The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G

KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 47 No. 3 The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller John W. COAKLEY, Th.D. Feakes Professor, Church History New Brunswick Theological Seminary, U.S.A. I. Introduction II. The “Crisis of Missions” III. Appenzeller at Drew IV. Underwood at New Brunswick V. The Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance VI. The Call to Korea VII. Conclusion Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3 (2015. 9), 59-82 60 KOREA PRESBYTERIAn JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 47 No. 3 Abstract This article discusses the seminary preparation, in America, of the missionaries Horace Underwood (1859-1916) and Henry Appenzeller (1858-1902), both of whom spent most of their adult lives in Korea after their arrival there in 1885. It presents them, in their documented actions and relationships in their seminary years at, respectively, New Brunswick Theological Seminary and Drew Theological Seminary (as it was then called) as being both influenced by, and exemplifying, a spirit of renewed urgency about world mission—a spirit that had begun to manifest itself in American evangelical circles in the early 1880s, and was epitomized in the notion of a “crisis of missions” popularized by the pastor and theologian A. T. Pierson. Both Underwood and Ap- penzeller had direct contact with the broader missionary movement that embodied this renewed spirit of mission, through the then-young organization called the Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance, the annual meeting of which they both attended in October of 1883, at around the time when they were coming to their decisions to respond to the call to serve in Korea. Keywords Appenzeller, Underwood, Crisis of Missions, Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance, Pierson The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 61 I. INTRODUCTION1 The missionariesH enry Gerhard Appenzeller and Horace Grant Underwood sailed together into Chemulpo harbor in April of 1885. Both spent much of the remainder of their lives in Korea, where the stories of their place in Korean Christianity are well known. Less well known, perhaps, are the stories of their preparation in America as missionaries, in the early 1880s when they were seminary students. Those are the stories I propose to tell here. A conspicuous trait of both these men in their seminary years, as in fact earlier, was their zealous commitment to evangelism. Indeed both of them were intellectually able, and in Korea both would distinguish themselves as teachers and biblical translators. But by disposition, their first love was always the active life of preaching and witness—a vigor- ous life of visible accomplishment for the Christian cause in the world. This passion for evangelism and for tangible achievement in build- ing the church, though of course a trait unsurprising in missionaries, was also peculiarly matched with the particular spirit of the foreign mission movement in America during the time they were in seminary, when they were coming to their decisions to serve as missionaries in Korea—a time characterized by a new sense of urgency about the call to mission and new organizational efforts to stimulate response to that call. II. THE “CRISIS OF MISSIONS” The new urgency about foreign mission that was being expressed in the 1880s had to do, in part anyway, with global geopolitical changes at the time. It was these that the pastor and theologian A. T. Pierson 1 This essay originated as a public lecture presented at the International Sympo- sium on Appenzeller and Underwood in Commemoration of 130 Years of Korean Mis- sion, held in Seoul May 30-31, 2105 and co-sponsored by the Saemoonan Presbyterian Church, the Chungdong First Methodist Church, Drew Theological School and New Brunswick Theological Seminary. I thank the organizers of the symposium for their in- vitation, hospitality and support. 62 KOREA PRESBYTERIAn JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 47 No. 3 famously spoke of as creating a “crisis of missions.” Indeed, the foreign mission movement in America was itself not new; we usually think of the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810—that is, two generations earlier—as its beginning- point, and the movement had deep roots in American Protestant cul- ture.2 All the evangelical churches had been sending and supporting missionaries to foreign fields through most of the century already. But Pierson and others were pointing out that by the 1880s, largely because of Western nations’ expansion of their commerce by treaty and also (let it be said) by coercion, countries that had previously excluded missionaries were now allowing them. The world, they argued, was suddenly becoming considerably more open to the Gospel than it had been in the earlier part of the century. Doors formerly closed to the Gospel were now thrown wide. What made this situation a “crisis,” as Pierson explained it, was a looming awareness that the doors might soon shut again. Thus it was imperative for the Church to bring the gospel where it might be heard while there was still time. Moreover, evils from the West, that is, from the cultures of the missionaries’ own countries, were also entering those doors—evils like materialism and unbelief—and the Church must hurry to preempt them.3 By the middle of the decade, the slogan, “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation”–a phrase, dubbed the “watchword,” which admirably conveyed the sense of haste shared by mission leaders at that point—was to be coined, and it became the great rallying cry of the American foreign mission movement, which grew remarkably, from not quite a thousand missionaries in overseas fields in 1894 to 5400 in 1900 to 9000 by 1915.4 And it was in the early 1880s that the impetus behind this great growth in missions 2 William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 43-61. 3 Arthur T. Pierson, The Crisis of Missions (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1886); Dana Robert, Occupy until I Come: A.T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), esp. 140-46, 150-56 4 Michael Parker, The Kingdom of Character: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions 1886-1926 (Lanham, Maryland: American Society of Missiology and University Press of America, 1998), ix. See also William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World, 91-124. The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 63 was beginning to be felt in earnest. III. AppENZELLER AT DREW Henry Gerhard Appenzeller, by the time he enrolled in seminary, was well poised to absorb this spirit of urgency about the evangelization of the world. He was a Methodist by choice, and for him the choice had intimately involved a commitment to evangelism. Born in 1858, he grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a family of German background and attended his family’s church, which belonged to the denomination known as the German Reformed Church. At that time, an important theological movement was finding expression within that denomination, a movement known as the Mercersburg Theology, whose leaders understood the Christian faith as a corporate reality that had developed organically over time, and accordingly criticized as shallow and indi- vidualistic the emphasis on revivals and personal conversion experi- ences typical of other American Protestants. At the German Reformed Church’s Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Appenzeller pursued his undergraduate studies, he was exposed to the Mercersburg theology, and he respected its intellectual depth. But by the time he became a student at the college he himself had had a personal conversion experience in a revival meeting, which had deeply affected him, and served to distance him from the Mercersburg theology; he found himself more comfortable in Methodist churches- -with their frank emphasis on revivals and personal evangelism--than in German Reformed ones. And so in 1879 as a twenty-one year old college student, he left the German Reformed denomination to become a Methodist, joining the First Methodist Church in Lancaster. He was soon serving as a preacher at one of its local mission churches. Then, in the fall of 1882, having received his college degree, he enrolled in what was then called the Drew Theological Seminary to prepare for the Methodist ministry.5 5 Daniel M. Davies, The Life and Thought of Henry Gerhard Appenzeller(1858-1902), 64 KOREA PRESBYTERIAn JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 47 No. 3 Drew itself made evangelizing a priority. When Appenzeller became a student there the seminary was only fifteen years old. Even so, it was among the first Methodist theological seminaries in America, though Methodists at that moment were one of the largest denomina- tions in the country. Methodists had had a slow start in theological education in large part because of their very success, as a movement committed to evangelistic preaching accessible to common people, and thus distrustful of what they saw as academic pretensions. Drew’s founding, in 1867, itself signaled the waning of that distrust, at least in some precincts of Methodism; already at its beginning the school had a solid academic program and by Appenzeller’s time it had, by any- one’s reckoning, a distinguished faculty. Nonetheless, Drew reflected its firm Methodist roots in not allowing academic work itself to become the be-all and end-all of seminary study; instead the practical matter of preaching, and by implication evangelistic preaching, was a central focus. The constitution of the school identified its purpose precisely as the preparation of preachers;6 the catalog in Appenzeller’s time de- clared that “while theology in all its branches is carefully taught, the art of preaching is assiduously cultivated”;7 its students were already licensed to preach, that is, to practice their craft, by the time they enrolled.

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