Minjung Theology

A NOTE ON THE SPECIAL THEOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTION OF KOREA

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What did the promise and the astonishing event of the first Easter mean to those who followed him??Saint Thomas, the Doubter, and the other now ten members of the inner circle of Disciples was hardly a wide sampling of opinion.?What does the crushing of one of one of these spat-upon and his rising from the dead mean to those who are crushed today beneath the wheel of war or real estate speculation or simple apathy??

In the Gospel of Matthew 5:3, Jesus tells the multitudes who have grown in number following him around Roman-occupied Galilee, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs’ is the Kingdom of Heaven.”?Jesus probably preached in Aramaic, but the Gospel is written in vernacular Greek.?The Greek Matthew uses for ‘the poor in spirit’ is Ptōchoi, a word that sounds like spitting, for it literally means ‘those who are spat-upon,’ the common people and also the very poor, the sick and crippled and blind.?It would be interesting to know what Aramaic word he used, whether it was Anawīm meaning the under-class, those really on the periphery of society, the exploited of every sort.?The Korean word Minjung (????) is very close to the meaning of Anawīm or Ptōchoi, the exploited multitudes, the spat-upon on the periphery of society, looking in from to outside to needs and wants they can never see met.?

The Korean people have some insight into what it means to be 'spat-upon,' marginalized, used and then forgotten. An ecumenical theological movement of both reflection and action among Korean Christians has coalesced over seven decades around that experience. I first learned about this Minjung Theology not in Korea but in Germany, at the Bethel Institutions near Bielefeld in the summer of 1984, at summer symposium being held right where I lived as a doctoral research fellow researching--what else?--the Bethel Confession of 1933. This was something completely different, or was it? If memory serves, and that is a big IF, the main presenter was HYUN Young-hak and the host of the Bethel Summer Mission Institute was Heyo E. Hamer.

Korea, like other countries situated between great powers, e.g., Poland or the Ukraine, has had to fight constantly for its existence between attacks from Mongols, Manchurians and Japanese.?After China was unified under the Han-Manchurian alliance, Korea (Joseon) became a vassal kingdom of the Empire.?The two countries developed very close economic, military and deeply Confucian-Taoist cultural ties through the centuries, even though linguistically Korean in its many dialects is closer in some respects to Japanese than to Mandarin.??The alliance provided some protection from Japan in large military operations, but Korea was still vulnerable to frequent Japanese raiding parties which came without warning to take Korean men, women and children as slaves, to rob anything of value and to destroy the rest.?Korea was also vulnerable to corruption from within and particularly to Japanese cultivation of that corruption.?In 1905, five leading members of the royal state signed a memorandum making Korea a Japanese protectorate and effectively removing it from the Chinese Empire.?Seven years later, after the final fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the proclamation of the Republic of China, there was absolutely no hope for Korea’s sovereignty.?In the 1930s, when the Asia-Pacific War really began, the Japanese presence in Northern China and Manchuria multiplied “to protect Japanese commercial interests. This turned into a full-scale military occupation with the rise of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the infamous Rape of Nanking. ?Korea was utterly defenseless against the Japanese occupation of the entire country and a routine repetition of the outrages Koreans had endured over many centuries were now carried out with the efficiency of a ruthless police state and was forced to become part of the Japanese war machine.?Even before the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific War that brought the United States into WWII, Korean girls as young as 15 were abducted into mobile brothels for the Japanese Army as ‘comfort women,’ never transported back to Korea by their captors and frequently ordered to be murdered outright as the Japanese troops retreated from the forces of Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong and the Anzac-American-Dutch Allies.?Biological and chemical warfare experiments that in some ways exceeded their equivalents under Nazi Germany were carried out not only in China but in Korea as well.?Because of their nimble fingers, children as well as adults were used as slave laborers in factories in Japan. Of the few who returned to Korea after the war, many were missing digits or limbs which had received no restorative surgery.???

And then, as a welcome home gift for the returnees while much of the world was learning just to live again after WWII there came the Korean War in 1952, in terms of military and civilian suffering one of the bloodiest wars in history (in which my own cousin nearly froze to death). ?As one further sorrow, the entire country was divided at the infamous 38th parallel between the Stalinist-Communist Peoples Republic of North Korea and the ostensibly democratic Republic of South Korea—a division that remains to this day.?But that was not all.?

Imagine if you dare a country, a people who had been through all that who now had their democratic constitution suspended by a military coup led by a general of the South Korean Armed Forces, PARK Chung-Hee, who, like those Koreans who signed away their country’s freedom in 1905, reached an accommodation with the Japanese ex-overlords. PARK even served as an officer in the occupier’s army during the war, openly expressing his admiration for the Japanese fighting spirit as Dictator of South Korea.?Imagine being ruled by such a creature, very much like Quisling, the Nazi collaborator-in-chief of Norway, one who used most if not all of the techniques of police-state intimidation, including torture, intimidation and assassination with which Koreans of the War Generation were familiar from the Japanese secret police.?It is said that all grief is cumulative.?That seems to have been the case in Korea, and one of the voices of protest that brought an end to the return of the nightmare was an ecumenical and interfaith movement of the early 1970s known as Minjung Theology, the ‘theology of the people,’ ‘the theology of the poor’ as in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:3.

Perhaps the most important and prolific, philosophers, social critics and advocates of this movement were young, many of them just students at the time of the national protests, and most of them experienced the horrible police brutality, torture and intimidation of the PARK regime.?The fact that they suffered in the same way their parents and grandparents had suffered, and at the hands of an apologist for the Japanese overlords, made the protest an intergenerational, national, Christian ecumenical and interfaith movement with participation from Roman Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists and others seeing relevance in both the teaching and suffering of Jesus Christ.?This is the particular ‘point in time’ that historians of Minjung Theology mean when they say that the movement ‘is not for export,’ that it is ‘specifically Korean.’?

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Out of the multitude of laity, clergy, monks and academics who developed Minjung Theology, four names that are particularly important to remember.?These are the workers’ rights advocate, JEON Tae-il, the Catholic artist and writer, KIM Chi-ha, and the Presbyterian theologians AHN Byung-Mu and KIM Yong-Bock.?

Tae-il was a young man of twenty-two when, out of complete exasperation with the brutal?cynicism of the PARK regime, taking a leaf from the book of several Buddhist monks in Vietnam at the time, immolated himself in public.?Chi-ha used his visual art and his artistry with words which traditionally accompany each other in Korean high culture to place the ministry of Jesus among the poor and outcast of Galilee and Judea in sharp relief, based on his own faith and study and on the work of theologians like Kim Yong-Bock and New Testament scholars like Ahn Byung-Mu.?Byung-Mu’s work is prolific, not all of it available in translation.?Two important works are, one written in book-length interview/dialog format, both published by the Society of Biblical Literature, Stories of Minjung Theology.?The Theological Journey of Ahn Byung-Mu in His own Words (trans. & ed. By Hanna In & Wongi Park, 2019—a full copy is available free online at https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/9780884144106_OA.pdf ) and Reading Minjung Theology in the Twentieth-First Century. Selected Writings by Ahn Byung-Mu and Modern Critical Responses (ed. Yung Suk Kim & Jin-Ho Kim).?

Though it developed at approximately the same time as Latin American Liberation Theology, predominantly among Catholics, Minjung Theology uses a different paradigm from Liberation Theology.?Latin American Liberation Theology, as developed by Gustavo Gutierrez and others, uses the Hebrew Exodus from slavery in Egypt, chronicled in the Books of Exodus and Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, as the basic paradigm of God’s action in history in the Biblical witness.?This action of God as liberator, choosing a people to effect a powerful liberation with and through that people, is the fundamental paradigm of Liberation Theology.?

Not so in Minjung Theology.???The Korean Church, the Korean people including the Buddhist-Taoist-Confucian majority, have experienced the exact opposite of a liberator coming from on-high or from anywhere to rescue them.?They have been repeatedly abandoned throughout their history.?But Koreans have had each other, and in Jesus, whether he is seen in Christological-Soteriological terms as the Mediator and Redeemer or as a great Bodhisattva, Son of the Guanyin, it is the Jesus of the Galilean ministry who was constantly with the people, the PTōCHOI, the ANAWīM, the moral screw-ups and outcasts, the poorest of the poor, the lepers and even the political assassins, and also the decent folk like Joseph and Mary of Nazareth who?couldn’t defend themselves against the Romans.?The Christ of Minjung Theology is Emanu-El, God-with-us, God-crushed to-dust with us, incarnate with us under the wheel of oppression, but joined with us forever in eternal hope, a hope that rises from the dead, just like the Korean people.?Minjung Theology also does not have to suffer the withering criticism of Liberation Theology from some Jewish quarters, which I have heard t my face in Jewish and Christian dialog sessions, that the Christian expropriation of the founding myth of the Jewish people is just that, a heist!

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The challenge of Minjung Theology today, still within Korea, is how to understand who are ‘the people,’ and ‘the poor’ in a fantastically wealthy and successful country, but still with an underclass and still with an incredibly strong tradition of feudal subservience which is striking to outsiders.?If you are addicted to 'K-Drama' as I am, you will know exactly what I mean. Not so Koreans, because you are obviously not outsiders. Minjung theologians today point to that inconvenient South Korean truth, but they also point with passion to the people of North Korea, that other inconvenient part of the Korean equation.

In the heady days of the student and national protests that brought down PARK, there was some reluctance to criticize the ‘socialist’ North, but no more.?KIM Jung-il and his offspring, KIM Jung-Un, have created a Maoist nightmare for the Korean prisoners of North Korea, reducing he populace at times to child cannibalism in the service of a megalomaniac who has run out of real allies.?His enemies are his own citizens, ordinary people, whose worst crime is that they want to see their families again, and from whom many of their children have taken for export to the West as ‘orphans’ as also in the South—these also are The Minjung.?

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What does this mean for the theology of the Church? ?Though its leading authors are Protestants, Minjung Theology has many Catholic exponents. Whether Rome is paying careful attention to this is not known. The possibilities of an encounter between Vatican II Catholic ecclesiology of the 'People of God' are intriguing indeed. ?If western students of theology and society read the Barthian Presbyterian, AHN Byung-Mu, they will find an ecclesiology far more radical than Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Church from below’ or ‘Church without privileges.’?It may seem puzzling to some, to me at least, that, in AHN's work, there is scant reference to Bonhoeffer.? With a nudge Barth, perhaps the Koreans just got there ahead of us and our discoveries of Bonhoeffer, just as they did in the development of the finest paper in the world.

In a still Confucian South Korea with abiding Buddhist sensibilities, but one in which Protestant respectability plays a great role among the upwardly mobile bourgeois elite, AHN calls for a Church with few ‘discernible outlines’ except for solidarity with the poor, the cast-off, ground-down, including refugees from the North who today form a sub-underclass of South Korean society according to some observers (See recent post, “Another Side of the Korean Struggle”).

? Guy Christopher Carter, Ph.D., 04/17/2023