Moon Dong-hwan

Life

Moon Dong-hwan was born on May 5, 1921, in Myeongdong Village in North Jiandao (Bukgando), the second son among the three sons and two daughters of the Rev. Moon Jae-rin and Kim Sin-muk. His elder brother was the Rev. Moon Ik-hwan. He is said to have grown up in the same village as the poet Yun Dong-ju. After graduating from Eunjin Middle School in 1938, he went to Japan and studied at Tokyo Theological Seminary and other institutions. After Korea's liberation he studied at Chosun Theological Seminary, which had been founded by Kim Jae-jun and is the forerunner of today's Hanshin University. In 1951 he went to the United States, where he attended Western Theological Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary before earning master's and doctoral degrees in religious education at Hartford Seminary.

After returning to Korea in 1961, he became a professor of religious education at his alma mater, Hankuk Theological Seminary. That same year he married Harriett Faye Pinchback (Korean name Moon Hye-rim), whom he had met while studying in the United States. In 1975 he was dismissed from his post under pressure from the Yushin regime. He was reinstated in 1979 but was dismissed again by the new military junta and went into exile in the United States. After retiring from the seminary in 1986, he entered politics, and in 1991 he settled in New Jersey. He died on March 9, 2019, and was buried in the section for national and democratic martyrs at Moran Park in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province.

Ministry and Accomplishments

• Pastoral ministry and community: As a minister of the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea, he served as pastor of Sudo Church in Seoul alongside his teaching career. In 1972 he founded the House of Dawn (Saebyeok-ui Jip), a Christian community in which like-minded people lived together and shared a life of faith. After his dismissal in 1975, he organized Galilee Church with fellow dismissed professors, and they pastored it jointly.
• Democracy movement: He was imprisoned in connection with the March 1 Declaration for Democratic National Salvation, issued at Myeongdong Cathedral in 1976, and served nearly two years. After his release he supported the struggles of labor union members at Dongil Textile and YH Trading, and he was imprisoned again.
• Political activity: At the urging of Kim Dae-jung, he joined the Party for Peace and Democracy and became chairman of its Research Institute for Peace, Democracy, and Unification. In 1988 he became a national-list (proportional representation) member of the 13th National Assembly, and he served as the party's senior vice president and as chairman of the National Assembly's Special Committee to Investigate the Gwangju Democratization Movement.
• Theology and writings: He is said to have found the starting point for his minjung theology in prison, as he witnessed the wretched conditions of ordinary inmates. Minjung theology seeks to read Scripture and history from the standpoint of the oppressed common people, the minjung. In his later years he advanced a "theology of wanderers," which focused on people who, like migrants, have lost their homes and livelihoods and live as drifters. In 2015, at the age of 94, he published Jesus or Paul?, in which he argued that the thought of Paul had undermined the spirit of Jesus.

Influence on the Korean Church

Together with his brother Moon Ik-hwan, he is regarded as a leading figure of the Protestant democracy movement. After his release from prison, the House of Dawn served as a gathering place for democracy activists. The Neutbom Moon Ik-hwan Memorial Foundation credits Moon Dong-hwan and Moon Hye-rim with building communities wherever they went, including Sudo Church, the House of Dawn, Durebang, and the Rainbow House. After retirement he led the Rainbow House community in the United States, which assisted Korean women, and he took part in the reunification movement among Korean Americans, carrying on the church's reunification movement.

Assessment

Progressive Protestant circles and the press honored him as a pastor of action who stood with the weak, calling him "the godfather of the democracy movement" and "the wandering shepherd." His theology, however, belongs to the progressive theological tradition associated with the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea and stands far from the theology of conservative and evangelical denominations. In particular, his direct critique of Pauline theology in Jesus or Paul? conflicts with the traditions of most denominations, which treat the Pauline epistles as central to the doctrine of salvation. Assessments of his decision, as a minister, to enter party politics directly also vary according to how one understands the relationship between church and politics.