Chung Kyung-ok

Life

Chung was born on Jindo Island in South Jeolla Province. In 1919, while a student at Gyeongseong Higher Common School in Seoul, he took part in student demonstrations during the March First Movement, for which he was expelled from school and later imprisoned. He is said to have converted to Christianity in prison after reading the Bible and talking about the faith with a Christian he met there.

After his release, he studied in Japan and then at the Methodist Theological Seminary, graduating in March 1927. That same year he went to the United States, where he studied at Garrett Biblical Institute in Illinois; he then reportedly earned a master's degree from the graduate school of Northwestern University for research on mysticism. He returned to Korea in 1931 and taught systematic theology at his alma mater, the Methodist Theological Seminary (now Methodist Theological University). Systematic theology is the branch of theology that arranges Christian doctrine in an orderly, coherent form.

In March 1937, declining health forced him to resign his professorship and return to his hometown on Jindo. In the spring of 1939 he came back to Seoul and resumed his teaching post. During the final years of Japanese rule, he was reportedly branded pro-American and detained at the Jindo police station. He died on April 1, 1945, at the age of 42, four months before Korea's liberation.

Ministry and Work

As a professor, Chung served as editor-in-chief of the seminary's academic journal Theological World (Sinhak Segye) and published some sixty articles within a short period. In 1932 his article "The Theology of Crisis" introduced the theology of Karl Barth to Korea for the first time. His writings also show the strong influence of theologians in the liberal theology tradition, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl.

His principal works include The Principles of Christianity, an exposition of Methodist doctrine; Thus He Lived (1938), a sermonic portrayal of the life of Jesus written while he was living on Jindo; and An Introduction to Christian Theology (1939), written during the same period. An Introduction to Christian Theology is regarded as the first scholarly introduction to systematic theology written by a Korean.

Influence on the Korean Church

Chung is regarded as one of the figures who laid the theological foundations of Korean Methodism. In its denominational history, the Korean Methodist Church presents him as a theologian who held to "conservatism in faith and liberalism in theology" and who sought both the modernization of theology and its "indigenization" (rooting it in Korean soil). For this reason he is also treated as a forerunner of later indigenization theology. Scholars have also described him as one of the first, together with the Presbyterian Park Hyung-ryong, to produce scholarly theological writings, and as one who, along with Kim Jae-jun, shaped the direction of Korean theology.

Assessment

Chung openly identified himself with liberal theology. Accordingly, scholars classify him as a leading early Korean liberal theologian and contrast him with the conservative theological tradition that emphasized the authority of Scripture. Methodist scholars who have studied him, however, note that he did not confine himself to theological theory but valued religious experience and a godly life, and that he warned against absolutizing doctrine while emphasizing practice. Assessments of his theology vary according to the theological position of those making them.