Category: Unificationism

The Unification Pater-Materfamilias

By Alexa Blonner

The Paterfamilias motif has dominated world religious history.  It is most obvious in the Roman Catholic Pontiff, but the senior male as the “family” head, holding chief responsibility for carrying out householder and state religious rites and other duties, is a familiar one in most cultures.

The True Parents doctrine of the Unification faith represents a unique innovation.  It replaces the Paterfamilias with a Pater-Materfamilias.

Surprisingly, the Unification True Parents are barely mentioned in the chief Unification text, Exposition of the Divine Principle (EDP), but the concept increasingly featured in the sermons and other homilies of the founder, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, to emerge by the end of his life in 2012 as perhaps Unificationism’s most seminal and distinguishing theological principle.

The True Parents doctrine has been further refined under the leadership of Rev. Moon’s wife, Hak Ja Han.  Indeed, without this doctrine, it is unlikely Mrs. Moon would have been accepted as leader of the Unification movement following her husband’s death.

Paterfamilias

The Roman paterfamilias classically exemplifies the status of the father or male elder as the socially dominant figure. Pater, or “father,” is an Indo-European word that stems back many thousands of years. By a range of evidences, the Indo-European kinship system was patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal.  This patriarchalism had cosmological justification. Women were related to the raw, untamed processes of nature while men were associated with the progressive civilizing force by which nature could be tamed.  The male was thusly construed as being the more important of the two genders and deserving precedence.

Among the paterfamilias’ duties was that of priest.  It was his responsibility to faithfully and accurately execute the household religious rites. The Roman Emperor, who from imperial times was also the Pontifex Maximus, or State High Priest, was like the Paterfamilias of the Empire.  He was both the Empire’s administrative and religious caretaker.

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‘Two Nations Are in Your Womb’: Unificationism and Partitioned States (1948-2018)

By Laurent Ladouce

Unificationism promises the advent of a unified world, where heaven, humankind and earth live in harmony. On the path toward unification, a major obstacle is that of partitioned states, beginning with Korea.

University of Pennsylvania political scientist Brendan O’Leary defines political partition as “an externally proposed or imposed fresh border cut through at least one community’s national homeland, creating at least two separate units under different sovereigns and authorities.”

Partitions have occurred throughout history, seldom bringing good results. Some were considered a “lesser evil” or a “necessary evil.” Here I consider contemporary partitions which have been or still are major obstacles for the Providence.

The “Two nations are in your womb” paradigm

Unificationism in general sees partitions as resulting from a failure of human responsibility to achieve unity or integration. There is then a division into two parts, one representing relative good (Abel) and the other relative evil (Cain). A major input of Unificationism is to emphasize the pivotal role of women in the origin (Eve) of and the final solution (Rebecca) to the partition.

When Rebecca protested to God about the struggle of the two twins, Esau and Jacob, in her womb, the Lord said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.” (Gen. 25:23)

This paradigm of the “two nations in the womb” is relevant in four of the five cases presented here.

The external cause of many partitions in the 20th century was the process of decolonization: the colonial power was unable to give birth to two communities or states living harmoniously and cooperatively, but gave birth to twins sharply pitted against one another.

I cover five partitions which had a direct impact on the Providence, grouped together for three reasons of direct concern for Unificationism:

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On Being and Consciousness

By Graham Simon

The scientific methodology for uncovering knowledge relating to the world around us – let us call it “external truth” – is a familiar one. A thesis is posited. Experiments are conducted exhaustively until the thesis is either proven or disproved.

The discovery of “internal truth” follows a parallel course.

We absorb some statement or teaching. Internally our mind validates the statement against accumulated experiences. When the statement accords with our experiences, the lights go on, so to speak, and the new-found truth then becomes part of our personal knowledge base and operating reality. The statement can encompass something as simple as a mother’s instruction to a child such as: “Don’t touch, it’s hot,” to a philosophical maxim like, “What you give out, comes back.”

As sentient beings, we all have experiences. Through study, exposure to the thoughts of others or an inspiration from a higher source, we are able to order our experiences in a meaningful way.

Sometimes we ingest knowledge prior to having had the experience. When the experience later takes place, we may encounter an “Ah, now I understand what the speaker meant” moment. At other times, we may have experiences that lie dormant until revealed. Those moments are more of the “Somehow I’ve always felt that was the case” variety. Either way, it’s not just a matter of knowing; we also need to “know that we know” for that knowledge to be incorporated into our being.

While scientific knowledge, or external truth, is largely validated and monitored by the scientific community, internal truths can only be validated by each of us as individuals. Nonetheless, there is no shortage of religions, philosophies and political movements, each peddling their own views of the world and each eager to help people make sense of their life experiences.

The problem people encounter is that all these teachings, especially those which form the basis of the world’s religions, mix inner truths with half-truths and even with teachings that are completely unverifiable or plainly false. The teachings of the Unification Movement are no exception.

It’s an observable fact that if an institution or accredited teacher reveals valuable knowledge to a person that stimulates the inner self, the recipient is much more likely to indiscriminately accept other teachings from the same source. When we imbibe a set of teachings in its entirety, some parts will genuinely enhance our being, while other parts just get incorporated as beliefs or opinions.

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The Hope and Promise of the Singapore Summit

By Mark P. Barry

I usually tell people that if you visited Earth from Mars, looked down at the Korean Peninsula and saw it’s divided and technically in a state of war since 1950, you’d say, “This has got to end.”

In other words, this kind of situation is simply unsustainable, despite that many practitioners of international relations seem to believe it’s possible to manage conflicts in perpetuity.

Last Tuesday’s summit in Singapore between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is at least notable for one important thing: it potentially changed the trajectory — hopefully for the better in the long run — of events on the Korean peninsula. This is because no sitting American president had ever met a North Korean leader. Previous presidents generally would not even consider the idea; Bill Clinton was the exception, but in the waning weeks of his presidency, he chose to focus on Middle East peace rather than Korean peace.

Ironically, Jimmy Carter was the first former U.S. president to meet his North Korean counterpart, Kim Il Sung, in 1994. He wisely observed at the time that “we should not ever avoid direct talks, direct conversations, direct discussions and negotiations with the main person in a despised, misunderstood or condemned society who could actually resolve the issue.” To his credit, Carter brokered an agreement, concluded months later, that froze the North’s fledgling nuclear program — which endured until the early years of the Bush 43 administration.

This simple truth — of the need for top-to-top communication and relationship-building — was easily grasped by President Trump because it had been a key lesson of his years of business experience. Kim Jong Un knew he had to take advantage of the opportunity to meet the U.S. president — the one person who could make fundamental foreign policy decisions without the encumbrance of a bureaucracy with a long and deep institutional memory.

It matters less what were the motivations of Trump and Kim; in both cases they were a mixture of the strategic and the selfish. But history shows that key figures, sometimes with unsavory motives, nonetheless produce changes, however unintended, whose impact endures for decades or even centuries (e.g., Henry VIII’s disagreement with the Pope over marriage annulment led him to initiate the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority).

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Truth and Authority in Scientific Discovery: Implications for the Religious Quest

By Chris Le Bas

Trusting something is true really comes at the point when your life depends on it.

An astronaut trusts the engineers who made the rocket and calculated the trajectory to the Moon and back.  In turn, the engineers trust the scientists who told them how cold it would be on the Moon and what force of gravity they would have to work against to take off from its surface. And the scientists trust the theories behind the solar panels that would power their return.

In the same way, a patient trusts the surgeon preparing to cut open his heart, the surgeon trusts the medical experts who weighed the risks of not operating against the dangers of open heart surgery, and the medical experts trust the interpretation of gamma camera scans and calculations made by microchip-based computers.

When our theories are correct, namely, they resonate with nature and identify natural processes, then we can predict (or at least know the degree to which we can predict) the outcome of our actions.

“Truth” in the scientific sense means we have a description, a pattern, law, or principle accurately matching the nature of the world around us.

This may come in the form of an image or model of something we are unable to see, such as a molecule or subatomic particle, or a mathematical equation that provides the link between different quantities we can measure. Or it may be the explanation of a technique or process that takes place in nature or can be made to happen under the right conditions.

Those who act as guarantors of the reliability of such information are often called “scientific authorities,” be they individuals like Isaac Newton, or institutions such as the Royal Society. Teachers and lecturers act on behalf of these authorities, relying on the historical hand-me-down record of constantly edited information from senior teachers, books and articles.

Some aspects of this knowledge can be tested and observed in classroom experiments, considered in the light of “common sense” and logic, but the majority of it relies on the authority it came from.

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Seeking Vital Community

By Mi Young Eaton

In fall 2014, I lived for two-and-a-half months with a small, Evangelical Christian community in Greatham, England, called L’Abri (French for “the shelter”). The L’Abri Fellowship in Greatham is one of eight such communities which have been established around the world and grew, like the rest, out of the pioneering ministerial efforts of Francis and Edith Schaeffer.

Although I was at L’Abri for only ten weeks in my senior year of college, I was transformed by my experiences there. Deep wounds began to be healed and confusions clarified; the spiritual life as fundamentally a relational life with God, others, and even myself began to open like never before, as concepts of faith became lived realities.

I experienced challenges, of course, understanding for the first time key differences in belief, from a Christian perspective, between the Christian and Unificationist worldviews, and carry fundamental questions of faith that arose from my time there even now, almost four years later. Principal among these is the question of the replicability of L’Abri as a model of spiritual community.

Were there spiritual principles at work in the structure, practices, and functions of L’Abri that allowed it to so deeply touch not only my heart and life but the hearts and lives of many others? Could these principles be applied in another context, for instance, either an extant or a potential Unification faith community?

My time at L’Abri and other experiences in the last few years have convinced me of the value of having the home serve as the hub or basis of ministry, as well as True Father’s prescience when he attempted to initiate the home church providence in the Unification Movement over 40 years ago.

I don’t think that the work of L’Abri fully answers the question of how Unification members should proceed with home church today. But I do think the current relevance of their work reveals a need and an entry point for the renewal of this kind of ministry

An Unusually Ordinary Evangelical Community

When I first left for L’Abri, I had little sense of what the experience would entail. I had heard about L’Abri like most others who have walked through the doors of its various branches around the world, by word of mouth, since L’Abri has eschewed any formal advertising about their work.

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Confessions of a Divine Principle Editor

By Dan Fefferman

I had the privilege of working on both the 1973 edition of Divine Principle and consulting on the 1996 new translation, known as Exposition of the Divine Principle (EDP). Here, I offer some recollections and confessions, with a view toward giving our community some information for our reflection.

Prior to 1973, most of us in the USA used Dr. Young Oon Kim’s “Red Book” titled Divine Principle and Its Application, or the blue study guide that complemented it. A smaller number used Sang Ik Choi’s Principles of Education. As part of his late 1971 push to unify the groups that had formed around the various Korean missionaries, Rev. Sun Myung Moon ordered the translation into English of the official Korean version of Divine Principle, Wolli Kangron. This task was given to Mrs. Won Pok Choi. She later told me she had to finish this work in great haste, over a period of 40 days, at the Soo Taek Rhee training center.

Sometime in 1972, Mrs. Choi’s text arrived in Washington, DC. Each chapter was given to a different editor, living in various centers, and we did not have a style sheet to guide us. Editors were relatively inexperienced and used various standards of punctuation and capitalization. In addition, there were lots of new terms.

Dr. Kim’s book was relatively short and did not use terms like “foundation of substance,” “foundation to receive the messiah,” or even “internal character and external form.” So in some chapters of Mrs. Choi’s translation, “foundation of substance” was rendered as “substantial foundation” or even “foundation of heart.” I myself changed “time-identity” to “time-indemnity” until I realized my error.

Editors agonized over whether Moses led the course of “restoration of Canaan” or “restoration into Canaan.” We also wondered how strict we should be about retaining “therefore,” instead of “thus” or “so.” Adding to the angst of the editors was the fact we had been instructed to stick closely to Mrs. Choi’s translation rather than risking a change in meaning. This meant avoiding changes in sentence structure and length.

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The Christ-Being in the Present Age: “Christ” Seen from the Perspective of Mithraism

By Shinji Gyoten

Reverend Sun Myung Moon (1920-2012) diligently studied the Bible in his youth and the Divine Principle was written mainly for Christians in the framework of Christian theology. The Exposition of the Divine Principle has been the core textbook of the Unification Church for a long time; church leaders taught lectures based on Divine Principle and the Bible; in his early days, Rev. Moon himself spoke a great deal about Jesus and biblical stories.

However, in his latter years, Rev. Moon began to speak about God in a broader sense (e.g., the God of Night and the God of Day, in Hoon Dok Hae on April 10, 2011) and other religions beyond Christianity. One time, he referred to the Persian dynasty and said, “That was the absolute dynasty (which should have been realized on God’s side) before the human fall” (in Hoon Dok Hae on October 10, 2011).

This article rediscovers the position of True Parents in the study of comparative religion by exploring the Christ-being from the perspective of Mithraism.

In the 21st century, we have the opportunity to meet “Christ” through guidance of the Holy Spirit as Sophia, who represents the motherhood of God. However, throughout Christian history, “Christ” has been identified with Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God.

In the ancient world, such as Judea, Egypt and India before Christianity spread, “Christ” appeared on earth in the form of supernatural phenomena and incarnation of the gods. Even after Christianity expanded, in the extensive region from the Hellenistic world to central Asia where people believed in Mithraism and Manichaeism (which was influenced by Mithraism), and Buddhism, etc., “Christ” was regarded as Maitreya Bodhisattva.

In explaining the etymology of “Christ,” it is a title indicating a savior, messiah. The original word for“Christ” is the Greek “Χριστός, Christós,” which means “the anointed one” who brings salvation to humankind. This “Christ” is a translation of the Hebrew “מָשִׁיחַ” (Mašíaḥ, messiah) and originated in religious ceremonies in Judaism. However, there is a theory that “מָשִׁיחַ” (Mašíaḥ, messiah) was used in the coronation ceremony of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, while Cyrus the Great, founder of ancient Achaemenid Persia, was called “the messiah” in the Hebrew Bible. A scholar of Mithraism, Masato Tojo, points out that “Mitra was taken as a messiah (savior) and incorporated into Judaism. The word ‘Messiah’ comes from the name Mithia in the southern Iranian dialect of Mithra.”

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Applied Unificationism Celebrates Its 5th Blog-iversary

The Applied Unificationism Blog was founded five years ago today on May 1, 2013, hosted by Unification Theological Seminary. Its purpose is to explore the application of Unificationism to the wider world, but also occasionally posts significant articles on theology. It generally posts a new commentary article every Monday.

The Applied Unificationism Blog is broadly read by Unificationists in the U.S., as well as in Europe, Korea and Japan. One major leader termed it, “The best thing out there,” referring to its focus and discussion of how to apply Unificationist principles to today’s societal problems. Any article on the site is available for automated Google Translation from English to dozens of supported languages.

In its five years, the AU Blog, as it has become known, has posted over 275 articles nearly every week in 11 categories. It is followed (by email, Facebook or Twitter) by 800 regular readers; is read in 200 countries or territories; has received over 270,000 total page views, posted nearly 2,700 reader comments, and nearly 60,000 referrals to its articles from search engines alone and 27,000 from Facebook. Some articles have generated a large number of site hits in just 24 hours — in several cases over 1,700 in a day.

The AU Blog’s top three articles all-time are: “Morals and Messages from Harry Potter: Lesson Learned,” “The Only-Begotten Daughter,” and “Same-Sex Marriage: A Unificationist Response.” Other popular articles include: “Toward a Headwing Idea for America,” “You’re Not Really an Adult Until Your Father Dies: Reaching the Highest Stage of Filial Piety,” and “God as the Heavenly Parent of Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother.” Popular regular authors include Dr. Andrew Wilson, Dr. Michael Mickler and maestro David Eaton.

The Blog recently ran a series of commentaries by three different authors on the topic of gun control in America. AU Blog articles are often re-posted by the FFWPU International Headquarters site and by the FFWPU-USA site and gain even broader readership.

Original written contributions of 1,500-1,800 words are encouraged to be submitted by Unificationists, current and former UTS faculty, and interested others. Quality commentary or op-ed pieces are sought, written in a lively manner, on a wide range of subjects in which the writer exhibits a strong degree of familiarity with the subject matter. Broad topics include politics and economics, religion and spirituality, gender issues and the family, and culture and the arts. The Blog especially encourages article submissions from second generation Unificationists. It also posts occasional film and book reviews, and collections of poetry.

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