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Swords into Plowshares as a Peace Challenge: Peace Discourse in Isaiah 2 and the Tonghak Peasant Rebellion

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  • Hye Kyung Park

Abstract

This article challenges our usual concept of peace as the absence of war by examining its meaning in two religions: Tonghak and Christianity. The ultimate peace imagined in the biblical book of Isaiah involves turning swords into plowshares. But Isaiah also saw that peace without social justice is meaningless, which may lead to turning plowshares into swords. In the unsuccessful Tonghak Peasant Rebellion (1894–1895) in Korea, peasants used farm implements to fight for true peace by resisting the oppression to which they were subjected. The seeming differences between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King also turn on questions of strategy in the face of overwhelming oppression. Those civil rights leaders were both pragmatic in their pursuit of strategic goals and not as far apart in their thinking as some have portrayed them. In the end, we find a convergence in Tonghak’s visionary thinking that shaped the future of East Asia, the call for global support in the success of the civil rights movement, and the importance of aid from a foreign power (Persia) in fostering eschatological hope in Isaiah’s vision of a peaceful and just future.

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  • Hye Kyung Park, 2021. "Swords into Plowshares as a Peace Challenge: Peace Discourse in Isaiah 2 and the Tonghak Peasant Rebellion," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 80(5), pages 1405-1427, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:80:y:2021:i:5:p:1405-1427
    DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12429
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