The Horace G. Underwood collection at Sage Library – Accessing and Unlocking 19th and 20th century missiological history in Korea
September 20, 2024
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the faculty and staff of New Brunswick Theological Seminary developed novel ways to continue our Seminary mission despite stay-at-home orders and forced building closures. Strong relationships among Seminary stakeholders and a general ethic of care made it all possible. In this article, we would like to highlight an example of a collaboration that has really borne wholesome fruit.
In 2020, the Sage Library was required to close and operate with very limited access to the building even for staff. Nonetheless, the strong relationship between the Underwood Chair, Dr. James JinHong Kim, and the Library Director Dr. T. Patrick Milas, made it possible for faculty to both research and publish despite the obstacles of the pandemic environment.
Since Sage Library was closed to its usual visitors, library staff developed new ways to meet the needs of the Seminary community. One project was “to digitize unique 19th- and 20th-century documents relevant to the history of NBTS. Digitization had long been a dream for NBTS in order to preserve and make available online some of our rarest and unique historic materials [especially the] letters of Horace Underwood, whose memorial is in Sage Library.”[1]
This journey towards digitization began in May 2019, when Dr. Milas invited the Director of Digital Initiatives from Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS), Gregory Murray, to meet with Sage Library staff to talk about the table-top scribe they used to digitize Princeton’s most important documents. The PTS Library administration offered to deploy their special scanning equipment to the Sage Library as early as spring 2021 if it could be done safely considering COVID-19. Library space we made available for digitization had not contained computers or scanners before, so Milas liaised with the NBTS Director of Communications and Technology, Rev. Steve Mann, to implement network access for the scanning center. A Memorandum of Agreement was necessary, for which NBTS and PTS general counsels were consulted.
Milas had not expected the pilot project to be able to be implemented in 2021, but due to COVID-19’s impact on what work library staff could do to be helpful to patrons, Library staff made rapid progress. Some of our most precious ephemera are now preserved in perpetuity at one of the most reliable and sustainable, open-access digital archives in the world – the Internet Archive. As new scans are uploaded, they will be published and accessible via the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/newbrunswickseminarylibrary. For access to the Horace G. Underwood Correspondence by Horace G. Underwood (1884-1898), see https://archive.org/details/horacegunderwood0000hora/mode/2up.
The story of how Sage Library received the Underwood collection predates the pandemic. When in 2013 the Underwood Family came to New Brunswick Theological Seminary with the idea of entrusting to us a large body of previously unknown private letters by Horace G. Underwood (1859-1916) to members of his own family, the initial plan was for Dr. Kim to transcribe the letters, add a short biographical sketch, and publish with the letters themselves as very much the main focus. Dr. Kim expected the publication to be out within a year or two, and indeed received emails from a number of scholars working in Korea conveying encouragement and great eagerness for the project to be completed so they could consult the letters for their own research interests. However, it would ultimately take some eight years for the letters to be published, and by then as part of a much larger endeavor.
The initial transcription of especially the handwritten letters (comprising thirteen of the twenty-four letters) took over a year to complete, due to fact-checking and related research. But in the course of that year Kim came to realize more and more what enormous significance these letters held. Written to his brothers in America during a key and volatile transition period in Korea (1884-1898), the letters not only contain a lively, intimate, personal account of his life and work in Korea, but are a penetrating and centrally placed eye witness account of Korean and Japanese politics, people, cultural character, and even interpersonal dynamics between Underwood and his fellow missionaries and its impact on the mission, etc., absent from his official mission reports. It was easy to see how these letters stood to impact the work of many scholars and institutions in and outside of Korea. But the significance of the letters went far beyond that even. What Kim sensed was that here was material that could actually change the way we understand the meaning and arc of 19th and 20th century missiological history as a whole. But bringing out such significance of the letters would need much more extensive explanatory groundwork than the short bio sketch originally planned. Kim’s new, much longer manuscript was completed by early 2017, but by then plans to publish the work as part of the RCA’s Historcal Series came to naught for reasons beyond anyone’s control, and it took time—made even longer by the restrictions posed by COVID-19 — before Wipf & Stock published the work in 2022.
During that delay, the main feeling Kim had was of tremendous inner pressure that he was holding up the work of other scholars who were counting on consulting the letters as part of their own research, especially at a time when the pandemic prevented them from traveling to NBTS. Kim relates, “I am truly in their debt for their patience!” Then in 2020, during a meeting at the Sage Library, Kim shared the sense of burden with Dr. Patrick Milas, Director of Sage Library, and he responded with the idea to prioritize the digitization of Underwood’s letters. His fast-tracking the digitization of those letters made it possible for scholars from around the world to access the precious historical documents as early as 2021, even as we awaited the book’s official publication.
Since we believe our NBTS community continues to be strongly committed to mission and missiological vision (“The Great Commission of Christ”), we want to share briefly about why we think Underwood, in spite of his almost unknown status (due to very historical circumstances Kim explains in the book), is arguably the most historically significant Protestant missionary of the last two centuries, even today continuing to inspire from Korea more than 27,000 career missionaries at work in all corners of the globe (second only to U.S. with 32,000), and more than 125,000 short-term missionaries annually at any given time.
What inspires an Asian nation to not only become Christian, but to become so committed to mission and to stay that way for over a century? Kim’s study of Underwood is neither a biography, nor an account of his mission, but rather an examination of the powerful synergy that can happen with what he calls proper “interculturation” of Christianity and local culture. In Underwood’s case it was his interculturation with Korea’s Neo-Confucian culture. His great hope for this book is that it will be read as a case study of successful Christian interculturation, so that Christians everywhere can think about the principles of interculturation and apply them in their own different contexts. In that sense, my work is an invitation to all Christians to rethink the pedagogy of missiology as we move toward the glocalization of Christianity.
So, for example, the book details how Underwood’s missiology was subtly but fundamentally changed as a result of his coming to appreciate the Neo-Confucian cultural ethos of “rightness” that he gradually learned to see and value among Koreans and in Korean history, and that ultimately expanded his own understanding of faith practice. To show this, the book had to include a chapter that provides some background on the foundations of that cultural ethos. That Underwood was engaging with the more substantive ethos and praxis deeply saturated within culture of the people at large distinguishes his interculturation from, for example, more recent efforts in Sino-Christian theology that tend to focus on the theoretical potentials of philosophical schools (e.g., Theo-Dao).
Second, so that Underwood and his letters may be more easily accessible as resources for future pedagogy of Christian missiology, Kim provides close analysis of various formative influences that helped shape Underwood’s own missiology before Korea—e.g., the anti-imperial legacy of his maternal great-grandfather the Rev. Alexander Waugh; the synthesis of science and religion modeled by the great scientist Michael Faraday; the years of field training under local pastors like Dr. William Mabon; the broad humanistic education he received at university; involvement in international and non-sectarian Christian movements led by the likes of Arthur Tappan Pierson; and not least the immigrant dynamics of late 19th century New York. With this Kim again wanted to show how synergy leading to interculturation is never a one-dimensional matter.
Christianity has taken root in South Korea as in no other nation in modern mission history, largely due to Underwood, yet there has been no book in English about him or an evaluation of his work since the two biographies about him written by his wife Lilias Underwood more than a century ago. And so Dr. Kim was tremendously moved when Rev. Laurel Underwood, a great-grand daughter of Horace Underwood who had kept those letters in safekeeping until she donated them to the Sage Library, said on an occasion celebrating their publication, “[u]ntil today, my family and I always only thought about how our great-grandfather went to Korea and Christianized it. But in coming to understand the meaning and significance of ‘interculturation’ through Prof. Kim’s work, we have come to see that it was Korea that allowed my great-grandfather to be transformed in Christ first. For that my family and I want to take this opportunity to thank Korea and Koreans.”
In recent decades, scholars from Kosuke Koyama to Stephen B. Bevans have increasingly argued that the Gospel cannot be “shared” in the manner of one-way-traffic, but needs to be modeled after two-way traffic; it shouldn’t be crusade-minded but cross-minded; delivering the Gospel is not about preaching but learning to listen first, to truly hear, as our Archetype, Jesus Christ, showed us by example. These are in line with Kim’s own strong belief that Christianity in America will have another true awakening only when it truly and deeply realizes that its history is not simply (or even primarily) one of white Christians converting and Christianizing African American slaves, but of many white Christians coming to understand the true meaning of the Gospel through the spirituality and faith drawn from the deep well of suffering among those who had been made slaves. This is what he means by learning to see and be open to interculturation, both in our past and as we develop the pedagogy of missiology for the future.
With enormous gratitude, Dr. Kim acknowledges just a few people among the many whose guidance and support have been instrumental to bringing the book project to fruition. Foremost among them he thanks Dr. John Coakley, for his encouragement and involvement with the project from its very beginning, closely reading numerous drafts with unflagging graciousness as well as immense scholarship. Among the NBTS community, his heartfelt thanks goes to all the faculty, students, and staff, but especially to the librarians and the NBTS/RCA Archives crew at Sage Library under Dr. Milas’ leadership, as well as Dr. James Brumm for his continued encouragement and support for the project even after its departure from the RCA Historical Series.
Sage Library was still closed to the public at the time of publication of Global Christianity and the early letters of Horace G. Underwood by James JinHong Kim in 2022. But it is open now, and the book is available for check out. Dr. Milas invites “all to come visit the Sage Library, tour the Underwood Memorial, check out the new book based in part on the Underwood correspondence that during the pandemic, even NBTS faculty struggled to access. The pandemic struggle here has waned. Welcome back. Come one, come all!”
By: James Jinhong Kim
and T. Patrick Milas
Resources:
Global Christianity and the early letters of Horace G. Underwood by James JinHong Kim
Library Leadership in the Long Lockdown and Beyond by T. Patrick Milas
Horace G. Underwood Correspondence by Horace G. Underwood (1884-1898)
[1] T. Patrick Milas, “Library Leadership in the Long Lockdown,” in ed. Burke, Ian and Megan Welsh Personalizing the Pandemic(Chicago: Atla Open Press, 2024), 262.