Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and Korea

Carey and the modern missionary movement

For two centuries after the Reformation, Protestant churches did comparatively little to carry the gospel overseas. There were exceptions, the Moravians above all, but some held that Christ's commission to make disciples of all nations had been given to the apostles alone. William Carey (1761–1834), a shoemaker and Baptist pastor in the English Midlands, set out to answer them. In a pamphlet of 1792 he surveyed the peoples and religions of the world in tables, and argued that the Lord's command still binds the church Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians.

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Matthew 28:18-20

If the promise of Christ's presence to the end of the age belongs to the church today, Carey reasoned, so does the command. That year he preached on "Enlarge the site of your tent" (Isaiah 54:2), and his sermon is remembered by a watchword about expecting great things from God and attempting great things for God, though its exact wording is uncertain. In October Baptist ministers formed a missionary society, and the next year Carey sailed with his family for India.

In India he endured years without visible fruit, the death of a young son and his wife's long mental illness. From 1800 he worked with colleagues at Serampore, translating the Bible into Bengali and other languages, founding schools, and campaigning against the burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres. He never returned to England.

Other societies followed. The London Missionary Society, founded in 1795 by Christians of several denominations, sent workers to the South Seas, Africa and China; Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, went out under it. The Englishman Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) wanted to reach beyond the coastal cities into China's interior, and in 1865 founded the China Inland Mission. It welcomed missionaries of any denomination, made no direct appeals for money but looked to God in prayer, and its workers wore Chinese dress and hairstyles so that a foreign appearance would not stand between the Chinese and the gospel.

What drove the movement was love for those who had never heard and the logic of Paul's questions: "And how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? And how can they preach unless they are sent?" (Romans 10:14-15). Matthew Henry puts it plainly: "But how should any call on the Lord Jesus, the Divine Saviour, who had not heard of him? … It was necessary that the gospel should be preached to the Gentiles. Somebody must show them what they are to believe" Matthew Henry. For the question of those who never hear, see What about those who never heard?.

Preachers and theologians

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) of London was the century's best-known preacher. At fifteen, on a snowy Sunday in a small Methodist chapel, he heard "Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth" (Isaiah 45:22) and turned to Christ, and before he was twenty he was a pastor in London. A Calvinistic Baptist, he saw his sermons printed every week and translated into many languages, and he founded a college for pastors and an orphanage. Near the end of his life, warning that the authority of Scripture and the doctrine of the atonement were being eroded, he left the Baptist Union.

The American D. L. Moody (1837–1899) moved from selling shoes in Chicago, through Sunday schools and the YMCA, to evangelism. Never ordained, he toured Britain from 1873 with the singer Ira Sankey, speaking of God's love and the new birth in plain words to great crowds. At a summer conference for students that he hosted in 1886, many young men pledged themselves to overseas mission, and from that pledge grew the Student Volunteer Movement, which sent many young men and women abroad.

In theology, Princeton Theological Seminary became a stronghold of the Reformed faith. Charles Hodge (1797–1878) taught there for more than half a century and published his Systematic Theology in 1872–1873 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology. As a natural scientist gathers and orders the facts of nature, he held, so the theologian gathers and orders the facts of Scripture. When the historical criticism met in the previous lesson unsettled Scripture's authority, his son A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield argued in an 1881 article, Inspiration, that Scripture in its original writings was inspired by the Spirit and without error A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, Inspiration. They leaned on Paul's words, "All Scripture is God-breathed" (2 Timothy 3:16), where the Greek is theopneustos (θεόπνευστος). The Spirit, they held, used the writers' own personalities and styles while making the whole the word of God. Their view became a deep root of twentieth-century evangelical teaching on Scripture.

Korea: the word came first

The story of Korean Protestantism begins with Scripture that arrived before the missionaries. In Manchuria the Scottish Presbyterian missionary John Ross (1842–1915), with his colleague John McIntyre, worked with Korean helpers from the border town of Uiju, among them Yi Eung-chan, Seo Sang-ryun and Baek Hong-jun, to translate the Bible into Korean. Luke and John appeared first, in 1882, and the whole New Testament followed in 1887, known as Yesu Seonggyo Jeonseo John Ross and others, The Korean New Testament. The sources give the exact titles and dates of the first portions in slightly different ways.

Colporteurs such as Seo Sang-ryun carried these books across the border at real risk. Like the scattered believers of Acts who "preached the word wherever they went" (Acts 8:4), they spread the word in their home villages and in Seoul, and it is told that Koreans gathered on their own as believers at Sorae in Hwanghae Province. In Japan, Yi Su-jeong, baptized there, translated Mark's Gospel, and the first missionaries are said to have brought his translation with them. When the missionaries arrived, there were already Koreans who had read the word and were waiting for baptism.

A treaty between Korea and the United States in 1882 opened the way. The medical missionary Horace Allen arrived in 1884, and on Easter Day, 5 April 1885, the Presbyterian Horace Underwood (1859–1916) and the Methodist Henry Appenzeller (1858–1902), sent by the northern Presbyterian and Methodist churches of the United States, landed together at Chemulpo. In 1887 they founded the Saemunan and Jeongdong churches, and they opened schools and worked together on Bible translation. Appenzeller drowned in 1902, when his ship sank on the way to a translation meeting. The missionaries published Scripture and tracts in the Korean alphabet, hangul, which anyone could read, rather than in classical Chinese, and many judge that this helped hangul itself to spread. Methodism's roots are traced in Wesley and the Methodist movement.

In 1890 John Nevius (1829–1893), an American Presbyterian missionary in Shandong, China, visited Seoul and explained his principles John L. Nevius, The Planting and Development of Missionary Churches: churches should propagate themselves, govern themselves and support themselves. These ‘three-self’ ideals had been voiced before by mission leaders in Britain and America, but the Presbyterian missionaries in Korea adopted them that year and set Bible study, in classes that gathered believers for days at a time, at their heart. Believers stayed in their trades and told their neighbours; congregations built their own churches. How the Presbyterian church grew from there is told in the Reformed Faith course's lesson Presbyterians in Korea.

Costly love and the limits of an age

The missionaries of this century gave up much. Many died of disease or buried children, and in China's Boxer uprising of 1900 many missionaries and a far greater number of Chinese Christians were killed. They learned hard languages, translated Scripture, and founded schools and hospitals, trusting Christ's promise to be with his people to the end of the age.

The limits of the age must be named honestly too. Nineteenth-century missions coincided with the expansion of Western power in Asia and Africa. In China, unequal treaties imposed after the Opium Wars protected missionaries' work, and some missionaries came close to equating Western civilisation with the gospel or looked down on the peoples they served. So Christianity could look like the religion of empire. Yet Carey fought widow-burning, Taylor opposed the opium trade, and Nevius's principles aimed at churches led by their own people rather than by missionaries. And in Korea, Koreans were reading and spreading the word before any missionary arrived.

The gospel did not begin in the West. It began in Jerusalem, in Asia, and John saw "a multitude too large to count, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue" standing before the Lamb (Revelation 7:9). See Is Christianity a Western religion? This course stops at about 1900, but the story goes on, into the great movement of repentance at Pyongyang in 1907.

Practice