Moon Ik-hwan

Life

Moon was born in 1918 in Myeongdong Village in North Jiandao (now the Yanbian region of northeastern China), the eldest son of the Presbyterian minister Moon Jae-rin and Kim Sin-muk. Myeongdong was a Korean village strongly shaped by the independence movement and by Christian faith. From childhood he was a close friend of the poet Yun Dong-ju and of Chang Jun-ha. The theologian Moon Dong-hwan was his younger brother. While attending Soongsil School, he refused to participate in Shinto shrine worship and withdrew from the school along with other students. After enrolling at the Japan Theological Seminary in Tokyo, he refused to be conscripted into the Japanese army as a student soldier and returned to Manchuria.

In 1947 he graduated from Hanguk Theological Seminary (now Hanshin University) and was ordained as a minister. He later earned a Master of Theology degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in the United States and taught Old Testament as a professor at Hanshin University. His wife was Park Yong-gil. He died of a heart attack in Seoul on January 18, 1994, and was buried at Moran Park in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province.

Ministry and Work

• Bible translation: Beginning in 1968, he headed the Old Testament translation of the Common Translation Bible, published jointly by the Catholic Church and Protestants; he took part as a translator representing the Protestant side. He also wrote A History of the Hebrew Minjung, which rereads the Old Testament from the perspective of the minjung (ordinary people).
• Democratization movement: He is reported to have joined the democratization movement in response to the suspicious death of Chang Jun-ha. He was first imprisoned for his participation in the March 1 Declaration for Democratic National Salvation, issued at Myeongdong Cathedral in 1976. In 1978 he issued a statement criticizing the Yushin Constitution, and in 1980 he was imprisoned again on charges of preparing and conspiring to commit insurrection.
• Reunification movement: From March 25 to April 3, 1989, without government authorization, he visited Pyongyang at the invitation of North Korea's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland. At the time he was a standing adviser to the National Alliance for Democracy and Reunification of Korea, a coalition of dissident groups. He met President Kim Il-sung twice and issued a joint statement titled "Nine Principles Concerning Independent and Peaceful Reunification." Upon his return on April 13, he was immediately arrested on charges of violating the National Security Act; he was released on special parole in 1993.
• Literature: He was also active as a poet. After his death, The Complete Works of Neutbom Moon Ik-hwan (12 volumes), a collection of his poems, essays, prison letters, and sermons, was published.

Influence on the Korean Church

The Common Translation project is regarded as a leading example of Protestant–Catholic cooperation in Bible translation in Korea. His theology is often discussed alongside minjung theology, and it influenced the progressive current in the Korean church that holds that the church should engage with issues of social justice and national division (The Church and the Democratization Movement, Reunification and the Church). In 2018, the centennial of his birth, the house where he lived reopened as a memorial museum called the "House of Reunification."

Assessment

Supporters regard his 1989 visit to North Korea as having opened the way for a civilian reunification movement at a time when only the government was permitted to deal with the North. The government of the time, however, punished the visit as a violation of the National Security Act, citing his traveling alone without prior consultation, his use of the phrase "respected President Kim Il-sung" in his arrival statement in Pyongyang, and his allegedly one-sided condemnation of the South Korean government. Assessments of his reunification activities therefore remain divided to this day, depending on political orientation and theological position.