A study on Christianity prospected by national religion during the blooming time: Centered on Christianity criticism and acceptance by national religion

Abstract

Two centuries have already passed since Christianity was introduced to this country. Society requires paradigm shift in everything for the new millennium in social aspects. Christianity, evangelical religion by Jesus Christ, can not be excluded. Korean Christianity has greatly improved and produced its fruits but today's Korean churches are of tardy growth facing self-examination and reproach. It is caused by the fact that Korean churches have not fulfilled the social requirements. What is worse is that Korea has been pushed into capitalistic market competition-centered society under IMF supervision. At the same time, Korean peninsula is the country that still keeps its cold war-like system called ideological race separation. Today, Koreans are suffering from these doubled troubles. Especially the ordinary people, having weak survivable abilities, are at the center of the trouble. This is quite time Korean churches should know what to do to approach people with evangelically joyful messages and spread the God's Rule successfully. Of course life is said to be a series of pain. As a result, it might be a matter of course that people's history contains a lot of suffering because it is composed of various kinds of lives. Especially Korean history can be said to be of suffering, which means its history has more people's suffering than any other countries. As it goes nowadays, there has been the times when the pain has increased depending on the historical ups and downs. Above all, in the historical situation around 19th century blooming time, Korean race reached its highest point in the pain. People tend to open their religious sentiment and rely on God when they get in troubles. A lot of national religions appeared to console and save their people's exhausted lives about the time of blooming. Among those, Daejong-gyo, Donghak, Jungsan-gyo, Wonbul-gyo have still had their social importance. About at the same time, Western Christianity of Jesus Christ's godsend was introduced to this land. National religions of those times applied them to their religious sources, sometimes showing their criticism and conflict, sometimes showing their agreements. Today's Korean churches should pay attention to the contacts and connections between those of that times because they offered Koreans the first experience to contact Christianity. These contacts let us know how Korean’s religious sentiment heads for Christianity. If Korean churches do their missionary work on this understanding, they can have their deep root and fruitful results. This study is on Christianity referred to in the scriptures of four major national religions introduced around the blooming time. That shows two important results. First is the agreement between Christianity and national religions. That is today, their religious object is a human of transiently honorable character. That means that nation's religious sentiment contains Jehovah as the creator of the world. That is the great and graceful fact. Second is the disagreement and conflict between Christianity and national religions. They disagree each other on the way to cope with the end of the world. There was deep conflict between Christians' individualistic, future life-oriented and unrealistic endism and national religions’ realistic endism focused on a community for treatment and completion of irrational society. That was caused by Christians’ selfish religious act and this gives today's Korean churches important facts. I, the researcher, think that the evangelical truth is based on community spirit, not on the individual spirit. What is dominating the Korean society nowadays is the humble capitalistic idea based on human individualism. And the pain of national separation is added to it. Korean churches should provide the exhausted and pain-stricken people with truthful comfort and godsend, which are the massage and religious act pursued by ordinary people of the blooming time through national religions. This is the same with truth of the Bible and can be said to be the community-oriented religion toward the humanity of greatly honorable character. This is the point where Christianity and national religions of the blooming time met each other and today's churches should seek after. This is the nation’s religious sentiment and warning for today's Korean churches. Korean churches should be based on this and improve the theology. They can never be the meaningful theology to serve people, the owners of churches without recognizing this fact. This study aims to examine the possibility of establishing a Korean theology.