God's Heart

Hananim-ui Shimjeong · 하나님의 심정 · 神의 心情 · Divine Heart · Heart of God

What is God's Heart?

God's Heart (Shimjeong, 심정) is the central theological concept in Unification teaching — the innermost motivational force that compelled God to create the universe and humanity. It is not a sentiment or an emotion in the ordinary psychological sense, but an irrepressible impulse of love that can only be fulfilled through an object partner who returns love freely.

Where mainstream theology has traditionally emphasized God's omnipotence, omniscience, or moral will, the theology of Rev. Sun Myung Moon places God's Heart — specifically His longing to love and be loved — at the very foundation of existence.

The Korean term 심정 (shimjeong) is composed of shim (心, heart/mind) and jeong (情, emotion/feeling/affection). In everyday Korean, shimjeong describes the deep inner feeling-state of a person; in Unification theology, it is elevated to describe the essential nature of God Himself, the root from which love, life, and lineage flow.

God is the subject of true love, and for that reason He needed an object. Since He is an absolute being, He needed an absolute object. God created human beings so as to have an object of true love. God cannot feel joy when He is alone. A being of absolute value needs a partner of absolute value.

— The Blessing and Ideal Family, Sun Myung Moon

This passage anchors the entire cosmology: creation is not an act of power but an act of longing. God creates because His Heart must overflow into relationship.

Section I — Etymological and Conceptual Analysis

The Hanja compound 心情 (shimjeong) has a classical East Asian resonance. Xīnqíng in Chinese philosophy denotes the affective state of the xīn — the heart-mind regarded by Confucian and neo-Confucian thinkers as the seat of moral cognition and feeling simultaneously.

In the Korean Neo-Confucian tradition (Sŏngnihak), the sim (心) was the governing faculty that mediated between original nature (sŏng, 性) and expressed emotion (chŏng, 情). Rev. Moon appropriates this classical framework but radically reorients it: in his teaching, shimjeong is not a human moral category but the ontological ground of God's being.

In everyday modern Korean, shimjeong carries connotations of sincerity, emotional depth, and affectionate concern — the shimjeong of a parent for a child, the shimjeong between longtime friends. Rev. Moon takes this intimate, relational meaning and projects it onto the infinite: God possesses shimjeong toward humanity in exactly the way a parent possesses it toward a beloved child, only absolutely and eternally.

The compound 하나님의 심정 (Hananim-ui Shimjeong), therefore, means literally “the heart-affection of God” — God's own interior impulse of love. It is consistently distinguished in Unification literature from:

Sarang (사랑, 愛) — love as action or expression. Shimjeong is the root; sarang is the fruit.

Jeongseong (정성, 精誠) — sincerity or devotion in practice. Jeongseong is the human response that resonates with God's shimjeong.

Ingyeok (인격, 人格) — personality or personhood. God's shimjeong is the core of His divine personhood.

Section II — Theological Definition within the Divine Principle

The Exposition of the Divine Principle introduces God's Heart in the context of creation's purpose. The Divine Principle teaches that God's essential nature (本然의 性品, bonyŏn-ŭi sŏngp'um) encompasses dual characteristics — internal character and external form, positivity and negativity — united at their core by Heart.

The Divine Principle states explicitly: “Heart (shimjeong) is the emotional impulse to seek joy through love.” This definition has three components that bear careful attention.

First, the heart is an impulse — not a static quality but a dynamic, outwardly-directed force. God is not self-sufficient in His Heart; He must express it.

Second, it is directed toward joy (기쁨, kipŭm) — and in Unification theology, joy arises only when a subject gives love to an object that reflects it, completing a circuit. God cannot experience the joy His Heart seeks while alone.

Third, it operates through love — meaning the Heart of God is inseparable from the giving of true love. God's Heart is, at its core, the heart of a parent.

God created human beings as His object partners of love, in His image, so that He could feel joy. For this joy to be possible, God created human beings as His children, whom He could love with parental heart.

— Exposition of the Divine Principle, Sun Myung Moon

This is the foundational statement of purpose in the Divine Principle. Creation is the outward expression of an inner necessity — the necessity of God's Heart to love and be loved.

The Divine Principle further teaches that because the first human ancestors failed to reach perfection and fell, God's Heart has been in a state of unresolved grief throughout all of human history. The doctrine of the Fall is not only a human tragedy but a wound to God's own Heart — the parent whose children turned away before the relationship of love could be fulfilled.

Yet the CSG opens an even deeper dimension of this teaching through the doctrine of God's total self-investment in creation. According to Rev. Moon, when God created, He did not merely issue commands. He poured out His entire essence — His true life, true love, and true ideals — as an artist who gives everything of himself to a masterpiece:

God completely invested Himself into making His object partner. The creation was the beginning of God's work through which He determined not to exist for His own sake, but for the sake of His object partner.

— Sun Myung Moon (78-111, 05/06/1975) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 1, Chapter 2

This teaching has a precise theological consequence: because God has already placed His entire essence into humanity, His love for us is not a preference He can revoke. It is an ontological bond. The shimjeong of God toward each human being is the shimjeong of a Creator who gave Himself away in the act of making what He loves. This is why the CSG can say that true love does not diminish the more it is invested — it multiplies. God's Heart, fully spent in creation, is not depleted; it is the inexhaustible spring from which all restoration flows.

The Fall, therefore, does not just disappoint God — it places Him in an impossible position: the One who gave everything cannot simply walk away from what He made.

Section III — God's Grief: The Wounded Heart (Han)

One of the most distinctive and pastorally powerful dimensions of Rev. Moon's theology is his sustained meditation on God's sorrow. The concept of han (恨) — a uniquely Korean word describing deep, unresolved grief mixed with longing — is applied directly to God's inner state after the Fall.

In conventional Christian theology, God's response to the Fall is most often described in terms of wrath, justice, or mercy. In Unification teaching, the primary divine response is grief — the grief of a parent whose beloved children have been stolen, corrupted, and placed under satanic dominion. God's Heart, which was meant to be fulfilled in joy through humanity, has been wounded across millennia.

This grief is compounded by a theological paradox that the CSG addresses directly and that conventional theology has never articulated: God cannot punish Satan. The reason is not weakness, but precisely the opposite — it is absolute fidelity to the principle of love that God Himself established at creation.

When Satan fell, he took Adam, Eve, and through them all of humanity into his lineage. If God were to destroy Satan by force, He would simultaneously destroy His own children who are inseparable from that lineage. The almighty God is therefore constrained not by any external power, but by the internal logic of His own Heart:

Why is the all-knowing and almighty God unable to wipe out Satan at one stroke? If He did so, that act would end up extinguishing Adam, Eve and the creation and destroying the ideal sphere of love as well. That is why He is prevented from doing so. The absolute Lord has the responsibility to absolutely fulfill what He said He would do. Despite Satan's attacks and tenacious persecution, the Lord God has endured throughout history in order to recover His established principles.

— Sun Myung Moon (208-256, 11/20/1990) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 1, Chapter 4

This is the theological ground of indemnity. God does not choose a long, painful path of restoration out of indifference or insufficient power. He chooses it because the only power He refuses to deploy is the power that would cost Him His children.

Every act of indemnity — every offering, every course of suffering, every providential sacrifice across millennia — is the record of a God who will endure any constraint rather than abandon those He loves.

God has been filled with bitter sorrow throughout history. He has been a God of grief, a God of lamentation. He has been a God who has had to endure, conceal, and persevere, while waiting for the day of liberation.

— God's Will and the World, Sun Myung Moon

This passage reconfigures the entire meaning of history. Providence of Restoration is not primarily the story of human sin being punished, but of God's Heart seeking to be healed — waiting, suffering, and working through every available channel to restore the parent-child relationship that was lost.

Rev. Moon often returned to the image of God weeping — a God who cannot intervene omnipotently but must work through the principle of indemnity, honoring the human portion of responsibility even while His Heart cries out for direct restoration. This theological posture demands of the believer not only obedience but empathy: to understand God's Heart is to share God's grief and to take responsibility for relieving it.

Have you ever heard God's sighing? Have you ever heard God weeping in the night? If you could, you would pledge your very life to comforting Him. That is the kind of pledge that I made to God.

— God's Will and the World, Sun Myung Moon

This testimony is autobiographical as well as theological. Rev. Moon describes his own encounter with God's Heart as the founding experience of his entire mission — the moment of hearing God weep becomes the call to a lifetime of sacrificial service.

Section IIIb — God in Confinement: The Incarcerated Father

Of all the images Rev. Moon employs to describe God's condition after the Fall, none is more radical — or more distinctively Korean in its theological texture — than the image of God as a prisoner.

The Cheon Seong Gyeong states plainly: God is confined by love. He may as well be in prison. The ideal world that the almighty Creator intended to establish on the foundation of love was seized by Satan; and because God's Heart is irrevocably bound to His children, He cannot simply turn away or begin again. His love itself became the chain that holds Him.

We must liberate God. God is confined by love. He may as well be in prison. He has not been set free. Due to the Fall, the ideal world that the all-knowing and almighty God intended to establish based on love was snatched away by Satan. Thus, God could not be liberated in heart. God is thus confined. His mind and heart cannot be at rest when His beloved children have died.

— Sun Myung Moon (138-261, 01/24/1986) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 1, Chapter 4

This passage does more than describe divine suffering — it reframes the entire structure of salvation. God is not a sovereign looking down on history and choosing when to intervene. He is a parent whose hands are bound by His own love, unable to act unilaterally because to strike Satan would be to destroy the children He loves who are entwined with the satanic lineage.

The CSG develops this further with the image of God's grief as something that has saturated history at its very roots:

God's bitter tears which melt the marrow of His bones, and His bloodstains which spread throughout the course of history, are crying out from the ground. I have been doing this work because I know that the mission remains to liberate God from His anguish.

— Sun Myung Moon (137-175, 01/01/1986) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 1, Chapter 4

The image of tears melting bone marrow and bloodstains in the ground belongs not to systematic theology but to the genre of lamentation — the Psalms, the Book of Job, the Korean minjung tradition. Rev. Moon is not constructing a philosophical argument here; he is transmitting a lived encounter. His theology of God's Heart was not first a doctrine but a disclosure — something heard and seen in prayer before it was ever written down.

This is also why the Unification movement understands its mission in terms that no conventional religious category fully captures: not only to receive salvation, but to give it — to God Himself. As the CSG states: "Instead of trying to be saved, we must make God free." (CSG 136-263). The Providence of Restoration is thus simultaneously descending (God seeking humanity) and ascending (humanity liberating God) — a double movement unique to Unification theology.

Section IV — Providential Context: OT, NT, and Completed Testament Age

God's Heart is the constant beneath all three ages of providential history; what changes is the degree to which humanity is capable of receiving and reflecting it.

In the Old Testament Age, God's Heart was veiled behind law, ritual, and sacrifice. The people of Israel came to know God primarily as sovereign, lawgiver, and judge.

The covenant (brit) expressed a relational bond, and the prophets gave voice to God's longing (e.g., Hosea's image of God as a husband grieving his unfaithful wife), but the full content of God's Heart as a parent could not yet be disclosed, because humanity had not yet matured sufficiently to receive it.

In the New Testament Age, Jesus revealed a deeper dimension of God's Heart through the proclamation of God as Abba — Father. Jesus' teaching opened a new register of divine intimacy. The cross, in Unification interpretation, is simultaneously the greatest tragedy of God's Heart (the sacrifice of His son before the mission could be completed) and the deepest expression of parental love.

In the Completed Testament Age, initiated by the emergence of the True Parents, God's Heart can at last be fully disclosed and reciprocated. The Blessing ceremony creates families rooted in God's lineage — families that can love God with the love of true children and thus finally fulfill the purpose of creation. But the CSG articulates something that goes beyond even this: the goal of the Completed Testament Age is not merely restored families, but the full oneness of God and humankind — a state in which the distinction between God's Heart and the heart of His children dissolves into complete resonance.

The reason that I, having the name of the True Parent, have been suffering for forty years as the center of the Completed Testament Age, is to receive God on earth. This will lead to the oneness of God and humankind in love.

— Sun Myung Moon (227-94, 02/10/1992) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 1, Chapter 3

In the Old Testament Age, the things of creation were sacrificed to prepare for the coming of God's Son. In the New Testament Age, Jesus, as the son was sacrificed to prepare for the coming of the parents. In the Completed Testament Age, the True Parents walk a suffering path to invite God Himself into the world — to establish a horizontal foundation wide enough for the vertical Father to descend and dwell. The goal is not only that humanity comes to God, but that God comes to humanity — that He is finally able to reside in families, in the flesh, in the lineage of restored children. This is the full meaning of liberating God's Heart.

Section V — Comparative Perspective

Christianity

Mainstream Christian theology has debated whether God can truly suffer (divine impassibility vs. divine passibility). Classical theism, following Augustine and Aquinas, held that God is without passions — that attributing grief or longing to God is anthropomorphism. Process theology (Whitehead, Hartshorne) broke with this tradition by affirming that God genuinely experiences the world and is affected by it. Unification theology aligns with the passibilist stream but goes further: God's suffering is not a theological concession but the very engine of providence.

Judaism

The rabbinic tradition and later Kabbalah offer rich resonances. The Shekhinah — God's indwelling presence — is described in the Talmud as going into exile with Israel, weeping at the destruction of the Temple. The Lurianic Kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum (divine self-contraction to make room for creation) and shevirat hakelim (breaking of the vessels) implies a God who endures rupture and yearning within the act of creation itself. These concepts resonate deeply with Rev. Moon's portrayal of God's constrained, suffering Heart.

Islam

Classical Islamic theology emphasizes divine transcendence (tanzīh) and is highly cautious about attributing emotional states to Allah. However, Sufi traditions — particularly the poetry of Rumi — speak extensively of divine longing and love as the ground of creation. Rumi's Masnavi opens with the reed flute crying for its origin; God's love cries out for union with humanity. This Sufi vision of a God who loves and longs is the closest analogue in Islamic tradition to Unification shimjeong theology.

Buddhism

The Mahayana ideal of the bodhisattva — a being who delays final liberation out of compassionate love for all sentient beings — offers a structural parallel to God's providential endurance in Unification thought. The Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha) present in all beings recalls the Unification teaching that God's Heart is already present as original mind in every person, awaiting restoration.

Confucianism

The classical Confucian ren (仁, benevolence/humaneness) is a relational virtue activated in parent-child, ruler-subject, and friend relationships. Rev. Moon's theology deeply internalizes this relational ontology and transposes it onto God: God's shimjeong is the cosmic source from which all ren flows.

Section VI — God's Heart in the Life of a Blessed Family

For members of the Unification movement, attending to God's Heart (Hananim-ui shimjeong-e shisŏng hada) is not a pious sentiment but a daily spiritual discipline with concrete behavioral implications.

Hoon Dok Hae (reading the words of Rev. and Dr. Moon each morning) is understood as a practice of aligning one's heart with God's Heart. By internalizing the words that came from the closest human point of resonance with God's shimjeong, family members attune their own inner life to the divine frequency.

Prayer in Unification practice is oriented less toward petition and more toward attendance and consolation — bringing one's heart into the presence of God's Heart, listening, and responding to what one hears there. The CSG records Rev. Moon's direct call to this interior posture:

How much have you wept in sympathy with God's situation? When you meet Him, your tears should gush out without ceasing as you comfort Him, saying, "Father, how great was Your sorrow upon losing me, Your son, and our first ancestors! Too many times throughout history until the present day have You suffered humiliation, pain and extreme hardship from their descendants!"

— Sun Myung Moon (51-111, 11/18/1971) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 1, Chapter 4

This is prayer as an act of filial love directed toward God rather than a request directed at Him. The believer does not come before God to receive; they come to give — to offer the consolation that God's Heart has been waiting for across all of history. Many practitioners of this form of prayer describe it not primarily as speaking to God but as becoming still enough to hear God's sorrow and respond. In this sense, prayer is not preparation for action in the world; it is itself the most intimate form of action — the act of a child who finally comes home to a grieving parent and says: I know. I am here. I will not leave again.

This dimension of prayer-as-consolation is what distinguishes the Unification spiritual life from both devotional petition (asking God for things) and meditative withdrawal (seeking one's own peace). It is an outward, relational, costly act of Heart — one that mirrors the very structure of God's shimjeong: love that must flow toward another to be complete.

Tribal Messiahship — the calling of each Blessed Family to restore their extended family and community — is understood as the direct expression of God's Heart in action. God's parental longing for all His children finds a human channel through the family that has been restored to His lineage.

The Three-Generation Family ideal (grandparents, parents, children living in a culture of heart) is seen as the earthly realization of God's shimjeong — a microcosm of the divine family in which all four realms of heart (children's, siblings', spouses', and parents') are experienced and perfected.

A person who has experienced the heart of a child, the heart of a sibling, the heart of a spouse, and the heart of a parent has experienced all four realms of heart. This is why the family is the school of love and the textbook of Heaven.

— The Blessing and Ideal Family, Sun Myung Moon

Section VII — Academic Note: God's Heart in New Religious Movements Scholarship

Scholars of New Religious Movements have identified the theology of shimjeong as one of the most theologically distinctive and pastorally consequential features of Unificationism.

Sociologist Eileen Barker (The Making of a Moonie, 1984) noted that converts to the Unification Church frequently cited an experience of felt divine love and parental warmth as central to their attraction to the movement — an observation that corresponds directly to the teaching of God's Heart as the foundation of all relationships.

Theologian Jonathan Wells and philosopher Joon Ho Seuk, writing from within the tradition, have argued that the shimjeong theology constitutes a genuine theological contribution to Christian theism — reframing the doctrine of God away from Greek metaphysical categories (omnipotence, impassibility) toward a more biblical relational ontology.

Journalist Michael Breen (Sun Myung Moon: The Early Years, 1997) describes Rev. Moon's early spiritual experiences—particularly his reported encounter with Jesus at age sixteen and his subsequent years of prayer and spiritual struggle — as the biographical origin of the shimjeong theology. Rev. Moon's personal encounter with God's grief, Breen suggests, became the experiential foundation that no purely academic theology could generate.

In the broader context of NRM scholarship, the theology of God's Heart represents an instance of what scholars call experiential soteriology — a path of salvation defined not by doctrinal assent or ritual performance alone, but by a transformative encounter with the emotional-relational reality of the divine. This positions Unificationism in interesting dialogue with Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, Sufi Islam, and devotional (bhakti) Hinduism, all of which center transformative felt encounter with divine love.

The concept of divine grief (han) as a theological category has been examined by Korean theologian Andrew Sung Park (The Wounded Heart of God, 1993), who develops a systematic theology of han from a minjung (liberation theology) perspective. Park's work, though not written from within the Unification movement, engages the same Korean cultural-theological matrix and provides useful comparative purchase for understanding Rev. Moon's shimjeong theology.