British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Social and Cultural Change in late pre-modern Korea
A one-day conference organised in collaboration with the
British Association for Korean Studies
Abstracts
Ch'udo yebae: a Protestestant substitute for Confucian ancestral rituals
Professor James H. Grayson - Professor of Modern Korean Studies, University of Sheffield
An early resolution of a conflict of values is necessary if a missionary religion is to find acceptance in the culture of the receiving society. In East Asia, under the influence of Confucianism, filial piety came to be seen as the principal personal and social moral value, which moral sentiment was to be given visible representation in the performance of ancestral rituals. Christian missions, Catholic and Protestant, faced a conflict between filial piety and ancestral rites on the one hand, and the proscription of the performance of idolatrous rites on the other hand. From the end of the nineteenth century, Korean Protestants have resolved this conflict by developing a Christian ritual which is a substitute for Confucian ancestral rites. Within a century, this rite has become the central rite in a complex of Confucian-based Christian death and funerary rituals.