Thanks everyone, there's a Korean cult that goes around my college talking about how Christianity is corrupt because we "don't follow" God's command to rest on the seventh day.
And this is a good reminder of one of the problems of Korean Christianity. I'm painfully aware of the role of Korean cults that not only claim to be Christian, but in some cases even identify as Presbyterian.
We're going to be seeing this with China as well once the persecution ends and the government decides Christianity isn't the enemy. The underground "house church" movement in China is a very, very mixed bag.
Many American Christians love to romanticize persecution, but we forget that our actual history shows us that when access to sound teaching is limited, the Scriptures are burned, and legitimate ecclesiastical authorities have little or no ability to debate and debunk false doctrine, sincere but confused believers become prey to wolves and shepherds too often aren't around to protect them. All sorts of heretical movements existed in the ancient church alongside true Christianity. In the Middle Ages, various Cathari dualistic heresies existed alongside the Waldensians and other legitimate opponents of the Roman Catholic Church. I'm not one of the people who say all Anabaptists were damnable heretics, but it IS true that the Reformation in Germany and England was plagued with numerous aberrant movements which attracted followers because they presented themselves as being more throughgoing in their removal of Catholic error than the Reformers, and in the process, attacked a number of things on which the Lutherans, the Reformed, and the Anglicans all agreed the Catholics were right.
The core of the problem in Korea is that not too many years after a massive Korean revival known as the Korean Pentecost happened and the government started paying attention to the large and growing number of Christians in Korea, the occupying Japanese forced the Korean Presbyterian General Assembly -- literally at gunpoint, with armed Japanese soldiers ringing the assembly hall -- to adopt a statement that Japanese Shinto ceremonies worshipping the emperor were a legitimate patriotic observance. As usually happens, most of the denominational leaders decided to collaborate, with some heroic exceptions, and back in the United States, the Northern Presbyterian General Assembly actually decided that Shinto worship was comparable to pledging allegiance to the American flag.
To his credit, J. Gresham Machen was very upset, and many years later after the OPC was formed, a single OPC missionary to the Koreans, Rev. Bruce F. Hunt, became known for refusing to cooperate with emperor worship and was arrested. During a traditional Korean ritualized "walk of shame" in which the whole village is called out to witness a criminal being taken from the jail to the courthouse, and in which the villagers usually mock and berate the criminal, the Koreans started calling out "To the end! To the end!" meaning, "Stay faithful to the end!" The Japanese-controlled government recognized that antagonizing Americans in the era of "gunboat diplomacy," and at the same time potentially setting off a Korean rebellion, were both REALLY bad ideas and released Rev. Hunt to defuse the chaos. Any idea why conservative Koreans, after the Japanese were kicked out, wondered if the OPC was the last faithful Presbyterian body left? What became the Presbytery of Pusan, and later the Kosin Presbyterian denomination, called on the OPC for help. Look at that again. A group of Koreans that already was multiple orders of magnitude larger than the OPC said, "You were faithful under persecution, nobody else helped us, come back and help us now."
My objections to the OPC are well known and a matter of public record; there are reasons I amicably transferred out of my former church when it joined the OPC. I don't belong in the OPC and I know it. What you will never hear from me is criticism of the founders of the OPC, and most of the modern people in the OPC, for standing up for the truth under persecution. These were professors at PRINCETON SEMINARY -- the elite of the elite -- who gave up basically everything to start Westminster Seminary, and less than a decade later, gave up most of what little they had left to start the OPC. Rev. Hunt's faithfulness under fire SHOULD have been expected, not just of conservative Presbyterians but of any evangelical Bible-believing Christian. The fact is that he stood alone. And the high regard that Koreans have for the OPC is due almost entirely to one man who said, "I am not going to compromise and disobey God's Word."
Remember that, by the way, the next time you or your church faces far less serious problems from American liberals and leftists who can't do anything close to what the Japanese occupiers could do to Rev. Hunt. Way too many American Christians bow the knee to wokeism and compromise with wickedness merely to avoid being uncomfortable or to avoid people saying bad things about us or calling us "intolerant."
The problem is that the Koreans who loved and remembered Bruce Hunt weren't the only ones who were estranged from the Japanese collaborators in the Korean Presbyterian General Assembly. For decades, no Korean students could get seminary training without collaborating with the Japanese, which led to large numbers of pastors who were minimally trained and illicitly ordained serving churches that were either fully underground or claimed to be part of the official church while taking advantage of their rural isolated locations to ignore it as much as possible.
It's pretty obvious that maintaining any sort of functional presbyterian system of church courts under such conditions won't work and can't work. All sorts of ministers and elders, both good and not so good, many with good intent but minimal training, were gathering people around themselves with no effective way to keep false doctrine out. In fact, if the official Japanese-controlled Korean Presbyterian ecclesiastical authorities tried to ban a preacher, it was often viewed as a good sign of his faithfulness in refusing to bow the knee to Shinto shrine worship, and more people started coming to his underground church than were coming before the official church authorities criticized him.
The result was all sorts of new denominations in Korea after the end of World War II, and even more after the disruptions of the Korean War in which many preachers from what is now North Korea fled to the South, and gathered new congregations with no way to verify their claims about what they said they had been doing before 1950 in the northern provinces of Korea.
Among the pastors who fled the north was Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, which is the best-known in the West of those Korean cults. Sadly, there are many other Korean cult groups, including one which bought a former Assemblies of God college in Missouri and is promulgating its views and claiming to be Presbyterian. Any real Presbyterian, even in denominations like the ECO or EPC, will recognize that group's aberrant teachings on what they will call free grace (it's basically an extreme version of what John MacArthur was fighting against during the Lordship Controversy, and utterly foreign to a Reformed view of total depravity). But they have a ton of money because Korean churches typically mandate tithing and Korean immigrants to the United States often are very successful in business, and they are causing a lot of problems.
Remember that when you read stories about the current liberal South Korean government harassing Korean church groups. The story is more complicated than it appears. Yes, there are situations in which the current Korean government is targeting political opponents in churches and Charlie Kirk and others were right to raise warning flags. But in a number of cases, the churches being targeted -- even if they seem to have "normal" names and identify as Presbyterian -- are cult groups, have doctrinal problems, or their leaders are legitimately accused of financial improprieties. We're not used to a situation in the United States in which conservative Reformed churches with a thousand adult members are considered to be medium-sized or even small. Influential Korean Presbyterian churches are far, far, far larger than all but the very largest conservative American Presbyterian churches -- think First Columbia, Coral Ridge under D. James Kennedy, Tenth Philadelphia during its heyday, etc. -- and that comes with VERY large budgets, and lots of money can lead to financial problems that just don't happen in small churches because everybody knows everybody.
I am deeply enamored of Korean Christianity. But I know its problems, and the explosion of heretical and outright cult groups traces directly to the experience under persecution when getting in trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities was often a mark of faithfulness in the minds of simple believers, which made them prey for wolves.
This is an axample where Christian practice has undermined sound doctrine. If more Christians properly observed the Lord's day, fewer people would be vulnerable to specious arguments.
I agree with others on this thread such as
@TheBoringBaptist -- a thousand times AMEN!
Teaching a Reformed view of the Lords Day prevents a ton of problems from the SDA and related groups.
