This thesis analyses the most popular Korean Protestant magazines “The Youth” and “The Christian News” during the colonial era, in order to examine the Korean Protestant understanding of war and peace of the time. This war, utilizing modern scientific knowledge for military weapons, was an unprecedented disaster that forced Korean Protestants to realize and acknowledge the importance of ‘war’. As Protestantism sought the cause of war in state-ism, scientism, and capitalistic competition, it started to critically view the limitations, contradictions, and necessity for reformation of modern Western civilization, which used to be a role-model. On the other hand, there was critical revision towards historical practices of Christianity, and also search for the ideal Christian response towards war. In general, the human crisis-war-and Christianity was understood as conflicting concepts and Christianity needed to maintain a non-belligerent stance.
The philosophies of Tolstoy and Ghandi’s non-violent social disobedience were also introduced. It is debatable how much their philosophies were understood, but it holds true that there was an introduction to the Korean Protestantism at the time of the philosophical thought that rejected the capitalistic liberalism ideals, that sought the future ideal society in villagecommunities represented by small farmers, and that practiced this through non-violence social disobedience.
But such philosophical thought and search towards peace decreases with the Manchurian Incident in 1931. Eras of Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific war was dominated by arguments of Holy Wars based on definitions of self as absolute right and the enemies as absolute evil.
Such Holy War theories become vastly spread throughout Korean Protestantism during the Korean War and the Vietnam War, generalized as the Korean Protestant response towards war. Today, the Korean peninsula where North and South Korea are hostile towards each other, is a power cake of the world and the possibility of war increases with North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons. In order to realize the Christian ideals of ‘respect towards life’ and ‘realization of peace’ under such circumstances, there must be critical analysis about the peaceful traditions of colonial times and also the arguments of ‘righteous war’ in order to define what allows wars to be righteous. For Christianity to mediate conflicts of interest and politics, there needs to be much more meditation on what Christianity can do to actively build peace. Moreover, there is a critical need to continuously find and review peaceful movements within church history, such as the ‘The World Day of Prayer for Women Incident’ conducted by women of a nameless church during the Pacific wars, at a time in which the Holy War theory was dominant.

• 양현혜(이화여자대학교) | Yang, Hyun Hye