True Parents Legacy Archive

The Unification Church is a global faith movement founded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon in South Korea in 1954, originally under the name Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWC). On April 10, 1997, it took the name Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU) — a change that marked a deepening of its mission from the unification of Christianity to the building of an ideal world of God-centered families. Its doctrine is set out in the Exposition of the Divine Principle, which presents human history as a providence of restoration moving toward the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Today the FFWPU is active in more than 100 countries, and it understands itself less as one denomination among many than as a movement to complete the work of salvation begun in the Bible.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) was born in what is now North Korea and is revered within the movement as the returning Lord who came to complete the mission left unfinished at the cross. Followers hold that as a teenager he received a direct call from Jesus, and that he spent the decades afterward in prayer, suffering, and deep spiritual communion with God, Jesus, and the saints of the spirit world before beginning his public ministry. His life included imprisonment in the Heungnam labor camp under the North Korean regime, from which he was freed in 1950, and later a worldwide ministry recorded in thousands of sermons spanning more than five decades. Together with Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, whom he married in 1960, he is honored as one of the True Parents of humankind.

The Divine Principle is the core teaching of the Unification movement — the systematic body of truth that followers believe Rev. Moon received through revelation and confirmed through years of prayer and study of scripture. It explains three great themes: God's original purpose in creating human beings, the cause and consequence of the human Fall, and the long providence of restoration by which God has worked through history to recover His lost children. The standard textbook, the Exposition of the Divine Principle, was first published in Korean in 1966 and in a definitive English edition in 1996. Rather than replacing the Bible, the Divine Principle presents itself as a fuller explanation of it — completing truths that earlier ages could not yet receive, and extending them to embrace the wisdom of the world's other great traditions.

The True Parents are the heart of Unification teaching. The doctrine holds that humanity lost its original parents when Adam and Eve fell, inheriting a lineage severed from God, and that restoration therefore requires a man and woman who reach full maturity without falling and re-establish the original parent–child relationship with God. Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon are honored as the True Parents of humankind, and their Holy Wedding on April 11, 1960, is regarded as one of the most significant events in providential history. From this foundation flows the Marriage Blessing, through which other couples are grafted into God's lineage. To call them True Parents is not to claim they replace one's own mother and father, but that they open the way for every family to be reborn in God's love.

The Holy Marriage Blessing (축복, Chukbok) is the central sacrament of the Unification movement — a marriage ceremony officiated by the True Parents through which a couple is said to change its lineage and enter a new covenant relationship with God. At its heart is the Holy Wine Ceremony, which symbolically converts the fallen lineage inherited from Adam and Eve into God's lineage of true love. The first Blessing was given to three couples on April 16, 1960, just after the True Parents' own wedding, followed by the 36 Couples in 1961; over the decades it expanded to 72, 124, 430, 777, 1,800, 8,000, 30,000, then 360,000, 3.6 million, and ultimately to hundreds of millions worldwide. These large ceremonies — often described in the press as mass weddings — express the movement's conviction that the Blessing is meant for all people, without barriers of nation, race, or religion.

In Unification teaching, God is first of all a Parent — the Heavenly Parent of all humanity — rather than a distant, all-powerful ruler. Followers understand that God created human beings to be His children and to share fully in His love, and that the Fall broke that relationship and left God's own heart in grief over the loss of His family. This emphasis on the heart of God, or shimjeong, is one of the movement's most distinctive contributions: it teaches that God is a being of deep emotion who longs to be comforted and to embrace His children once more. God is also understood to hold harmonized dual characteristics — internal nature and external form, and masculine and feminine qualities — which is why the ideal of creation is fulfilled not in the individual alone but in the loving union of husband and wife centered on God. To live for God, then, is not merely to obey Him but to console a Parent's heart and to complete the family He first envisioned.

Cheon Il Guk (천일국), often rendered as the nation of cosmic peace and unity or one world under God, is the Unification name for the Kingdom of Heaven realized substantially on earth. Rev. Moon taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is not primarily a place one enters after death but a quality of relationship that begins in the family: when a person loves their parents, spouse, children, and siblings with true love centered on God, the Kingdom is already being lived. The family is therefore the central model for the Kingdom — the training ground of true love from which nations and the world are meant to expand. Cheon Il Guk is the fulfillment of this vision at every level, proclaimed in the 2000s as the providential age in which God's sovereignty of heart is established across the earth. It is built not by force but by families freely choosing to live for the sake of others.

The Unification movement recognizes several sacred texts drawn from the words of the True Parents. The Exposition of the Divine Principle (1966) is the foundational doctrinal textbook, while three volumes of Holy Scripture form the canon of Cheon Il Guk: the Cheon Seong Gyeong, a comprehensive anthology of Rev. Moon's teachings; the Pyeong Hwa Gyeong, his major public peace addresses; and the Cham Bumo Gyeong, the scripture of the True Parents' own life and course. Alongside these stands the World Scripture, which sets Rev. Moon's words beside the sacred texts of the world's religions. All of these are ultimately drawn from a single vast source — the collected sermons of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a Korean record of his spoken words filling more than 600 volumes.

Rev. Moon was above all a speaker rather than a writer: for more than five decades he taught aloud — often extemporaneously, sometimes for many hours at a time — and his Korean addresses were transcribed and gathered into a monumental collection, the Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, which fills more than 600 volumes and preserves thousands of sermons delivered between the 1940s and 2012. Every one of the movement's scriptures — the Cheon Seong Gyeong and the others — was compiled by selecting from this vast body of spoken words. This archive takes that complete corpus as its foundation: to explain what Rev. Moon taught about a single term or theme, we do not rest on one memorable quotation but examine the whole span of his words on it, translating from the Korean originals and tracing how a teaching first appears, deepens, and reaches its mature form across the decades. That is the method behind the Doctrinal Encyclopedia — a scholarly account in which each entry rests on the full weight of the primary sources, not on impression.

Several convictions set Unification teaching apart while keeping it in deep continuity with the world's faiths. First, its focus is the restoration of the family rather than the salvation of the individual soul alone: the Kingdom of Heaven is entered as families, not merely as separate believers. Second, the Divine Principle offers a detailed account of the Fall, of history, and of restoration that goes beyond the biblical narrative it builds upon. Third, God is presented not as a remote sovereign but as a Parent whose heart was broken by the loss of His children. Fourth, the movement does not treat any single religion as the final destination; it teaches that the faiths are meant to converge as humanity matures, a vision reflected in the World Scripture and in Rev. Moon's lifelong work for interreligious harmony. What unites all of these is the belief that lasting peace begins where God intended it to begin — in true families joined by true love.