Understanding Korean Christianity
Grassroot Perspectives on Causes, Culture, and Responses
by K. Kale Yu
Imprint: Pickwick Publications
The cultural landscape plays a momentous role in the transmission of Christianity. Consequently, the global expansion of the church has led to the increasing diversification of world Christianity. As a result, scholars are turning more and more to native cultures as the point of focus. This study examines how this new discourse evolved as well as presenting a missional methodology based on the study of the native landscapes of Korea. Kale Yu argues that the process of formulating and communicating Christianity was less consistent than is usually supposed. By immersing the reader in the thought and lived experience of various Korean contexts, Professor Yu recreates the diversity of cultural landscapes experienced by Korean Christians of different periods in history. The result is a new interpretation of cross-cultural missional interactions.
K. Kale Yu is Adjunct Professor of Religion at High Point University, NC. He is the author of Study: A Spiritual Practice (forthcoming).
"K. Kale Yu provides us with a historiography from the bottom-up, with local and native perspectives set with a thematic framework. The author unearths deeply rooted traditions, such as Confucianism and shamanism, and grasps the core of Korean culture, which works as cultural gravity and offers contact points for pulling and encountering the gospel. This book is a fresh example of historiography with a world Christianity approach. Recommended to those interested in the 'glocal' nature of Christianity!"
--Hyung Jin Park, Associate Professor, Torch Trinity Graduate University, Seoul, Korea
"Building on the work of Walls, Sanneh, and other pioneers in World Christianity who have drawn our attention to the complex processes of faith reception, translation, and transformation, Yu's theory of 'terraculturalism' sheds fresh light on ethical, religious, and gender dynamics that helped to shape the unique character of Korean Christianity."
--Thomas John Hastings, OMSC Executive Director and IBMR Editor
"A superb contribution to the study of world Christianity both in its content on Korean Christianity and methodological proposal that underscores the creative and distinctive responses of the local agents. It offers a remarkably thoughtful analysis of how Korean Christianity has negotiated socio-philosophical foundations of its culture, such as Neo-Confucianism, and also the complex effects of hybridization."
--Daniel D. Shin, Associate Professor of Theology and World Christianity, Drew University
"K. Kale Yu brings a fresh voice to the methodology of world Christianity from the perspectives of grassroots approaches. Using South Korea as his context and terraculturalism as his methodology, Yu expertly explores grassroots Korean Christian perspectives on causes, culture, and responses in dialogue with the Korean native religions, such as Confucianism and Shamanism. When the trained theologians humbly and critically engage the theologies found and practiced in the socio-religious lives of the experiential grassroots communities, the more relevant theologies and missiologies emerge for the mutual benefits of both academic and ordinary Christian communities. This book is an important and a timely contribution to the fresh methodology of world Christianity. I heartily recommend it."
--David Thang Moe, Asbury Theological Seminary, Associate Editor of Missiology: An International Review
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