Questing for an earthly sovereign: Adjudication in Korean political theology

ABSTRACT This research attempts to unearth the political nature of Korean liberal theology, yet an adjudicative tradition has not been previously studied. Amidst the turmoil of the constitutional battles of the 1970s, a group of liberal theologians appeared. Cutting through the well-worn claim that the nation was the best conceptual vehicle to deliver the Korean people’s will, they propounded the idea of popular sovereignty. Inaugurating a new public theatre of vigorous polyphonic controversy about the Korean polity, their novel treatment of the true nature of political authority recast the people as a whole as God’s agency through which He fulfilled his unfolding earthly purposes. In the canon of this workmanship model, their juridical recasting of the relation between God and his people gave it a contractarian nature. The renewed legal and normative substances endowed upon the singular sphere of the individual in God’s world set out a theoretical proposition for the nascent Korean notion of democratic representation ultimately. This marked the birth of the Korean political theology. The principle objective of this survey is to enter this now-lost intellectual world and glean how it shaped modern Korean political thought.