The Rescue Mission: From Confucian Corruption to Protestant Conscience at the Turn of Nineteenth Century Korea

Abstract:

This article is an account of the changing conceptualization of Confucianism by Protestant missionaries and Korean Protestant believers at the turn of the twentieth century. The Koreans and Anglo-American missionaries each identified different moral and political reasons for religious conversion. Key to the missionary notion was a proper religion. A religion proper is premised in the Revelation in the Scripture and verifiable in history and is distinct from a set of abstract ethical precepts. To this end, the missionaries deployed various catechisms with reference to comparative chronology and the rational basis of souls. On the other hand, the converts were attracted to the political possibilities of Protestant religion. The converting Koreans saw potential in reforming and regenerating public and private morality, arguing that Confucianism had exhausted its ethical resources. However, the closure of the political possibilities by the 1900s prompted the missionaries to explore other avenues such as Christian moral psychology. This reflected the missionaries' emphasis on post-mortem individual salvation, leading to a renewed conceptual focus on inner conscience rooted in Christian moral and natural science.