The Wilderness Pilgrimage Code
This chapter begins by outlining the views of Stanley Hauerwas who insists that a meaningful (Christian) story is the ontological foundation upon which a person or a community develops self-identity, moral virtues, socio-political institutions, and social
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The Wilderness Pilgrimage Code
[Christians] live each in [their] native land[s] but as though they were not really at home there. They share in all duties as citizens and suffer all hardships as strangers. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland a foreign land … They dwell on earth but they are citizens of heaven. Letter to Diognetus, 5 (Joseph Barber Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1956), 18.)
In this chapter and the following ones, I discuss in detail each of the five socio-ecclesial codes or faith fundamentals of Korean American evangelical diasporas in North America: the Wilderness Pilgrimage code, the Diasporic Mission code, the Confucian Egalitarian code, the Buddhist Shamanistic code, and the Pentecostal Liberation code. The five codes are socio-ecclesial or practical, the logical responses to the particular ecclesial situation of the Asian/Korean American Christian life discussed in the previous chapter. Yet, the five codes serve not only as responses but also as formative spiritual formulae that have shaped the constructs of Korean American faith over the past decades. In particular, as we will see, preaching is an essential ecclesial practice that strongly reflects the five codes in their diverse forms and contents. Indeed, the moment of preaching embodies the five codes and is the pivotal time when the five codes that shape congregational spirituality are most vividly demonstrated and reestablished in the Korean American context. © The Author(s) 2016 S. Yang, Evangelical Pilgrims from the East, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41564-2_2
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I begin with the bicultural theological dimension of Korean American spirituality, as shaped by the Wilderness Pilgrimage code (along with the Diasporic Mission code that appears in the next chapter). This bicultural theological analysis will show how the code helps formulate the particular biblical-theological symbolic narrative of the Korean American Christian life as the spiritual, missional pilgrimage, especially during the preaching event. The given code is the result of Korean Americans’ daily bicultural life experience and their theological interpretation of it.
FOUNDATIONAL CONTEXT FOR THE CODE The driving idea for the code of a pilgrimage in the wilderness is not a faith orientation that Korean American evangelicals have developed or that is unique to their socio-cultural context. Throughout (western) Christian history, the concept of the Christian life as a spiritual pilgrim journey has been a significant theme, specifically derived from biblical-theological understandings of the pilgrim idea/ideal. Yet, Korean Americans have adopted and creatively adapted the pilgrim idea in accordance with their own socio-cultural context. This has helped them generate new spiritual meanings of the same concept for the sake of their own spiritual journey in the foreign land. In the following section, therefore, I first explore the biblical-theological understanding of the pilgrimage and then discuss the c
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