A Korean History Education in the Korean Protestant Church Curriculum

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is critically to verify the Korean history education in the Korean Protestant church curriculum (KPCC). Considering the Korean Protestant Church toward the national public religion in Korea, the whole Korean history needs to be taught in the church curriculum. The KPCC, however, keeps silent about such issues as the null curriculum. In addition, there are very few evidences of Korean history in KPCC, especially about the ancient history of Korea before the first Protestant church arrived in Korea around the last period of the Chosun dynasty regime. It seems that theologically conservatism and the church growth-oriented ideology in the Korean churches have strongly effected on making the null curriculum for Korean history in KPCC. Such phenomena put the Korean church at risks that it would like to be a national public religion. Accordingly, the researcher tried to suggest a possibility to bridge between the two different histories, i.e., Korean history and Israelite history of the Bible in terms of the hermeneutical perspective so that Christian learners could understand the whole Korean history. On the basis of dynamic analogy of hermeneutics between the Korean history and the Israelite history of the Bible, the researcher puts forward two different models, that is, the one is “theology of religion model,” and the other is “social science model.”