“ Our Tongue-Cut God,Respond to Us ”: Prayer of Righteous Anger and Communal Lament as Theology of the Oppressed

Introduction: Respond to Us

In the spring of 1987, the police department in South Korea reported to the public that Park Jong-chul, a student of Seoul National University, “accidentally” died in the process of investigation concerning the charge of violation of the National Security Law. However, on May 18, 1987, the Catholic Priests Association for Justice debunked this false report and revealed that Park was tortured during the interrogation and brutally killed by waterboarding. After hearing this prophetic voice by the Catholic Priests Association, with anger and lament, the oppressed ordinary people in South Korea—minjung ² —initiated massive protests against Chun Do-hwan’s junta regime, passionately calling for democratization. However, in June, Lee Han-yeol, another college student from Yonsei University, tragically died from a wound received during the street protest. The police intentionally shot a tear gas grenade toward the protesters, and the grenade directly hit Lee’s head. Jeong Tae-won, a journalist from Reuters, photographed the moment and released the photo of Lee’s bleeding body to the public. This photo ignited public anger and lament once again, which eventually mobilized the minjung to organize the June Democratic Uprising, the nationwide protest for democracy from June 10 to June 29, 1987.

During the June Democratic Uprising, a prayer-song composed by Kim Heunggyum, “The Father of Minjung,” was sung on the street. This prayer-song was composed in 1982 after the May 18, 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising. ³ While “The Father of Minjung” was originally introduced by some Christian college students, it became one of the most prominent protest songs for the minjung throughout the democratic movement in South Korea. Under the smog of tear gas, facing against the riot police, the minjung gathered together, stood on the street, and desperately cried out, “Respond to us! God whose tongue was cut…” With this prayer-song’s indignant lyrics and a sorrowful tune, the minjung expressed their deep emotions of anger, frustration, anguish, and sorrow and utilized these emotions as fuel for their relentless social movement for democratization.

Given this historical example in South Korea, this article pays special attention to Kim Heunggyum’s prayer-song “The Father of Minjung” and traces its original context and developmental stages, specifically highlighting the development of its performative nature in a public space. This article then analyzes its distinctive genre, a cross-genre that blends the styles and structures of the minjung-gayo and the lament psalms in the Old Testament. Subsequently, theological reflection on this prayer-song focuses on particular religious affections, righteous anger and communal lament, shaped by Korean minjung’s collective performance to sing this prayer-song as a means of political resistance. The careful study of this prayer offers a theological reflection on how this prayer of righteous anger and communal lament served as a formative source for the Korean minjung in constructing and embodying their own theology—critical and incarnational theology. For this theological reflection, I point out the limitations of Barth’s theology of prayer and draw on the works of Audre Lorde, Johann Baptist Metz, and Emmanuel Levinas in order to argue for this prayer’s formative role in doing critical and incarnational theology.

The Original Context of “The Father of Minjung”

One day in 1983, Kim Heunggyum, junior at Yonsei University’s College of Theology, prayed in front of students in the chapel service:

Lord, what is your will? We have no confidence to let your will be done on earth. No, we cannot endure anymore. Do you command us to repent? Do you think we are sinners? It is YOU who need to repent in weeping; it is YOU, the sinner of sinners  …  What did you do? What did you do in Gwangju where thousands of citizens were brutally massacred by soldiers of the dictator? … It is not us who need to repent, but YOU who do nothing. It is YOU, Yahweh, our God …  ⁴

As he expressed his deep emotions of anger and lament with an explicit form of prayer in a public worship, Kim vented those painful emotions through the sung prayer, “The Father of Minjung.” It is hard to pinpoint and trace exactly when and how this prayer-song was developed as it was orally composed without written notation. Close colleagues of Kim’s speculated that he had written this prayer-song while he served as a pastor in a small rural church in 1982. ⁵ “The Father of Minjung” was then orally shared with Kim’s close colleagues. It became their “go-to” song to vent and articulate their pent-up anger and lament, putting arms around each other’s shoulders, when those emotions were heightened in praying and crying out for justice. ⁶

While “The Father of Minjung” had been sung by Kim’s friends in a private setting in the early stage of its development, he later fully developed its performative nature in public. Kim attempted to publicize this prayer-song by performing it for the Song Contest during the 1983 May College Festival at Yonsei, but he failed to draw sufficient attention from the audiences and jury. ⁷ In another performance, he drew on his artistic imagination and resources as one of the core members of the school’s religious drama team and directed the street performance, titled “Who … Jesus … ” ⁸

This street performance, which was staged all over the campus, demonstrated the pivotal events in the passion narratives, including the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus on the cross. More importantly, it vividly contextualized the biblical narratives in the contemporary Korean context of state repression. Kim played the main character, Jesus. In the performance, he was arrested and dragged into a black car by police officers wearing plain clothes and black leather gloves. ⁹ This scene represented the actual arrest process in the early 1980s, which became the everyday reality for college students engaging in any form of political resistance. Then, the police officers dragged and staged Kim at the “Roman court” for trial. Kim intentionally set the court right in front of the university’s front gate, which was often the “battleground” between student protesters and riot police at that time. ¹⁰ As he intended, while acting the scene of trial, riot police, heavily armed with riot helmets, batons and shields, surrounded the court like a “Roman army” in order to suppress possible outbreaks of protest. ¹¹ The scene of the trial was performed in a confrontation between the riot police and the audiences (mostly students) shouting out “Go Away Roman Governor Pilate!” and “Step Down Chun Doo-Hwan the Killer!” ¹²

The street performance reached its climax when Kim was hung on the cross on the stage, “the hill of Golgotha,” next to the university’s field and track. ¹³ In this final scene, the choir accompanied Kim on the cross, holding torches after sunset, and started to sing “The Father of Minjung” in a somber mood. ¹⁴ Through this creative performance, along with the powerful images of protest and suffering of minjung, this prayer-song, specifically performed in the climax, impressed many audiences and began to be sung as a protest song by college students. One journalist described this prayer-song as a “spirit hovering all over college towns”: no one knows who composed this song, but it was orally transmitted and sung in the gatherings of minjung such as in secret meetings of protesters and on street marches surrounded by riot police. ¹⁵ The performed nature of “The Father of Minjung” in public was fully developed as it was sung by minjung as one of their representative protest songs in the 1980s.

The Genre and Structure of “The Father of Minjung”

“The Father of Minjung” belongs to the genre of minjung-gayo, a particular musical genre created by Korean minjung autonomously in the process of democratic movements in the 1980s. This particular genre was intentionally developed in order to seek an autonomous subculture as an alternative to the mass culture that was censored and controlled by both the authoritarian regimes as their means of propaganda and the capitalistic market as its profit-making means. ¹⁶ As democratic movements organized by student protesters were drastically developed in the 1980s, and more importantly as they went through the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, student protesters called for this new genre of songs—minjung-gayo—to express their collective experiences of suffering and struggle. ¹⁷ Many protest songs, specifically in a minor key, were created and orally transmitted in the early and mid-1980s. Kim’s prayer-song “The Father of Minjung” is one of the minjung-gayo. ¹⁸

Although “The Father of Minjung” belongs to the genre of minjung-gayo, it has a distinctive feature—its religious, specifically Christian aspect—compared to other protest songs: it is a prayer-song that directly invokes and speaks to the divine. Specifically, it is a prayer-song addressing minjung’s anger and lament to the deity. This distinctive religious feature allows us to analyze the inner structure of this prayer-song by making a direct connection with the genre of lament psalms in the Old Testament. Biblical scholars in general recognize five structural elements of the lament psalms: address, complaint, request, motivation, and confidence or praise. ¹⁹ The inner landscape of Kim’s prayer-song is explicitly and implicitly contoured with these structural elements (the fifth element will be discussed at the end of this article). Throughout “The Father of Minjung,” it repeatedly invokes the divine—“God”—and confirms its distinctive genre as a “prayer directed [addressed] to God.” ²⁰ In other words, it explicitly follows the first structural element of the lament psalms.

The second structural element—complaint—is about “the description of the problem” that those who pray are facing. ²¹ Kim’s prayer-song follows this structural element and thickly and artfully describes the Korean minjung’s experiences of suffering and pain under political oppression and violence by the authoritarian regimes. This thick description is metaphorically mediated through the scandalous images of God in the prayer-song.

First, the image of the burned God reminds us of the self-immolation of a young factory worker, Jeon Tae-il, in 1970. He worked in Pyung-hwa Market in Seoul and discovered the extremely poor working conditions of small textile factories: many young girls continued to die of lung cancer. He passionately protested for improving the working conditions and reforming the labor laws, but the authoritarian regime of Park Chung-hee dehumanized the factory workers as “expendable parts” to be sacrificed for the sake of the glory of the nation, the economic growth of South Korea. Against this cruel dehumanization of the factory workers, Jeon finally self-immolated himself at the age of 22 and came to death. At his final protest of self-immolation, he desperately cried out, “We are not machines!” ²² The image of burned God in “The Father of Minjung” poignantly symbolizes the dehumanization of the minjung under authoritarian capitalism.

Second, the image of tongue-cut God describes the suffering of the minjung under state violence and torture. The citizens of Gwangju in 1980 were brutally killed, wounded, and arrested by the armed forces of General Chun Do-hwan. Under the authoritarian regimes, many innocent citizens were falsely accused of the violation of the National Security Law, labeled as “the Reds” (North Korea sympathizers), and brutally tortured by the secret police. In his memoir, Namyoung-Dong, Kim Geun-tae, one of the key leaders in college students’ democratic movements, named the torture room where he was tortured for ten days “the human slaughterhouse,” a place filled with unceasing screams of half-dead “animals.” ²³ The image of tongue-cut God vividly captures the unjust suffering and muted voices of the minjung caused by state violence and torture.

Lastly, the image of buried God under a pile of garbage expresses the suffering of the minjung from structural poverty. The authoritarian regimes of Park and Chun instituted economic policies that unjustly favored certain mega-corporations. Under the massive constructions of apartment complexes in Seoul and the surrounding metropolitan areas, many poor citizens were forcefully driven to slum areas, the so-called Moon Villages (Dal-dong-ne in Korean). The pile of garbage in the prayer-song symbolizes the abandoned village of the minjung. The image of buried God describes the marginalization of the minjung under their structural poverty.

While “The Father of Minjung” fulfills the second structural element in itsthick description of the minjung’s suffering and pain, it does not simply complain but meets the third structural element: request. It asks for “a specific response from God, to whom the cry is directed.” ²⁴ From the beginning of the prayer-song, it calls for God’s responsive actions—“Respond to us” and “Hear our prayer.” Along with these petitions, it also “articulates the reason God should help.” ²⁵ In terms of this fourth structural element—motivation—it directly appeals to the minjung’s covenantal relationships and familial intimacy with God by addressing God as “the Only One” and “the Father of Minjung.” In addition, the title itself strengthens this structural dimension of motivation.

“The Father of Minjung” as a Formative Source for Doing Theology

Kim’s prayer-song “The Father of Minjung” belongs to a cross-genre that blends the particular styles of the minjung-gayo and the structural elements of the lament psalms. This unique prayer-song was autonomously created, orally shared, and collectively performed by minjung as a means of political resistance against the authoritarian regimes. When the minjung cried out this prayer-song on the street in a confrontation with riot policemen, certain religious affections were aroused by the scandalous images of God with the somber tune: anger and lament. ²⁶ Specifically, I argue that the anger in this prayer-song is not a source of self-destruction or violence against the other. In order to distinguish from this type of destructive anger, I qualify it as righteous anger, which provides the minjung with a generative source of their critical theology. In addition, lament in this prayer-song is not a source of passive resignation or individual isolation, but a formative source of incarnational theology and consequently collective political resistance: this is why I name it communal lament. In other words, in this article, I argue for the formative role of a prayer of righteous anger and communal lament for the oppressed in constructing and practicing their own theology.

Traditionally, theologians have also paid attention to the inseparable relationship between prayer and theology. In his Evangelical Theology, Karl Barth contends:

The first and basic act of theological work is prayer … But theological work does not merely begin with prayer and is not merely accompanied by it … it can be performed only in the act of prayer. ²⁷

Barth presents how proper and useful theology can be constructed in the guidance of four aspects of prayer: opening, response, offering, and petition. ²⁹ Through the prayer of opening, a theologian turns toward the proper object of theology—the transcendental God. ³⁰ Then, they inter-subjectively listen and respond to God through the vocative language in the prayer of response. ³¹ While performing a theological work, they bear the posture of humility and openness toward God’s free grace in the form of the prayer of offering. ³² Finally, they overcome the inherent limitations as finite human being through the prayer of petition. ³³

Barth’s account of prayer as the theological method reflects his core commitment or ultimate telos in his theology: “acknowledgment of God.” ³⁴ Barth puts emphasis on God’s free grace—God’s self-giving and self-revelation: God first loves us and speaks to us. As the recipient of God’s free grace, we should acknowledge God by giving thanks for the divine grace and praising the divine glory. Indeed, “the themes of thanksgiving and doxology” inherently permeates in the act of prayer as the theological method. ³⁵ Therefore, for Barth, the human response to the divine free grace in the mode of thanksgiving and doxology is “intrinsic to any knowledge of God.” ³⁶

For Barth, prayer serves as the proper methodology for doing theology. It is clear that prayer is crucial for Barth’s theology. However, his account of prayer and theology bears at least two limitations. First, the ultimate themes embedded in his exposition of prayer in his Evangelical Theology are thanksgiving and doxology. ³⁷ No one can deny that these themes are the foundational bedrock for Christian theology. Although he addresses the problem of evil—“deliver us from the Evil One [evil]”—in his lecture on the Lord’s Prayer, ³⁸ what he misses is a careful attention to human suffering which evokes certain existential moods and deep emotions such as anger and lament. As Daniel L. Migliore points out, “a certain deficiency in Barth’s theology of prayer” is his tendency to “overlook or at least subordinate the prayer of lament, protest, and anguished questioning.” ³⁹ His theological stance seems over-optimistic and has a dangerous tendency to gloss over the tragic dimension of human life—our vulnerability to suffering and pain.

Second, Barth does not provide a sophisticated account of how prayer serves as a generative source for theology. He presents the formal structure of speaking–responding or inviting–accepting in the divine–human relationship. However, this formal structure is primarily normative given the lack of account of how humans are encouraged or motivated to follow the formal structure. This lack of descriptive character or theological account from the below in his theology and ethics may derive from his theological focus on God’s freedom and sovereignty—theology from the top. This formal and normative structure in the relationship between prayer and theology fails to capture human struggle and suffering, often evoking anger and lament rather than gratitude and praise.

However, a theological reflection on Korean minjung’s collective performance to sing “The Father of Minjung” as a means of political resistance demonstrates how a prayer of religious affections, specifically righteous anger and communal lament, serves as a formative source for the oppressed in constructing and practicing their own theology. For this theological reflection, it is important to underscore the transformative values of these affections.

Audre Lorde declares in her book Sister Outsider: “My response to racism is anger.” ⁴⁰ Based on the systemic oppression and violence of racism in America, Lorde seeks to discover the transformative value of righteous anger. She argues that “anger is loaded with information [epistemic value] and energy [motivational value].” ⁴¹ According to her, first, anger is a source of information to empower the marginalized women of color to debunk and consequently recognize the hidden “exclusion,” “unquestioned privilege,” “radical distortions,” “ill-use,” “stereotyping,” “defensiveness,” “misnaming,” “betrayal,” and “co-optation” which have been normalized under systemic racism. ⁴² Second, anger is a “powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” ⁴³ More importantly, for her, it is a transformative source of “a war against the tyrannies of silence” and “the transformation of silence into language and action.” ⁴⁴

Given Lorde’s account of anger as the transformative source of information and energy for the marginalized, we can see that the religious affection of righteous anger was aroused in the collective performance to sing “The Father of Minjung,” which empowered the Korean minjung to construct their own critical theology and exercise their political resistance against the authoritarian regimes. First, the righteous anger expressed in the scandalous images of God provided the minjung with critical theological information that exposes the misuse of the theological language that served as religious sanction of the authoritarian regimes. During the authoritarian regimes of Park and Chun, some mainline Korean churches, especially mega-churches, were actively involved in sanctifying the dictators and their authoritarian regimes, providing theological justifications of state violence in the name of God. One of key examples is the Korea National Prayer Breakfast, where prominent Christian leaders in Korean churches publicly blessed the dictators and their military governments in the name of God. Specifically, right after Chun’s military junta had brutally crushed the May 18 Uprising in Gwangju, the Chun regime deliberately broadcast the “Prayer Breakfast for the Future of the Country and the Nation” across the country in August 1980. ⁴⁵ In this prayer meeting, Rev. Han Kyungchik laid his hands on Chun and blessed him to become “the great leader whom God gave to our nation, just like Moses who saved the Israel from Egypt.” ⁴⁶ Han’s blessing of the dictator Chun in the name of God is one of the most notorious examples of misusing theological language and glossing over the injustice and oppression of the authoritarian regimes.

By contrast, the righteous anger expressed in the scandalous images of God in “The Father of Minjung” motivated the minjung to resist what Johann Baptist Metz calls “a eulogistic evasion of what really matters” ⁴⁷ regarding the Korean churches’ misuse of theological language. In other words, the scandalous images of God denounce the false god, whom I call “God the Dictator” in this article, whose name was unjustly used for political propaganda. The God whose tongue was cut accuses the false god whose tongue plots destruction “like a sharp razor” and deceives the minjung with a “deceitful tongue” (Ps. 52:2–4). The God who went deaf criticizes the false god who only hears the powerful, against the Leviticus law: “You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor” (Lev. 19:15). In addition, the God whose face was burned critically points out the facelessness of the false god. ⁴⁸ According to Emmanuel Levinas, the face is “the presentation of an entity as an entity,” “its personal presentation,” and “an expression, the existence of a substance, a thing in itself.” ⁴⁹ The face expresses the ineffaceable truthfulness. Although “the face” of the false god was portrayed through the theological sanctification of the dictators, the God whose face was burned truthfully exposes the facelessness of the false god, the deceptive elevation of the finite beings into the divinely absolute. Consequently, the righteous anger expressed in the scandalous images of God provided the minjung with the generative epistemic source for critical theological language that significantly challenges the theological sanctification of the false god and unjust justification of the political oppression in the name of God the Dictator.

Along with righteous anger, the combination of the scandalous images of God and the somber tune of “The Father of Minjung” shaped and expressed the religious affection of communal lament. Again, this lament is not about a passive resignation and individual isolation. Rather, as testified in the minjung’s passionate struggles for democracy and justice, they lamented together and utilized their communal lament as a generative source of doing incarnational theology.

According to Levinas, the face of the other truthfully presents own ineffaceable individuality, particularity, uniqueness, beauty, and even vulnerability. Moreover, the face of the other presents these ineffaceable qualities in a non-violent way: rather than using forceful power or violence, it opens up its vulnerability in “the absolute nakedness of a face, the absolutely defenseless face, without covering, clothing or mask.” ⁵⁰ This vulnerability, the absolute nakedness and defenselessness, is the key character of the truthful face.

As discussed above, the image of the burned God debunks the facelessness of the false god, God the Dictator. When the minjung sorrowfully lamented together, “Turning his face away from God who got burned,” the deceptive face of the false god, which expresses its face in the form of destruction and violence, was turned away. Then, the truthful face of God was ultimately revealed. God revealed the most vulnerable face—burned face—in a non-violent way. This extremely vulnerable face of God is the most truthful face of God. In other words, through the communal lament, the minjung received the true knowledge about God: the vulnerability of God.

Given the vulnerability of God, the communal lament enabled the minjung to construct their incarnational theology. For them, God “became flesh and lived among” them (John 1:14). The incarnated God freely opened Godself to vulnerability, and freely chose to suffer with the minjung. Lamenting toward God informs them of the core tenet of incarnational theology: God co-suffers with the minjung in the midst of the structural oppression and violence under the authoritarian regimes. The tongue-cut God was screaming with Park Jong-chul when his face was forcefully covered with a cloth and water was poured over his face. The burned God was within the flame that consumed the body of Jeon Tae-il. Even the dead God let God’s body be buried near the abandoned village of the minjung. The minjung’s communal lament expressed through these vulnerabilities of God was the formative source of incarnational theology.

Conclusion: Anger and Lament, but with Gratitude

In this article, I paid particular attention to Kim Heunggyum’s prayer-song “The Father of Minjung,” historically traced its original context and development stages, and analyzed its cross-genre that blends the styles and structures of the minjung-gayo and the lament psalms. This article focused on particular religious affections, righteous anger and communal lament, shaped by Korean minjung’s collective performance to sing this prayer-song as a means of political resistance, and offered a theological reflection on this prayer of righteous anger and communal lament, which encouraged and guided the Korean minjung to construct and embody their own critical and incarnational theology.

Given the emphasis on anger and lament in this analysis, some readers might misunderstand that this article seeks to negate the value and importance of gratitude. However, the purpose of this article is to re-discover the necessity and formative value of anger and lament in prayer, which has been often neglected in Christian tradition, specifically the liturgical tradition, in order to envision a harmonious relationship of religious affections, including anger, lament, and gratitude.

Although Metz defines prayer as “a cry of lament from the depths of the spirit,” he also declares that “To pray is to say Yes to God.” ⁵¹ Saying yes to God agrees to be neither “weak yes-men nor bound by compulsive obedience.” ⁵² Rather, it is exemplarily represented in Jesus’ prayer from the cross: he “has never deserted God,” even though he desperately cried to “the Father for having forsaken him.” Similarly, Jesus expressed his anger and lament on the cross: “Eli, Eli, lema sabachtani?” However, he has not given up his ultimate faith in God. Without this faith, he would not need to cry out to God: he would just remain in silence and hopelessness. In the end, for Metz, saying yes to God is based on one’s ultimate faith in God. This faith is the existential posture of acknowledging God who deserves to receive one’s thanksgiving and doxology. The prayer of thanksgiving and doxology, which is a crucial expression of one’s ultimate faith in God, is already embedded in the prayer of anger and lament.

The ending of “The Father of Minjung” implies this harmonious integration of the religious affections of anger, lament, and gratitude. The prayer-song concludes by reiterating: “But, you are the Only One. The Father of Minjung.” Throughout the prayer-song, the Korean minjung cried out their pent-up anger and expressed lament toward God (and also social injustice). But they finally came to acknowledge the suffering and vulnerable God as the Only One, the Father of minjung. Following Jesus who has never forsaken his faith in God, the minjung faithfully endured in their ultimate faith and trust in God. ⁵³ The minjung sang “The Father of Minjung” as the explicit prayer of righteous anger and communal lament and the implicit prayer of thanksgiving and doxology at the same time. Through their prayers, they became the subject of doing theology.