Coming into the 21st century, Korean religious (Christian) societies seem to lose the hope for social transformation. There are few voices to speak out for the common good especially on behalf of the helpless people. Prevailing is a relativist social ethic, which is ironically based on absolutist understandings of religious beliefs, that each social group deserves its own share, and any request for an ultimate ethical calling sounds obtrusive and extravagant. This is one of the worst aspects in our contemporary (...) religious ethics. This paper suggests that the legacy of the Korean minjung theology be reconsidered seriously in order to overcome the present predicament of religious social ethics. With a specific hermeneutic eye of minjungcentrism, we could establish a postmodern religious responsibility that avoids both relativism and absolutism and yet encourages an absolute calling for justice and liberation in the midst of historical relativity. (shrink)

This paper attempts to reinterpret the idea of minjung messiah, a major doctrine of Korean minjung theology, in order to reveal its nondualistic understanding of Christian eschatology, by using process non-substantialist metaphysics. In a dialogue with process panentheism, minjung theology gets philosophical languages to articulate its organic ideas of the relationships between historical liberation and eschatological salvation, minjung’s self-transcendence and divine providence, and history and the Kingdom of God.

Process hermeneutics attempts to solve the philosophical problem of the destructive effect of relativism in order to establish a common ground on which our metaphysical and ethical dialogue can be possible. In the postmodern context, we confront a very different hermeneutic task from that of modern hermeneutics. As Jean-François Lyotard characterizes postmodernity as “a war on totality,” postmodern hermeneutics criticizes the modern triumphalist rationality that claims such absolutisms as scientific objectivism, epistemological foundationalism, and moral universalism. Process hermeneutics welcomes this postmodern (...) iconoclastic urge against modern absolutism. However, it suspects the postmodern transition from meta-narrative to local-narrative that causes a difficulty for apossible common scholarship. In the postmodern relativization, an astute thinker asks whose interpretation, whose authority, whose criteria counts, and why. This paper proposes that process hermeneutics offer an alternative understanding to our postmodern studies and dialogues. (shrink)