Executive Summary

Why it matters

Romans is the theological backbone of the New Testament, and Korean carries a doctrinal-translation risk profile distinct from every other language in this pipeline: Korea has the largest Christian population proportionally in East Asia and its own robust, century-old Bible translation tradition, so the risk here is not large-scale syncretism but a narrower, sharper overlap between Korean shamanistic folk religion (무속신앙) and the very “spirit”/“power” vocabulary central to Romans, plus a historically significant collision between Confucian filial-piety ancestor rites and exclusive loyalty to God as Father.

Key findings

• The registry tracks 40 doctrines across Romans 1-16; 25 require mandatory human theologian review before any translated segment ships (5 Critical, 20 High) — the lowest Critical/High combined count in this batch of four languages, reflecting Korea’s more settled Christian vocabulary tradition.
• Grace, Power of God for Salvation, and Holy Spirit-related sanctification are Critical-risk specifically because Korean charismatic Christianity’s own internal self-critique has long flagged a shamanistic transactional pattern (기복신앙, “fortune-seeking faith”) as a live pastoral concern, not a hypothetical one.
• “Father” carries the heaviest historical weight of any term in this package: 18th-19th century Korean Catholic converts were persecuted and martyred specifically over refusing Confucian ancestor-memorial rites (제사), a real doctrinal-cultural collision this curriculum must teach with historical awareness.
• Kingdom of God and Kingdom Mission are unusually Low/Medium-risk here, since Korea has no live competing “divine kingdom” state ideology — a genuine point of contrast with Mandarin’s Mandate-of-Heaven risk and Japan’s State Shinto risk.

Risks

• Shamanistic overlap risk: grace, holy spirit, and power of God each risk being processed through Korea’s still-active shamanism (무속신앙), where a mudang’s ritual power and spirit-channeling supply a superficially similar but doctrinally opposite framework.
• Ancestor-rite collision risk: “Father” and “adoption” language intersects with Korea’s historically significant, sometimes lethal conflict between Confucian jesa ancestor rites and exclusive Christian loyalty to God.
• Achievement-culture risk: obedience, election, and mission all risk being read through Korea’s intensely competitive, hierarchical, achievement-oriented social culture rather than as gifts of grace.

Opportunities

• Korean already maintains a clean structural distinction between covenant (언약) and secular contract (계약) that some other languages in this pipeline lack, removing a whole category of dilution risk for free.
• Korean 아빠 (appa, informal “dad”) closely parallels the Aramaic Abba’s intimate register, an unusually good natural fit.

Recommended actions

• Route every Critical and High risk segment (25 of 40 doctrines) through human theologian review before publication; do not allow automated-only review to touch these terms.
• Brief native-speaker reviewers specifically on the internal Korean-church critique of 기복신앙 so a fluent-but-transactional rendering of grace or power language is caught before it ships.
• Reuse this Language Package’s translation_memory.json for every Romans lesson in Korean rather than re-deriving terms per document, per the two-phase pipeline design.