
William Vance Trollinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Organic Evolution ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Young Earth Creationism ◽  
Conservative Protestants ◽  
Over Time

Biblical creationism emerged in the late nineteenth century among conservative Protestants who were unable to square a plain, commonsensical, “literal” reading of the Bible with Charles Darwin’s theory of organic evolution. As this chapter details, over time a variety of increasingly literal “creationisms” have emerged. For the first century after Origin of Species (1859), old Earth creationism—which accepted mainstream geology—held sway. But with the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood—Noah’s flood explains the geological strata—young Earth creationism took center stage. Waiting in the wings, however, is a geocentric creationism that rejects mainstream biology, geology, and cosmology.

The Geography of Mormon Apocalyptic

2020 ◽  
pp. 98-129
Author(s):  
Christopher James Blythe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American West ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter documents how Latter-day Saints in the late 1840s and 1850s deployed the faith’s apocalyptic master narrative to make sense of the lands they colonized in the American West. Drawing on the apocalyptic geography of the Bible, Mormons came to believe they resided in the “wilderness” of the Book of Revelation where they would be protected from persecution. They recognized the region’s peaks as the mountain setting for Isaiah’s prophecies of a last days temple and an ensign to the nations. This chapter also examines how in the late nineteenth century Canada and Mexico would also be incorporated into the era’s apocalyptic geography.

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL PROGRESS: THE SLAVERY DEBATES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM IN THE UNITED STATES

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
MOLLY OSHATZ
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Liberal Protestantism ◽  
Horace Bushnell ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Slavery Debates

The slavery debates in the antebellum United States sparked a turning point in American theology. They forced moderately antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, and Horace Bushnell, to reconcile their contradictory loyalties to the Bible and to antislavery reform. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to make a scriptural case against slavery in itself, the moderates argued that although slavery had been acceptable in biblical times, it had become a sin. Antislavery Protestantism required a theory of moral progress, a deeply unorthodox idea that became fundamental to the development of late nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. The antislavery argument from moral progress, along with the moral progress represented by abolition, established a progressive conception of revelation that would be further developed by late nineteenth-century liberal theologians, including Newman Smyth, Lyman Abbott, and Theodore Munger.

Race and Emancipation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Halliwell
Keyword(s):  
Black Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Racial Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
American Leader

Set against the history of slavery and abolitionism in the Atlantic world, the chapter first considers two essays of 1900 by African American leader W. E. B. Du Bois before addressing ways churches in the United States were often accused of complicity in perpetuating slavery. The chapter assesses the contested status of the ante-bellum black church and the covert worship slaves often needed to take in the South, before turning to the 1830 Southampton Insurrection and the 1831 Great Jamaican Slave Revolt. The focus switches to key texts that drew upon the Bible to oppose slavery, before considering how racial representations in the mid-century offered ambivalent views on racial equality. The chapter then turns to the shifting status of white and black churches during Reconstruction, and the re-entrenchment along racial lines in the late nineteenth century, before broadening out questions of identity and belonging by discussing missionary enterprises to Africa.

Some Scripture Is Inspired by God: Late-Nineteenth-Century Protestants and the Demise of a Common Bible

1996 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-623
Author(s):  
Peter J. Thuesen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Front Page ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chicago Tribune ◽  
Fourth Estate ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
King James Bible

“A New Testament which Needs neither a Glossary nor a Commentary.” So proclaimed the New York Evening Post on 21 May 1881, in a front-page story announcing the publication of the Revised Version of the Scriptures. The first major English translation since the King James Bible, the Revised New Testament was billed as the most accurate version ever, and the Post writer did not hesitate to hyperbolize. The printing of the Revision, the reporter declared, would probably “rank among the great events of the nineteenth century.” Meanwhile, as buyers snatched up the first Testaments in New York, a bigger sensation was building in Chicago. Dubbing the new translation nothing other than “the Bible as it is,” the Chicago Tribune printedthe entire Revised New Testament—from Matthew to Revelation—in its regular Sunday edition. Although the Tribune pilfered its scriptural text from the Bible's authorized publishers, the paper lambasted the rival Chicago Times (“the fraudulent newspaper concern on Wells Street”) for printing a “forged” Testament of its own. The unsavory competition in Chicago's fourth estate did not deter an eager public, who bought 107,000 copies of theTribune'sTestament alone. Demand for bound editions of the updated Bible was no less intense, with nationwide sales figures quickly surpassing one million.

Building a City on a Hill in Korea: The Work of Henry G. Appenzeller

1992 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 422-435
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Davies
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Korean Society ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City ◽  
Evangelical Protestant

Henry Gerhard Appenzeller (1858–1902)—along with Horace N. Allen, Horace G. Underwood, William B. Scranton, and Marion F. Scranton— pioneered Protestantism in Korea at the turn of the nineteenth century from about 1885 to 1902. Appenzeller intended to convert Koreans to Methodism, to establish Methodist societies, to reform Korean society in agreement with American Protestant evangelical teachings, and, finally, to help Korea become independent, democratic, and modernized, using the United States as a model. Appenzeller's commitment to “convert the heathen” and to reform Korean society along American Protestant Evangelical lines is easy to understand. But why the commitment to Korean independence, democratic reform, and modernization? Why did a pietistic, evangelical Protestant missionary place political concerns on a par with evangelical concerns in Korea? Appenzeller, and the rest of the small American community in Korea during the late nineteenth century, brought along the partially articulated, partially unconscious agenda to build the late nineteenth-century American evangelical Protestant vision of the City on a Hill. Appenzeller attempted to create a Christian Korea in a manner similar to late nineteenthcentury Protestant efforts to create a Christian America. Appenzeller's concept of a City on a Hill provides the key to understanding his commitment to independence, democracy, and modernization in Korea. Citizens had to hold the evangelical Protestant faith. They had to have Anglo-Saxon manners and customs. They had to live morally. The nation had to maintain independence from foreign powers, maintain a democratic form of government, and enjoy the benefits of modernization. We will consider the development of that vision in American history below.

God and Revolution: Protestant Missions in Revolutionary Guatemala, 1944-1954

1989 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-223
Author(s):  
Virginia Garrard Burnett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
American Values ◽  
Liberal Reform ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Protestant Missions ◽  
The Government

“Our institutions,” remarked a North American Protestant missionary in Guatemala in 1910 referring to his denomination's missions, schools and clinics, “can do more than gunboats.” From the time of the Liberal reform of Justo Rufino Barrios, most of Guatemala's Liberal rulers had agreed. Valued by nineteenth century Liberal rulers for their development projects, their usefulness in the struggle against Catholic clericalism, and, most importantly, for the packaging of North American values, beliefs and culture in which they wrapped the Word of God, Protestant missionaries worked in Guatemala with the blessing and encouragement of the government from the late nineteenth century until 1944. That year, the “last caudillo”—the old Liberal dictator Jorge Ubico —was ousted from power and replaced by a reformist junta, marking the beginning of Guatemala's decade-long flirtation with progressive revolutionary government.

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