Bible - Glossary

성경 · 聖經 · Seonggyeong, Holy Scripture, Old and New Testaments

What Is the Bible?

The Bible is the canonical Old and New Testament scriptures of Christianity, which the Unification Movement receives as authoritative records of God’s providence of restoration in the Old Testament Age and the New Testament Age.

The Exposition of the Divine Principle defines the Bible as “a textbook teaching the truth” rather than truth itself — distinguishing the lamp from the light it carries. The Bible is therefore read not as the final word but as preparation for it.

This understanding is anchored in the experience of Sun Myung Moon, who at sixteen received a direct calling from Jesus and then spent nine years probing the Bible’s hidden meanings before publicly proclaiming what he called the Divine Principle.

After that, for nine years I lived with Almighty God and Jesus. Many times I went into the spirit world. Gradually God taught me wonderful truths. It was as though a long, long dark night gave way to the dawn. In that truth I could see the glorious light of a new culture. This special revelation, founded on the New Testament, is far superior to the teaching of Judaism. This revelation has the power to embrace all religions and bind them into one.

— Sun Myung Moon (102-288, 01/01/1979) Cham Bumo Gyeong

The bridge from this nine-year exposure to the Unification Movement’s biblical hermeneutic is the Exposition of the Divine Principle, especially its General Introduction and Chapter on Creation, which set out why the Bible — though true — must be read with a key.

Etymological Analysis

In Korean, the Bible is 성경 (Seonggyeong), written in Hanja as 聖經 — 聖 meaning “sacred,” 經 meaning “canonical text.” The character 經 originally referred to the warp threads of a loom, then by extension to the foundational classics of Confucianism, before being adopted by Korean Buddhists for the sutras and by Korean Christians for the Bible.

In ordinary Korean usage, 성경 denotes the Christian scriptures specifically. In Unification theological usage, the term retains that denotation, but the surrounding category is plural: the Bible stands alongside the Exposition of the Divine Principle and the three Cheon Il Guk holy scriptures — Cheon Seong Gyeong, Cham Bumo Gyeong, and Pyeong Hwa Gyeong.

The semantic field shifts from “the holy book” to “a holy book within an unfolding providence of the Word.”

Theological Definition

The Exposition of the Divine Principle classifies the Bible as the record of God’s restoration providence covering roughly four thousand years from Adam to Jesus and the early Church. Two claims define its status within the Unification system: it is genuinely revealed, and it is genuinely partial.

It is revealed because every providential figure — Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the prophets, John the Baptist, Jesus — fulfilled or failed indemnity conditions whose internal logic only the Doctrine of the Fall and the Doctrine of Restoration can render coherent. Without this key, even canonical episodes are scandalous on ordinary moral terms.

In the Bible, Jacob unites with his mother Rebekah to deceive his elder brother Esau and his father Isaac, and so receives the blessing. Tamar conceives by her father-in-law and through her sons Perez and Zerah the tribe of Judah is blessed. Why are such matters — unresolvable within ordinary human ethics — there at all? In the genealogy at the head of Matthew, four irregular women appear: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba. Why are they at the very head of the New Testament? These problems cannot be solved without knowing the Doctrine of the Fall. It is only in the time of the True Father that all this has been laid bare.

— Sun Myung Moon (211-138, 12/30/1990) Cham Bumo Gyeong

The text is not surface ethics but lineage providence: the Hebrew Scriptures track God’s careful work of separating the messianic seed from satanic lineage so that the Messiah might one day be born free of original sin.

It is partial because the Bible’s narrative ends with the Church awaiting the Lord’s return, and the Unification Movement teaches that this return has now occurred, generating new scripture for the Completed Testament Age. The relationship is cumulative, not replacement.

Why have we kept the name “Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity”? Because we attached “Christianity,” we have been reviled. If we removed it, we would have to discard the Old Testament and the New Testament. Without the Old, the New could not have come; that having gone wrong, the new promise — the New Testament — appeared. Without the New, the Completed Testament cannot come. Because the New arose upon the Old and the Completed Testament arose upon the New, we must remain connected to Christianity.

— Sun Myung Moon (284-189, 04/17/1997) Cham Bumo Gyeong

The Bible is therefore not relativized but situated: the indispensable second floor of a three-storey building.

The Bible as Textbook, Not Truth Itself

The Exposition of the Divine Principle’s most quoted sentence on the Bible distinguishes the medium from the message. The book itself is not the truth it carries; it is the lamp, not the light.

The Bible is not the truth itself, but a textbook teaching the truth. Naturally, the quality of the teaching must vary with the period, the level of understanding of the people of the time, and the cultural environment in which it was given. We must therefore understand the inner essence of the truth taught in the Bible, and never become so attached to the textbook’s expressions that we miss the truth itself.

— Sun Myung Moon, Exposition of the Divine Principle, General Introduction Exposition of the Divine Principle

Three consequences follow.

First, biblical language is calibrated to its first audience. When Genesis describes creation in six days for Bronze Age people, the metric is pedagogical, not chronometric.

Second, biblical idioms — “sons of God,” “the elect,” “fire from heaven” — are technical terms whose meaning is fixed by the providence of restoration, not by literal physics.

Third, the Bible is necessarily incomplete, because the truth it teaches outruns the textbook in proportion as the providence advances. To insist on the textbook against the truth — what the Divine Principle calls being “so attached to the textbook’s expressions that we miss the truth itself” — is to repeat the error of the Pharisees who held to the letter of Moses against the Messiah they were waiting for.

This is why Sun Myung Moon, even after spending nine years probing the Bible’s hidden meanings, treated his own words as a deeper engagement with that same truth rather than a departure from it.

The Unification Principle is not a philosophy nor an academic theory; like the Word itself, it is the Principle of God. It is God’s unchanging truth. Once that truth has been disclosed, one must live by that principle and act under that principle. The Principle of Creation, the Doctrine of the Fall, and the purpose of the Messiah’s coming and Second Advent — the central content of these will never change. They cannot be changed by negotiation or because people dislike them.

— Sun Myung Moon (091-124, 02/03/1977) Cham Bumo Gyeong

The Divine Principle does not displace the Bible; it is the deeper reading of the same truth the Bible teaches in its own register.

Symbolic Interpretation in the Bible

A defining feature of Unification hermeneutics is that the Bible communicates much of its most important content symbolically — and that the key to its symbols lies in the providence of restoration. Five symbol-clusters carry most of the load.

The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, — In the Unification reading, the two trees of Eden are not botanical objects but symbols of perfected Adam and perfected Eve.

The Tree of Life is the male principle that humanity is meant to inherit; the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the female principle through whom good or evil could enter humanity depending on her use of love.

This is why Revelation 22 promises the Tree of Life to the saints at the end — the Bible begins and ends with the same symbol.

The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden in the Genesis account symbolize the perfected Father and Mother. Therefore, were the human ancestors Adam and Eve, undefiled and complete, to have stood as the root, humanity would have lived in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and after death gone to the Kingdom of Heaven in the spirit world to live forever. Fallen humanity is a wild olive tree, and so must receive the engrafting of the True Parents — the true olive tree — to be reborn as true human beings.

— Sun Myung Moon (344-198, 03/09/2001) Cham Bumo Gyeong

The forbidden fruit — Inside this same key, the “fruit” Eve was forbidden to eat is not a literal produce. Eating is an idiom for incorporation through the most intimate relation, and the prohibition is the prohibition of premature, unsanctioned love at a stage of immaturity.

Genesis 3 is therefore a coded account of the misuse of human sexuality before perfection — a reading that explains why nakedness becomes shame the moment after the act, why the consequences fall on the reproductive organs and on childbirth, and why God’s redemptive work proceeds through bloodlines rather than by mass forgiveness.

The serpent — The serpent is the archangel Lucifer, who possessed angelic intelligence (which is why he speaks), occupied a position above humanity in the order of formation but below them in the order of love (which is why his temptation took the shape of envy), and lost that position in the Fall (which is why Revelation 12 calls him “that ancient serpent, the dragon” and shows him cast down).

This identification fixes both the moral logic of the Fall — Eve was led astray by a being created to serve her — and the eschatology of Revelation, where the same serpent is finally bound.

The wild olive and the true olive — Romans 11, where Paul describes the Gentiles as wild olive shoots grafted into the cultivated olive tree of Israel, becomes in Unification reading the master metaphor for restoration through lineage. All fallen humanity is wild olive — descended from a corrupted root.

Salvation is not a forensic declaration but an actual change of root, accomplished by being grafted into the True Parents’ lineage through the Holy Wine Ceremony and the Blessing.

Numerological symbolism — Biblical numbers in the Unification reading are not coincidences but providential markers. Forty (forty days of flood, forty years in the wilderness, forty days of Jesus’s temptation, the Father’s waiting until forty to consummate the Holy Wedding) is the number of separation from Satan and indemnity.

Twelve (Jacob’s sons, the tribes of Israel, the apostles) is the providential complete number of substantial restoration. Three (three temptations, three days in the tomb, three disciples at the Transfiguration) is the providential number of the formation–growth–perfection stages and of the family unit (parents and child).

Seven, ten, and three multiplied (seven days, ten generations, thirty pieces of silver) recur because the providence of restoration is repeating, at successively larger scales, the same internal arithmetic.

Numbers are not mystical; they are the syntax of indemnity.

Decoded Passages

The cumulative effect of these symbol-keys is that previously opaque passages become legible. Three classic examples:

Genesis 38 — Tamar and Judah. On a literal reading, this chapter is a moral embarrassment — a daughter-in-law sleeping with her father-in-law to bear twins.

On the Unification reading, Tamar performs the indemnity condition that reverses the elder–younger inversion of the Fall: in her womb, the second-born Perez emerges before the first-born Zerah, providentially overturning the satanic claim on the elder line. This is why Matthew 1 names Tamar at the head of Jesus’s genealogy — she is one of the four women through whom the messianic lineage was rectified.

Matthew 1 — the four women in Jesus’s genealogy. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba are not included by accident or as embarrassments to be quietly accepted. Each undertook a culturally scandalous act that, in providential perspective, performed an indemnity condition for the lineage of the Messiah.

Their presence at the head of the New Testament tells the reader that the Old Testament has been preparing this moment through the careful, costly work of separating the messianic seed.

Revelation 19 — the Marriage of the Lamb. This is not a celestial spectacle to be awaited in the clouds. It is the substantial wedding at history’s culmination of the Lord at his Second Advent and the bride God has prepared. Unification theology reads this as fulfilled at the Holy Wedding of Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han on 11 April 1960 — the ceremony that opened the Completed Testament Age and inaugurated the substantial restoration of the family God lost in Eden.

Providential Context

The three-age structure organizes how the Bible functions across history. In the Old Testament Age — the formation stage of God’s restoration — the Hebrew Scriptures record the foundation of faith and substance laid by patriarchs and prophets, preparing for the Messiah.

In the New Testament Age — the growth stage — the Gospels and apostolic writings record Jesus’s incarnation, ministry, crucifixion, and the Holy Spirit’s continuation of his redemptive work. Spiritual salvation is achieved; physical salvation awaits the Second Advent.

In the Completed Testament Age — the perfection stage, inaugurated with the Holy Wedding of Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han in 1960 — the Bible’s promises move from prophecy to substantial fulfillment.

The Marriage of the Lamb foretold in Revelation 19 is read as fulfilled in the True Parents; the new heavens and new earth become the substantial work of restoring God’s lineage on earth. After the Seonghwa of Sun Myung Moon in 2012, Hak Ja Han Moon oversaw the codification of the new scripture, which carries this age.

Father’s achievement was to give to fallen humanity true words of truth like jewels. When I think that these words, undisturbed and arranged like beautiful jewels, have been threaded together in a single line in the book Cheon Seong Gyeong, I am profoundly grateful. We are at the point where we must press into the era of Cheon Il Guk, and these words are the substantial center of Cheon Il Guk. They are the fruit. They are the pillar.

— Hak Ja Han Moon (06/10/2013) Cham Bumo Gyeong

The point is structural: as the New Testament did not abolish the Old but completed it, the three Cheon Il Guk scriptures — Cheon Seong Gyeong, Cham Bumo Gyeong, Pyeong Hwa Gyeong — do not abolish the Bible but bring its providence to its rest.

Practical Dimension

For Blessed Families, the Bible is read in three modes — devotional, comparative, and apologetic. Devotionally, Genesis 1–3 anchors meditation on the original ideal and the tragedy of the Fall; the Gospels cultivate filial piety toward Jesus as second Adam; Revelation grounds eschatological hope in the substantial reality of the Holy Wedding rather than in a sky-event.

Comparatively, the Bible is read alongside the Exposition of the Divine Principle and the Cheon Il Guk scriptures within the practice of Hoon Dok Hae — daily reading of the Word in family settings. Sun Myung Moon described the Word as ontologically charged in a way that makes such reading more than information transfer.

The Word has the power that — like a seedling that sprouts again when spring comes — recreates. It is not like ordinary speech. The Word the Father has spoken sets a wavelength of the heart; entering it, one finds something there. The mind resounds; the self is taken in. Even forty years on, when I read what I once said, I enter that state at once. The Word has the power to recreate the world as the kingdom of heaven.

— Sun Myung Moon (322-012, 05/11/2000) Cham Bumo Gyeong

This sacramental view of the Word extends to biblical texts read within Hoon Dok Hae. Apologetically, Blessed Families learn to use the Bible — Genesis 3, Matthew 1, and Revelation 19 in particular — as the bridge of explanation when speaking with Christian neighbors and family members.

Academic Note

Scholars of new religious movements have given considerable attention to the Unification Movement’s biblical hermeneutic. George Chryssides, in The Advent of Sun Myung Moon (1991), identifies the Movement as one of the most exegetically sophisticated of the post-Christian new religions.

Eileen Barker, in The Making of a Moonie (1984), observed that early evangelical converts were drawn precisely by the depth of Unification biblical exposition before encountering its doctrinal divergences from orthodoxy.

Massimo Introvigne, in The Unification Church (2000), traces the gradual emergence of new scripture as a marker of the Movement’s transition from a Christian-derived movement to a religion with its own canonical literature alongside the Bible.

Frederick Sontag, in Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church (1977), characterized the relationship to the Bible not as deviation but as continuation under a new prophetic claim.

Sympathetic systematic work from within the tradition — particularly Young Oon Kim’s Unification Theology and Christian Thought — develops the relation between the two canons in dialogue with mainstream Christian sources.

Comparative Religion

Christianity — Mainstream Protestant theology holds the Bible as the sole infallible rule of faith and practice (sola scriptura), as classically articulated in Calvin’s Institutes; Karl Barth, in Church Dogmatics, distinguished Scripture as “witness to revelation” from revelation itself, a distinction that resonates partially with the Unification view. Catholic theology, since Trent, holds Scripture and Tradition as twin sources interpreted by the Magisterium.

The Unification Movement shares the conviction that the Bible is genuinely God’s word but holds that the canon continues into the Completed Testament Age.

Judaism — The Tanakh is read alongside the Oral Torah codified in the Mishnah and Gemara; Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, articulates a hierarchy of revelation crowned by Mosaic prophecy.

Both traditions treat text as a living word demanding interpretation; they diverge sharply on messianic identity and on whether further canonical revelation is possible.

Islam — Islam recognizes earlier scriptures — the Tawrat, the Zabur, and the Injil — as genuine but corrupted (the doctrine of taḥrīf), with the Qur’an as the final, uncorrupted revelation through Muhammad.

The Unification Movement shares the conviction that revelation continued past the New Testament canon, but rejects the corruption thesis: the Bible is not corrupted, only incomplete.

Buddhism — The Tripitaka and Mahayana sutras frame scripture as the record of the Buddha’s teaching for liberation from suffering, not as the record of God’s restoration providence in history.

The parallel is therefore weak — both venerate text and treat reading as a transformative practice, but the underlying metaphysics differ substantially.

What makes the Unification view distinctive is its insistence that the Bible is true, not corrupted, but unfinished — and that its unfinishedness is resolved not by allegorical re-reading but by substantial historical fulfillment in the True Parents and by new scripture that records that fulfillment.

Key Takeaway

The Bible is canonical scripture for the Unification Movement, recording God’s providence of restoration in the Old Testament Age and the New Testament Age, and remains in active use within the tradition.
The Exposition of the Divine Principle teaches that the Bible is “a textbook teaching the truth” rather than truth itself — genuinely revealed but requiring an interpretive key.
That key is the Doctrine of the Fall and the Doctrine of Restoration, without which key biblical episodes — the Jacob–Esau deception, the Tamar narrative, the Matthean genealogy — are unresolvable on ordinary ethical grounds.
The Bible communicates much of its most important content symbolically: the two trees of Eden symbolize perfected Adam and Eve; the forbidden fruit codes the misuse of love; the serpent is the archangel Lucifer; the wild olive grafted into the true olive is restoration through lineage; biblical numbers (40, 12, 7, 3) are markers of indemnity.
The Bible’s promises culminate in the Marriage of the Lamb of Revelation 19, fulfilled in the Holy Wedding of the True Parents in 1960 and inaugurating the Completed Testament Age.
New scripture for the Completed Testament Age — Cheon Seong Gyeong, Cham Bumo Gyeong, Pyeong Hwa Gyeong — does not replace the Bible but completes the providence the Bible records.

What is the relationship between the Bible and the Divine Principle?

The Divine Principle does not replace the Bible; it serves as the interpretive key without which key biblical episodes — the Fall, the genealogies, the indemnity narratives — remain opaque.

Why does the Unification Movement read the Marriage of the Lamb as referring to the True Parents?

Revelation 19 promises a wedding at history’s culmination between the Lamb and his bride; Unification theology reads this as substantially fulfilled in the Holy Wedding of Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han in 1960, which inaugurated the Completed Testament Age.

Are the Cheon Il Guk scriptures meant to replace the Bible?

No — the relationship is cumulative; Sun Myung Moon explicitly insisted that the Movement remain connected to Christianity precisely so the Bible would not be discarded.

Why does the Unification Movement read the two trees of Eden as symbols rather than literal trees?

Because the Bible itself uses tree imagery elsewhere as personal symbol — Jesus calls himself the vine, Paul calls Israel the cultivated olive — and because the providential logic of the Fall (loss of lineage, transmission of original sin) requires a personal source rather than a botanical one. In the Unification reading, the Tree of Life is the perfected Adam, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the perfected Eve.

Key Texts on tplegacy.net

Exposition of the Divine Principle — The General Introduction and the chapters on Creation and the Fall set out the Bible’s status as a textbook of truth and the framework for reading Genesis.
Cheon Seong Gyeong — The first of the three Cheon Il Guk scriptures, organizing Sun Myung Moon’s words on God, Creation, and Providence around biblical themes.
Cham Bumo Gyeong — Compiles teachings on Word, Truth, and Hoon Dok Hae that frame the Movement’s doctrine of scripture across the three ages.
World Scripture and the Teachings of Sun Myung Moon — Reads biblical passages alongside the world’s scriptures and Sun Myung Moon’s teachings on shared themes.