Ahn Byung-mu

Life

Ahn was born in 1922 in South Pyongan Province. He is said to have moved with his family to Gando (Jiandao) as a child and to have grown up there. After Korea's liberation in 1945 he moved to the South. In the early 1950s, shortly after the Korean War, he formed a faith community in Seoul with like-minded believers, and this community became the origin of today's Hyanglin Church. He is known as a lay theologian who was never ordained.

In the late 1950s he went to Germany, where he studied New Testament at the University of Heidelberg and received his doctorate in the mid-1960s. After returning to Korea he taught New Testament at Hanshin University. Under the military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s he took part in the democratization movement, for which he was dismissed from his teaching post and imprisoned. He died in 1996. His pen name was Simwon (心園).

Ministry and Contributions

• Establishing Minjung theology: Together with Suh Nam-dong and others, he laid the framework of Minjung theology (民衆神學), a Korean theology that interprets the Bible and the Christian faith from the standpoint of the minjung, the oppressed and the poor.
• Interpretation of ochlos: He focused on the Greek word ochlos, which designates the "crowd" that followed Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. He held that ochlos refers to those marginalized in society, and he called what Jesus and these people brought about together the "minjung event." His Jesus of Galilee is regarded as his major work.
• Research institute and publishing: In the 1970s he founded the Korea Theological Study Institute, which published theological studies and translations, and he published the journal Hyeonjon (Presence). His writings were collected in a complete edition after his death.

Influence on the Korean Church

Ahn's Minjung theology is regarded as having provided a theoretical foundation for progressive churches, including the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea, and for social engagement movements associated with the National Council of Churches in Korea. It shaped the church's concern for labor, the urban poor, and human rights, an aspect of what is known as the church and the democratization movement. Minjung theology was also introduced to scholars abroad as a distinctive theology originating in Asia. Among his associates were Kim Chai-choon and Ham Sok-hon.

Assessment

Progressive circles regard him as a theologian who did not merely follow Western theology but read the Bible in light of the Korean people's history of suffering.

Conservative and evangelical critics have also raised objections. They argue that Minjung theology narrows salvation to a primarily social and political liberation and, by treating the minjung as virtually the agent of salvation, obscures the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. Some also object to its use of social-scientific analysis in biblical interpretation. Proponents of Minjung theology respond that they do not seek to deify the minjung but rather to bring to light, on the basis of the biblical text, the event in which Jesus stood with the minjung.