A Holistic Mission Approach: A Case Study of Missionary John Van Neste Talmage

It is the conventional wisdom of the academic community to conclude that the U.S. missionaries’ stance toward Japanese imperialism during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945) did not stand on either side of Korea or Japan, but exposed their non-political inclinations by maintaining neutrality. This conventional wisdom is not wrong, but it is not entirely true. Almost all U.S. missionaries maintained apolitical attitude that did not intervene into Korea’s political situation. The purpose of this study is to find out the nature of Japanese imperialism by studying an American missionary who resisted Japanese imperialism in his own political way and to enrich the discussions on non-political stance of missionaries.