David Chung

The purpose of this article is to examine why Koreans showed such keen receptivity to Christianity when it reached Korea in the eighteenth century. The article argues that this receptivity was in great part due to the already-established belief systems of the people having elements congenial to Christian doctrines and that these congenial elements were the fuse which, when ignited, touched off the explosive growth of the Christian churches in Korea. Needless to say, these congenial elements were found in all belief systems of Korean people, namely, Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and indigenous Shamanism. In this article, however, Confucianism will be singled out as an example that illustrates to what extent a belief system was congenial to Christianity. Morphological analogies existed between Confucianism and Christianity. It was “sensed'” early by Ricci and brought to the attention of the world by his colleagues in the bitter Controversy of Rites which ensued after his death. In an excessive form the Riccian understanding of Confucianism found an expression in Le Comte, himself a Jesuit missionary to China, who was by the Longobardians “accused of having preached indifference in religion, driven by illusion of a church in China before Jesus Christ, and of having substituted the Chinese people as the chosen nation in place of Israel. And so forth.”