Before Korea's religions and culture

A land of many faiths

Korea is a land where many faiths have long lived together. Oldest is shamanism; Buddhism reached the kingdom of Goguryeo in the fourth century; Confucianism shaped the state and the family under the Joseon dynasty. Catholic Christianity came at the end of the eighteenth century, Protestant Christianity at the end of the nineteenth. Many Koreans carry several of these at once. They hold the ancestral rite at the New Year and at Chuseok, hang a lantern at a temple on the Buddha's birthday, and consult a fortune-teller before a big decision.

Paul stood in such a place at Athens. "Men of Athens," he began, "I see that in every way you are very religious" (Acts 17:22). From their altar to an unknown god and from their own poets he went on to the Creator, the judgement and the resurrection (Apologetics in the Bible). John Wesley says that Paul was "proclaiming to them an unknown, and yet not a new God" Wesley. Bridges are built with respect, and at the far end of the bridge stands Christ. Paul told the Athenians plainly that God "now commands all people everywhere to repent" (Acts 17:30).

Confucianism and Matteo Ricci

Confucians speak of their tradition less as the worship of gods than as the way of becoming truly human. Confucius taught humaneness towards others, the reverence of children for their parents, and right conduct and ritual: a person cultivates himself to become a person of noble character, and so sets family and state in order. The ancestral rite carries that reverence on to parents and forebears who have died, a thanksgiving that does not forget where one comes from. Scripture too commands, "Honor your father and mother" (Exodus 20:12). Here is a bridge.

The Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) set out to build it. He dressed as a Confucian scholar, wrote in classical Chinese, and in 1603 published in Beijing The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven Matteo Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven. A dialogue between a Chinese scholar and a Western one, it begins not from the Bible but from reason. It argues that the Lord of Heaven made all things and that the soul does not die; it identifies the Lord on High of the ancient Confucian classics with God; and it holds that neither Buddhist emptiness nor the Neo-Confucian principle (li) can be the personal maker of the world. Christ appears only briefly, near the end. It is close kin to classical apologetics, which begins from reason and common ground (Classical and evidential apologetics).

Korean scholars read it too. Yi Su-gwang described it in his Jibong yuseol (1614), and scholars such as An Jeong-bok wrote against it. In the late eighteenth century young scholars studying this and other Chinese books of Western learning came to faith, and in 1784 Yi Seung-hun returned from Beijing baptised. The Korean church began among people who read and argued.

But how far can a bridge reach? Ricci allowed the ancestral rites as civil honours; in the eighteenth century Rome forbade them. Korean believers heard the same from the bishop in Beijing, and in 1791 Yun Ji-chung, who had not held the rite for his mother and had burned the ancestral tablets, was executed with his cousin Gwon Sang-yeon. Joseon society saw sons who had abandoned their parents; the two, it is said, were keeping faith with their conscience. The Catholic Church changed its judgement of the Chinese rites in 1939, and the Korean church followed a year later; most Korean Protestants today hold a memorial service instead, and the question is taken up in Can Christians take part in ancestral rites (jesa)? Where Confucianism and the gospel part should be said plainly too. Heaven is not only a moral order but the personal God who knows us and calls us, and we are made new not by self-cultivation but by God's grace.

Buddhism and shamanism

Buddhists set out the Buddha's teaching in the Four Noble Truths: there is suffering; suffering arises from craving and clinging; it ceases in nirvana, where craving is extinguished; and there is a path that leads there. At its heart too is the teaching of no-self: all things arise in dependence on one another and pass away, and there is no unchanging self. Buddha means ‘the awakened one’, and Korean Buddhism treasures the Seon (Zen) way of awakening through meditation, and compassion towards every living being. Christians have something to hear in a teaching that faces suffering and transience so honestly. Scripture too calls our life "a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes" (James 4:14).

The gospel differs in three ways. Beyond suffering is a personal God who made us and loves us (1 John 4:10). Salvation is not an awakening reached by effort but "the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8); some Buddhist traditions, such as Pure Land devotion to the compassion of Amitabha, also speak of help that comes from beyond oneself, and that is good ground for conversation. And Scripture sees each person as one whom God made and calls by name, and sets our hope on the resurrection of the body: "Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:20).

Shamanism is Korea's oldest religious tradition. Those within it speak of a world shared by the living, the dead and the spirits, and the shaman (mudang) mediates between them in the ritual called gut: to heal sickness, ward off misfortune, ask for blessing, and release the grief and grievance (han) of those who died wronged, reconciling them with the living. Beneath it lie pain and fear, and a deep wish to comfort the dead. Scripture does not make light of the unseen world (Ephesians 6:12), but it says that Christ, "having disarmed the powers and authorities," triumphed over them by the cross (Colossians 2:15). So Christians neither appease the spirits nor fear them: "greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world" (1 John 4:4). The question is taken further in Are angels and demons real? Many have noted that the Korean church, too, has known a faith that stops at asking for blessings, so this word is for us as well.

In conversation

Since the later nineteenth century many new religions have arisen in Korea. Some use the Bible's words while setting a man in Christ's place, or a new revelation above Scripture; the marks for telling them apart are in How can I tell a heresy or cult? The people inside them are to be met with love, not mockery.

Another common question is whether Christianity is a Western religion (Is Christianity a Western religion?). Korea's own church is one answer. Catholic faith there began with Korean scholars reading books, and the Protestant church with a Bible in Korean, translated with Korean helpers, that arrived before the missionaries did (Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and Korea). Through colonial rule and the trial of shrine worship, that faith became the people's own (The Korean church in the twentieth century).

In conversation this means hearing another's tradition first as they would put it. Ask a mother who goes to the temple what gives her peace; ask an elder who keeps the rites what the table set for the ancestors means to him. Welcome every bridge gladly, and say where the gospel differs plainly but gently. Above all, a life that honours parents with care is the clearest answer. The next lesson, Apologetics as conversation, brings the course to the place where it is used.

Practice