A Reading of Isaiah 11 in the Context of the Divided Korea with focus on a Reunification Theology of Isaiah in his Messianic Prophecy

Abstract

One of the Asian ways of reading the Bible is to engage biblical promises and prophecies in a real and sociopolitical context. Historically, for Asians the Bible has always been a book of divine word that needs to be acted out in a real life setting. It was the case both with M. Gandhi when he led a peaceful movement against the British imperial regime over fields of salt (the 1930 Salt March) and with the Korean Christians in the 1930-40s when they resisted the Shinto worship of the Japanese imperialistic regime. The then Korean Christians were able to successfully resist the forced Shinto shrine worship because they were able to find spiritual nourishment in various biblical oracles that inspired them to counter the human powers of the imperialistic regime by the Divine Sovereign. They acted out biblical prophecies that castigated human emperors and dictators, and acted upon them even when they were threatened to be jailed or sentenced to death. The Korean church thus has been anchored in the tradition of faith that embraced the Word of God as instructive and directional in one’s daily life and made it to bear upon their real life issue. Living on the divided Korean peninsula has strongly motivated me as a biblical scholar to pay much more serious attention to those biblical oracles which proclaim the unification of a divided people under the hand of the sovereign God (Isa 9 and 11; Ezek 36-37; Amos 9.11-14). Isaiah 11 is an example of a passage in which it is possible to demonstrate how an Asian reading makes a difference in interpreting biblical prophecies. With my reading of Isaiah 11, I will attempt to exemplify an Asian reading of the biblical oracle by making it address the Korean people who have been suffering a lot from the hostility and disunity between South Korean and North Korea since 1945. The essence of such a reading lies in reading biblical prophecy as something to be humanly acted out and lived out rather than a retrospective memoir or futuristic forecasting. My reading is intended to encourage people suffering from hostility and disunity like the Korean people to achieve peace reconciliation. It is with this kind of Asian engagement with the Bible that my paper will be concerned. The present paper specifically makes an exegetical inquiry into Isaiah 11 with special focus on its realpolitikal implication for the reconciliation between southerners and northerners.