Heavenly Affection

천정 · 天情 · Heavenly Affection, Heavenly Heart-Bond, Heavenly Sentiment, Heavenly Jeong

What Is Cheonjeong?

Cheonjeong (천정 · 天情) is the Unification theological term for the heart-bond of affection that should exist between God and humanity—the divine counterpart and elevation of ordinary human affection.

The term appears in some of True Father's earliest documented sermons, structurally paired with its opposite term 인정 (injeong, human affection), and names the specific kind of emotional, sentimental, and relational bond that the Heavenly Parent has always wanted with His children but that the Fall severed. It is not a synonym for divine love (사랑) in the abstract; it is the more intimate, felt, embedded jeong — the lingering heart-tie — that flows between Heaven and a human person who has been restored to a vertical relationship with God.

Wherever the term appears in the corpus, it is presented as the destined fulfillment of the human heart and the precondition for a genuine relationship with Heaven.

The most canonical and complete early statement of the doctrine — and the place where the term first appears in clear theological development in the records preserved in the Speeches of Reverend Sun Myung Moon — comes from a sermon delivered on January 11, 1959, eighteen months before the term's appearance in the often-cited June 26, 1960, sermon.

The passage frames Cheonjeong within a fourfold convertible unity of heart, ideal, life, and love:

When we seek to find a conscientious standard, evil opposes us and there is room for Satan to dispute. Therefore, on the focal point where our heart becomes one with Heaven's heart, on that same focal point human affection (人情, injeong) and Heavenly affection (天情, cheonjeong) must become one; on the focal point where our ideal becomes one with the heavenly ideal, our life becomes one with Heaven's life; on the focal point where our love and the heavenly love are intertwined as one — on that focal point we must establish our bond with Heaven. Once Heaven and our heart are one, and our life is one, and our ideal is one, and our love is one — what could ever sever that bond? Among fallen people, even the bonds of affection (情) tied between fellow human beings cannot be severed without weeping and wailing; how much less can anyone sever a bond entangled in Cheonjeong, made one with Heaven? No matter how strong the power of sin may be, no matter how strong the authority of the earth may be, nothing on earth can break the one standard of the flow of affection bound at the root of this heart.

— Sun Myung Moon (005-158, 01/11/1959) Speeches of Reverend Sun Myung Moon

This single passage establishes the entire conceptual architecture of the doctrine: Cheonjeong is one of four convertible categories — heart, ideal, life, love — that must each become one between the human being and Heaven for the bond with Heaven to be substantially established. None of the four can be made one in isolation; all four converge on the same focal point. And the foundational element of the four is jeong — the heart-tie of affection — because jeong is the carrier-substance through which heart, ideal, life, and love are actually felt between persons.

Etymological Analysis

The compound 天情 (천정, cheonjeong) is built from two characters whose individual force determines the theological precision of the term.

天 (cheon, 천) — Heaven, sky, the divine. The graph in its oldest form depicts a great anthropomorphic figure standing above the horizon — the original Sino-Korean word for the cosmic Above and, by extension, for the divine. In Unification usage 천 names the Heavenly Parent specifically; the compound 천부모 (Cheon Bumo, Heavenly Parent) follows the same formation. 天 is also the first character of 천국 (Cheonguk, Heavenly Kingdom), 천일국 (Cheon Il Guk), 천정궁 (Cheon Jeong Gung), and 천도 (cheondo, Heavenly Way).

情 (jeong, 정) — feeling, affection, sentiment, the embedded heart-bond between persons. This is one of the most theologically loaded characters in the Sino-Korean vocabulary, and it requires its discussion below.

Combined, 天情 names jeong as it exists in the Heavenly dimension or, more precisely, jeong as it should flow between Heaven and humanity. The term is constructed to mirror 人情 (injeong, human affection) — the everyday Korean word for the warmth, sympathy, and embedded feeling among human beings.

The two terms are not opposites in the sense of contradiction; they are levels — injeong is what people share among themselves, cheonjeong is the higher and original jeong that should bind Heaven and humanity in the same kind of warmth.

The doctrinal claim is that the two should not be in conflict but should become one: when a person's injeong is rightly ordered, it carries cheonjeong within it; when injeong is severed from its Heavenly root, it withers into mere sentimentality.

A note on the same character set: the homophone 천정 (天井) means “ceiling,” and the homophone 천정 (天正) is the second element of 천정궁 (Cheon Jeong Gung, the Cheon Jeong Palace). Neither of these is a theological term.

The theologically correct character set is unambiguously 天情, and the meaning is unambiguously “Heavenly affection.”

The Untranslatable Jeong (情)

To understand Cheonjeong, one must understand jeong. The character 情 is itself constructed from two graphic elements that are themselves theologically significant in the Unification framework:

The left element 忄 is the radical form of 心 (sim, heart) — the same character that supplies the second element of 심정 (shimjeong).
The right element 青 (cheong, blue/green) originally depicted a sprout growing from the earth and carries the meaning of “fresh,” “alive,” or “newly born.”

The character thus reads, in its constitutional logic, as “that which is freshly born of the heart” — the lively, alive feeling that grows out from the seat of the heart.

The classical Confucian usage gave 情 a wide range — “feeling,” “emotion,” “true state of affairs,” “the actual condition of things” — but in modern Korean the word has narrowed and deepened to name something quite specific: the embedded, lingering, often unspoken affectionate bond between persons or between a person and a place. Koreans treat jeong as one of the defining characteristics of Korean culture, and it is famously difficult to translate fully into other languages.

Jeong is not romantic love (which is 사랑, sarang). It is not a duty (의, ui). It is not respect (경, gyeong). It is the warmth that grows between people who have lived through something together, the sense of belonging that one feels toward a familiar place, and the soft tug of attachment that does not announce itself but persists.

True Father's choice of 情 — and his pairing of it with 天 to make 天情 — is therefore deeply intentional.

The Heavenly Parent's relationship with His children is not described as a contractual duty or a juridical love. It is described as jeong — the embedded, lingering, alive heart-tie. Heaven does not merely love humanity; Heaven has jeong for humanity, and humanity is created with the capacity to have jeong for Heaven in return.

This is what makes the Unification doctrine of Cheonjeong distinctive even within Korean theological vocabulary: it takes the most untranslatable Korean affective term and applies it directly to the Heavenly Parent.

The Cheonjeong–Injeong Contrast: The Structural Pair

In the Unification corpus, Cheonjeong is rarely discussed without its structural counterpart 인정 (injeong, human affection).

The pair operates throughout True Father's teaching as a two-term contrast that names the fundamental rupture in the human condition and the fundamental work of restoration.

In the original creation, before the Fall, cheonjeong and injeong were not two different things at all.

The human being was created with injeong, whose root was cheonjeong — that is, the human capacity for embedded affection was itself a sharing in the Heavenly Parent's embedded affection. The two flowed as one through the same heart.

The Fall ruptured this unity: human affection was severed from its Heavenly root and reduced to mere injeong, while cheonjeong remained on Heaven's side, longing for the children with whom it could no longer flow.

In the fallen world, human beings still feel injeong — abundantly, sometimes overwhelmingly. The bonds between parents and children, between friends, between lovers, between countrymen, are all bonds of injeong. These bonds are not evil; they are the residue of the original capacity for affection that Heaven gave humanity. But they are injeong only, no longer joined to cheonjeong, and therefore they cannot fulfill the deepest purpose for which they were created. They produce attachment without ultimate meaning, sentiment without final resolution, love that ends at death.

The work of restoration, in True Father's framing, is therefore the reuniting of cheonjeong and injeong. The whole providential effort — the course of True Parents, the work of the Holy Wine Ceremony and the Marriage Blessing, and the daily disciplines of Hoon Dok Hae and jeongseong — is aimed at restoring the unity that was severed at the Fall, so that human affection once again carries Heavenly affection within it, and the warmth that flows between people is also the warmth that flows between Heaven and humanity.

This is the structural reason that the pair 천정/인정 appears throughout the corpus as a stable doctrinal couplet. The two terms together name the work of restoration in its most intimate form.

Historical Appearance in the Earliest Sermons

The user-tradition reference for Cheonjeong points to a sermon delivered on June 26, 1960.

The earliest documented appearance of the term in the published volumes of the Speeches of Reverend Sun Myung Moon available in this archive is the sermon of January 11, 1959 — eighteen months earlier — quoted at length above (005-158).

The June 26, 1960, reference may reflect an oral tradition of where the term was first heard in a sustained way; the published record establishes that the term was already in active doctrinal use at least a year and a half earlier.

What is consistent across both dates and across the broader sermons of 1958–1968 is that the term emerges from a closely connected cluster of teachings about the structure of the human heart in relationship with Heaven.

The immediate doctrinal background is set by a sermon from December 21, 1958 — three weeks before the January 11, 1959 sermon — in which True Father had already begun developing the language of jeong in its theological depth:

Whether brothers have faults or not, they are brothers born of the same blood and bone that Heaven has permitted. People must come forth who can rise above their personal circumstances and weep in order to be joined to the historical lineage and heart (shimjeong) of the Parents. Such young people are being called for. If the burning fervor of those young people is for personal success and personal desire, it will end within the boundary of a single individual. The human being's original ideal is to cross beyond the infinity of goodness and to take hold of God and rejoice. Therefore, that original ideal demands the pouring out of every passion. If God's providence has been at work in the path of history this nation has walked, what kind of people will God ultimately seek? They will be the people who know how to weep for the sake of God's will — who weep entangled in one will, who weep entangled in one shimjeong, who weep entangled in one action, and who say “I will be the offering first.”

— Sun Myung Moon (005-080, 12/21/1958) Speeches of Reverend Sun Myung Moon

The December 21, 1958, sermon establishes the shimjeong framework — the deeper God-heart-impulse — within which cheonjeong will be situated three weeks later.

The two terms are not interchangeable: shimjeong names God's own heart-impulse, the inner motive force of the Heavenly Parent, while cheonjeong names the affectionate bond that flows from that heart to the children of Heaven.

Without shimjeong, there is no cheonjeong; cheonjeong is, in effect, shimjeong radiating outward toward humanity as the embedded heart-tie that wants to be felt and reciprocated.

By the time of the January 11, 1959, sermon, this background is in place, and True Father can deploy the term cheonjeong in its full doctrinal weight, paired with injeong in the convertible-unity formula.

By 1968 — nearly a decade later — the term had become a stable doctrinal couplet that True Father could deploy in highly compressed form, as in the passage on the scything of shimjeong examined below.

The Fourfold Convertible Unity: Heart, Ideal, Life, Love

The structural framework that surrounds Cheonjeong in the January 11, 1959, sermon is the fourfold convertible unity. The passage names four pairs that must each become one between the human being and Heaven:

our heart (마음) — Heaven's heart (하늘의 마음)
human affection (人情, injeong) — Heavenly affection (天情, cheonjeong)
our ideal (이념) — the heavenly ideal (천적인 이념)
our life (생명) — Heaven's life (하늘의 생명)
our love (사랑) — the heavenly love (천적인 사랑)

The structure is not a list of five separate conditions; it is a single condition described from five overlapping angles.

The convertibility runs in every direction: where heart is one with Heaven's heart, affection cannot fail to be one with Heavenly affection; where affection is one with Heavenly affection, ideal cannot fail to be one with the heavenly ideal; where ideal is one, life is one; where life is one, love is one; where love is one, the bond with Heaven cannot be broken. The five are five descriptions of a single substantial unity.

True Father returned to this framework throughout the 1960s, and the same architecture appears in a sermon from October 3, 1964, where the parallel is given without the explicit term cheonjeong but with the same underlying structure:

The world does not live by the bond of truth. People live and die by love, the source of life. By God's love we live and die. Truth is the guide. It is like a bridge for establishing relationship with the substantial reality; it is the intermediate form for transmitting shimjeong. When we say “by the bond of shimjeong the world lives,” the shimjeong is the shimjeong of God. This shimjeong is not the shimjeong of han (恨, sorrowful resentment) that God has carried toward this fallen world and that requires restoration through indemnity, but rather the shimjeong that longs to be resolved. To resolve God's han, we must first know what God's han is. God's han is that He could not find the individual He could truly love, that He could not find the family, the tribe, the people, the nation, the world, the cosmos.

— Sun Myung Moon (014-181, 10/03/1964) Speeches of Reverend Sun Myung Moon

The October 3, 1964, sermon places shimjeong at the structural center: shimjeong is the substantial reality, love is what flows from it, life is what is carried by love, truth is the bridge that transmits shimjeong, and jeong — the embedded affection — is the medium in which the whole architecture is lived.

The fourfold convertible unity is thus not a teaching that disappeared after 1959; it is a stable doctrinal framework that True Father returns to across decades.

The Scything of Shimjeong: Uniting Cheonjeong and Injeong

The most architecturally compressed statement of the doctrine of Cheonjeong in the entire corpus comes from a sermon delivered on June 9, 1968, at the close of the First Seven-Year Course.

The passage is brief but doctrinally exact: it names the work of restoration as the scything of shimjeong that reunites cheonjeong and injeong in the same harvest:

Though we accomplished the First Seven-Year Course in victory, the True Parents shed many tears of blood throughout it. Night and day, no matter what hardship arose, they ran from place to place to attain one single purpose. There is no one to blame for not going along, and no fatherland to blame for being absent. We go because we have the mission to reap the result of God's predetermined providence. Therefore, we must reap the fruit of goodness that is scattered across this world. By the scything of shimjeong (심정의 낫질), we must reap such fruit, and we must unite our divided self, and we must unite the separated Heavenly affection (天情, cheonjeong) and human affection (人情, injeong). Our body itself, even if it is the dull edge of a scythe, must become a substantial tool used for the harvest. Through such a substantial tool, we must lead the world, which today is collapsing into ruin, onto the right path, and pass through into a new central world centered on God's shimjeong. That is the mission of the members of the Unification Church.

— Sun Myung Moon (020-192, 06/09/1968) Speeches of Reverend Sun Myung Moon

The passage repays close reading. The “scything of shimjeong” is not a metaphor for spiritual discipline in the abstract — it names the precise mechanism by which the work of restoration is accomplished.

The Fall divided two things that should never have been divided: the unitary self of the human being, and the unitary affection of cheonjeong-with-injeong.

The scythe of shimjeong cuts at the root of the divided field and gathers the harvest in such a way that what was divided becomes one again.

The human being's own body, however blunt, becomes the substantial tool of this harvest. The harvest is not the destruction of injeong in favor of cheonjeong; it is the re-unification of the two so that human affection once again carries Heavenly affection within it.

This 1968 passage closes the doctrinal arc that opened with the 1958–1959 sermons. What was introduced in 1959 as a theological pair — cheonjeong and injeong must become one — is restated nine years later as the operational mission of every member of the church.

Relationship to Shimjeong (심정) and the Heart of God

Shimjeong is the most foundational of all Unification heart-terms, and Cheonjeong stands in a specific structural relationship to it. The two are not synonyms; they name different aspects of the same divine reality.

Shimjeong (心情) is God's own heart-impulse — the inner motivational force from which God's love and providence proceed. It is the deepest layer of God's interior life, the seat of His han and of His longing for unity with His children.

Shimjeong is, in the first instance, an attribute of the Heavenly Parent; it becomes an attribute of the human being only insofar as the human being is made one with the Heavenly Parent.

Cheonjeong (天情) is the outward radiation of shimjeong toward the human being — the embedded heart-tie of affection that flows from God's heart-impulse and seeks to be received and reciprocated in the children of Heaven.

In other words: shimjeong is the source; cheonjeong is the flow. Where shimjeong is the spring, cheonjeong is the stream that runs from it into the territory of human relationships.

This structural distinction matters because it determines the daily practice. A person cannot generate shimjeong by will; shimjeong is God's, not the human's.

But a person can enter the flow of cheonjeong by aligning their own injeong with it — by living in such a way that the embedded affections of daily life (the warmth toward family, the loyalty toward friends, the love toward spouse and children, the care toward strangers) are not severed from their Heavenly root but carry that root within them.

This is what the January 11, 1959, sermon means when it says that the focal point of unity with Heaven is the focal point where injeong and cheonjeong become one.

Cheonjeong and the Original-Nature Bond

A further structural clarification comes from the second part of the October 3, 1964, sermon, where True Father develops the language of the original-nature bond (본성의 인연, bonseong-ui inyeon) and locates the fulfillment of the human heart in returning to that bond:

What is God's first wish? The individuals God sought to find are bound up in conditions of han, and so the resolution must be accomplished by an individual who can say, “I will resolve all the conditions of han that arose because of me — please accept this.” Then the family is resolved, and the tribe, and the people, and the nation, and the world. But none of this can be made one apart from the shimjeong of God, who has bound them together. Human power cannot do it. Through the shimjeong of God, the world is one. “The bond of original nature (本性의 因緣) by which He bound us as one” — that is our original bond. The bond of this fallen world is not our bond. The shimjeong that bound us as one — that is the original bond. And then: “the eternal giving and receiving of our original homeland.” By the bond of original nature, having been bound as one, we give and receive eternally. Centered on the shimjeong of original nature, in the place of eternal giving and receiving, our original homeland is found at last. And only then does the word “happiness” become possible.

— Sun Myung Moon (014-182, 10/03/1964) Speeches of Reverend Sun Myung Moon

The October 3, 1964, passage clarifies the eschatological direction of Cheonjeong.

The work of uniting cheonjeong and injeong is not an end in itself; it is the recovery of the original-nature bond — the relationship that the Heavenly Parent always intended and that the Fall destroyed.

The original-nature bond is the bond of jeong in its undivided form, the relationship in which heart, ideal, life, love, and affection flow simultaneously between Heaven and humanity.

When that bond is restored, cheonjeong is no longer something a person reaches up to receive; it is the daily medium of life.

The original homeland (본향, bonhyang) is not a place but a relationship: it is the territory in which cheonjeong and injeong are once again the same single flow.

Practical Dimension for Blessed Families

For Blessed Families, the doctrine of Cheonjeong is not abstract theology; it specifies the texture of daily life as a citizen of Cheon Il Guk. Three practical dimensions can be identified.

First, the qualification of human affection. Cheonjeong does not eliminate injeong; it qualifies it.

The warmth that a Blessed husband feels for his wife, the jeong that a Blessed parent feels for a child, the embedded affection that grows between Blessed brothers and sisters in faith — these are all injeong, and they are all meant to be carried within cheonjeong. The daily discipline is to refuse to let any injeong be cut off from its Heavenly root.

The affection that one feels for a family member is meant to flow simultaneously to Heaven; the affection that one feels toward Heaven is meant to flow simultaneously to one's family.

Where one of the two is missing, the jeong has been severed from its origin and becomes merely human; where both flow together, the jeong is cheonjeong.

Second, the criterion of relationship. Cheonjeong provides a usable criterion for evaluating any relationship a Blessed person enters. The question is not whether the relationship is enjoyable, nor whether it is harmonious, nor whether it produces results.

The question is whether cheonjeong and injeong flow together in it — whether the warmth of the relationship is the warmth of Heaven flowing through the persons involved.

A relationship in which injeong is strong but cheonjeong is absent is a relationship that produces attachment without ultimate meaning.

A relationship in which cheonjeong is invoked but injeong is cold is a relationship of formal religion without substantial life. Only the relationship in which both flow as one is the relationship that belongs to the citizens of Cheon Il Guk.

Third, the practice of weeping. True Father's earliest sermons on this subject repeatedly invoke weeping — the weeping of one entangled in one shimjeong with Heaven, the weeping of one who feels what Heaven feels and weeps because Heaven weeps. This is not sentimentalism.

It is the practical sign that cheonjeong has begun to flow through injeong. A person who can weep for what makes Heaven weep — for the lost children, for the broken families, for the suffering nations — has begun to share cheonjeong.

The practical disciplines of the early movement (the predawn prayer, the all-night vigils, the sustained Hoon Dok Hae, the tearful witnessing) are all in part disciplines for making injeong able to carry cheonjeong. The doctrine is not learned by reading; it is learned by weeping.

The Place of Cheonjeong in Restoration

In the broader Unification narrative of restoration, Cheonjeong occupies a specific structural place.

The Fall was a sexual violation that severed God's lineage from humanity; the restoration is the substantial inauguration of God's lineage through True Parents, the Holy Wine Ceremony, and the Marriage Blessing.

But lineage alone is not sufficient. A person who has received the Marriage Blessing has been substantially engrafted into God's lineage, but the engrafting must be lived, and jeong is the medium in which the engrafting becomes substantial in daily life.

This is why the doctrine of Cheonjeong is so insistent. Without it, lineage becomes a juridical category — a status received in a ritual and recorded in a registry. With it, lineage becomes the substantial flow of Heavenly affection through every relationship of the Blessed Family. The grandparent who pours jeong into the grandchild is not merely showing affection; she is conducting cheonjeong through the three-generation family.

The Blessed husband who weeps for his wife's sorrows is not merely showing sympathy; he is letting cheonjeong flow through the conjugal bond. The neighbor who feels embedded warmth toward the stranger is not merely being friendly; she is extending the territory of cheonjeong outward into the unsaved world.

A late-period statement from April 21, 1997 — nearly four decades after the foundational 1959 sermon — restates this continuity in slightly different vocabulary, showing how stable the underlying doctrine remains across the entire arc of True Father's life:

The absolutely necessary thing for a person is the way of the filial son, the way of the loyal subject, the way of the saint, the way of the divine son. One cannot assert one's own self. One must first praise one's mother and father, then praise the king, then praise God. One must not assert oneself. That is why all the people of a nation that has a family long to draw near to the king or president, and the whole family longs to go. And then they long to go before God — to take hold of God's eternal love, His absolute love. Once one has God's love, eternal life becomes possible. Because God is vertical, the family is absolutely necessary, the nation is absolutely necessary, the world is absolutely necessary, and then the Heavenly Kingdom is necessary. To love the parents is to become the incarnate body of the parents' love; to love the nation is to become the incarnate body of the king's authority; to be made one with the Heavenly Kingdom is to become the incarnate body of the Heavenly Kingdom — the substitute existence. Therefore all of God's relational realm is connected from me to Heaven, to the world, to the family. That is the path the human being must complete and walk while alive.

— Sun Myung Moon (285-092, 04/21/1997) Speeches of Reverend Sun Myung Moon

The 1997 passage does not use the technical term cheonjeong, but it describes its operation precisely. The person who has become one with the Heavenly Parent has become the incarnate body of Heavenly love — meaning that the affections of the person are no longer their own private affections but the substantial flow of Heaven's affection through them. This is cheonjeong in its fulfilled state.

The structure laid down in the 1958–1959 sermons — the convertible unity of heart, ideal, life, love, and affection between humanity and Heaven — remains the operative framework four decades later.

Key Takeaway

Cheonjeong (천정 · 天情) is the Unification theological term for Heavenly affection — the embedded heart-tie of jeong that should flow between Heaven and humanity, contrasted with injeong (人情), human affection.
The term first appears in clear doctrinal use in the published Speeches on January 11, 1959 (005-158), eighteen months earlier than the often-cited June 26, 1960, reference; the doctrinal background is laid in a sermon from December 21, 1958 (005-080).
The doctrine names the structural pairing of cheonjeong and injeong as one of four convertible unities — heart, ideal, life, love — that must each become one between the human being and Heaven.
The work of restoration is described as the scything of shimjeong (020-192, 1968.06.09) that unites the divided self and reunites the separated cheonjeong and injeong.
Cheonjeong stands in a specific structural relationship to Shimjeong: shimjeong is the source (God's heart-impulse); Cheonjeong is the outward flow toward humanity (the affection that radiates from shimjeong).
For Blessed Families, the daily discipline is to ensure that every injeong — every embedded human affection — carries cheonjeong within it; where the two flow as one, the original-nature bond is restored.

How is Cheonjeong different from Shimjeong?

Shimjeong (심정 · 心情) is God's interior heart-impulse — the source. Cheonjeong (천정 · 天情) is the outward flow of that heart-impulse toward humanity — the embedded affection that radiates from shimjeong and seeks to be received and reciprocated. Without shimjeong, there is no cheonjeong; cheonjeong is shimjeong made relational, expressed as the heart-tie between Heaven and a human person.

How is Cheonjeong different from God's love (사랑, sarang)?

Sarang names the act and motion of love; Cheonjeong names the lingering, embedded heart-tie that persists in and behind love. A person can perform an act of love without jeong; a person can feel jeong even without an explicit act of love. Cheonjeong is what makes God's love feel like the love of a parent rather than the benevolence of a stranger.

Is Cheonjeong something a person can produce, or is it a gift from Heaven?

The structural answer is both. Cheonjeong flows from Heaven — a person cannot generate it. But a person can enter into its flow by aligning their own injeong with it, that is, by refusing to let any human affection be severed from its Heavenly root.

The disciplines of Hoon Dok Hae, jeongseong, and tearful witnessing are practical means of opening injeong to cheonjeong.

Why is the term so difficult to translate into English?

Because the character 情 (jeong) is itself difficult to translate. English “affection” captures part of the meaning, but jeong is also the embedded, lingering heart-bond between persons who have shared something together, closer to what English-speakers feel toward an old friend or a familiar place.

To translate 천정 as “Heavenly affection” is correct but insufficient; “Heavenly heart-bond” or “Heavenly jeong” comes closer.

Key Texts

Speeches of Reverend Sun Myung Moon — Volume 5 (1958–1959) contains the foundational sermons in which Cheonjeong is first developed (005-080 of December 21, 1958; 005-158 of January 11, 1959); Volume 20 contains the canonical 1968 statement (020-192); Volume 14 contains the October 3, 1964 sermons on the original-nature bond.
Cham Bumo Gyeong — The canonical record of True Parents' lifework, with sustained treatment of the shimjeong-cheonjeong framework in the chapters on the True Family and the lineage of God.
Cheon Seong Gyeong — The foundational scripture of Cheon Il Guk, in which the heart-language of shimjeong and cheonjeong receives its most systematic compilation.
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong — The collected Peace Messages, in which the doctrinal vocabulary of the early sermons is brought into the framework of the substantial inauguration of Cheon Il Guk.