Predestination

예정론 · 豫定論 · Yejeongron, God's Predestination, Divine Foreordination

What Is Predestination?

Predestination is the Unification doctrine that God's will for the creation is absolute and unchanging, while the fulfillment of that will is conditional on the human portion of responsibility.

Stated as a single claim: God predestines only the good, never the evil, and He predestines the outcome of His providence only in relation to whether human beings freely cooperate with it.

This two-sided formulation sets Unification theology apart from both Calvinist double predestination and Arminian conditional foreknowledge, and it forms the backbone of the Exposition of the Divine Principle, Part I, Chapter 6.

The teaching has two practical consequences.

First, every human being is predestined for salvation — there are no persons created for damnation.

Second, whether any given providential figure, nation, or age actually realizes God's plan depends on the response of those called. This is why, in Unification teaching, a messianic mission can be delayed, substitutes can be raised, and the course of providential history must frequently be reset through new foundations.

God chose me according to His own timetable. From the age of sixteen I began to experience, from a most humble position, the reality of a living God, and for nine years I lived continually with the almighty God and with Jesus.

— Sun Myung Moon (087-285, 1976) Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 2

This passage illustrates the Unification understanding that God foreordains central figures according to His own providential schedule, while their actual calling is confirmed through lived experience, study, and accepted responsibility. God's choice is prior; the human response remains free.

The doctrinal locus is the Exposition of the Divine Principle, Part I, Chapter 6, which divides predestination into three objects: God's Will, the fulfillment of that Will, and human beings themselves.

Etymological Analysis

The Korean term is 예정론 (yejeongron). The Hanja components are 豫 (ye, “beforehand, in advance”) + 定 (jeong, “to determine, to fix”) + 論 (ron, “theory, doctrine”). A literal reading is “the doctrine of determining beforehand.”

The word 예정 (yejeong) itself is a common modern Korean term for “schedule,” “appointment,” or “prior arrangement” — the term a Korean speaker uses when making a dentist appointment or planning a trip.

Unification theology preserves this ordinary sense of “prior plan” but lifts it into a metaphysical register. Where 예정 in daily speech assumes a planner with full control of outcomes, 예정론 in the Divine Principle carefully separates the planner's intent (absolute) from the plan's realization (contingent).

The gap between common and theological usage is precisely where the doctrine gets its work done: it rejects the popular intuition that a divine “schedule” must automatically come to pass.

The Predestination of God's Will

God's Will — the purpose of creation, a world of true love governed by the Three Great Blessings — is absolute, eternal, and unchanging. Because this Will arises from God's essential nature as parent and the archetype of true love, it cannot be revoked, adjusted to circumstances, or compromised. Human beings did not bring the Will into being, and human failure cannot dissolve it.

The Exposition of the Divine Principle states that God's predestination regarding His Will is therefore unconditional.

This is why the fall of the first human ancestors did not cancel creation's purpose; it only forced a long providence of restoration to accomplish what was originally intended.

Likewise, Jesus's death on the cross did not change the Will — it changed the path, requiring a Second Coming to complete what the First Advent could not bring to full, substantial fruition.

The Predestination of the Fulfillment of God's Will

If the Will itself is absolute, its actualization in history is not. The Divine Principle teaches that God's predestination of fulfillment is ninety-five percent God's portion and five percent human responsibility. The asymmetry makes clear that salvation is overwhelmingly God's work, but the small, irreducible human share is also genuine, and its neglect can derail even providentially prepared outcomes.

The Old Testament supplies the scriptural spine of this teaching. Jeremiah 18:7–10 describes God “repenting” of planned blessing when a nation turns evil, and withdrawing planned judgment when a nation repents. Genesis 6:6 speaks of God grieving over having made humankind.

In Unification exegesis, these passages are not anthropomorphic softenings but direct evidence that the fulfillment of God's plans responds to human fidelity. God's foreknowledge is perfect; His patience allows real contingency inside history.

Five percent of responsibility remains for you. You must walk this path. In order to complete this path, you must unite with the three hundred and sixty homes of home church and become one.

— Sun Myung Moon (135-325, 1985-12-15) Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 6

The quote makes concrete what the doctrine says in the abstract. A providential gift — the foundation laid by True Parents — is real and historically accomplished, but its personal and communal appropriation is not automatic.

Each Blessed Family must complete the five percent portion for the ninety-five percent to flow through.

The Predestination of Human Beings

Unification theology denies that God predestines any individual for damnation. All human beings are created for goodness and are predestined, as to God's desire, for salvation.

1 Timothy 2:4 — “who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” — is read straightforwardly as universal in scope.

Whether a given person in fact attains that predestined end is another matter. Individuals retain a real five percent share and can resist the Will.

Moreover, within the providence, God calls specific persons to specific missions — prophets, founders, central figures. The Divine Principle carefully distinguishes vocational predestination (God's call to a particular role) from soteriological predestination (the universal call to salvation).

When you become one with God, He makes creative preparations for you in advance. When you come to such a position, the spirit world teaches you. Some have said they attended me before they ever met me, and even before I was born. That is possible because of God's predestination. When a central figure is sent into the world, God must work internally and externally according to the same standard.

— Sun Myung Moon (028-094, 1970-01-04) Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 1

The passage shows vocational predestination in action: God prepares a lineage, a nation, and a body of supporters long before a central figure is born. Even then, the figure must accept, study, and respond — predestination does not bypass the portion of responsibility.

Predestination and the Portion of Responsibility

The relationship between predestination and the Portion of Responsibility is the operational heart of the doctrine. The ninety-five to five ratio is not a calculation of effort but a statement of proportion: almost all the work of salvation is God's; the small remainder belongs to the creature and is indispensable because it is the means by which the creature shares in the love of the Creator and becomes the co-author of the good result.

If predestination were absolute, there would be no room for freedom or love; if it were entirely contingent, God's Will would be at the mercy of creaturely failure.

The Divine Principle's conditional predestination holds both claims together: God's intent cannot fail, but any particular instance of its fulfillment can be delayed, substituted, or recovered through indemnity.

Providential Context

Across the three providential ages, the pattern of predestination expresses itself differently.

In the Old Testament Age, God predestined nations and chosen families — Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Israel — to prepare the foundation for the Messiah, substituting when one branch failed.

In the New Testament Age, God predestined Jesus as the Messiah, but Israel's failure to unite with him required the extension of the providence into a second coming.

In the Completed Testament Age, God's predestination takes the form of the True Parents' foundation, offered universally through the Blessing, with each family's fruition conditional on its own portion.

Practical Dimension for Blessed Families

For a Blessed Family, predestination is not a speculative comfort but a daily discipline. The teaching implies that one's calling is real, God-given, and prepared — and that its realization depends on visible fidelity. Jeongseong, regular Hoon Dok Hae, steady attendance to one's spouse and children, and concrete Tribal Messiah work are the means by which the predestined five percent is actually completed.

The doctrine also tempers both despair and complacency. A family that has suffered setbacks is not outside God's plan; restoration remains possible because the Will is unchanging. A family that has received the Blessing cannot assume its fruit without responsibility; the gift must be cultivated.

Academic Note

New Religious Movement scholarship has noticed that Unification predestination occupies an unusual position in the Christian theological landscape.

Frederick Sontag, in Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church (1977), observed that the doctrine's rejection of double predestination aligns it with Eastern Orthodox synergism and with Wesleyan Arminianism, while its strong providential voluntarism distinguishes it from both.

Young Oon Kim's systematic expositions emphasized that the Divine Principle self-consciously positions itself against Augustinian and Calvinist determinism. George Chryssides, in The Advent of Sun Myung Moon (1991), treated the Principle's handling of Jeremiah 18 as a genuinely serious engagement with biblical theodicy.

Eileen Barker's sociological work has shown how the lived doctrine functions pastorally — neither fatalism nor moralism — within Unificationist communities.

Massimo Introvigne has documented the movement's distinctive insistence on universal salvific predestination as a mark of its late-twentieth-century theological profile.

Comparative Religion

Christianity — John Calvin in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (III.21) argued for double predestination: God eternally elects some for salvation and reprobates others for damnation. Jacob Arminius, in the Declaration of Sentiments, rejected reprobation and made election contingent on foreseen faith.

Unification theology agrees with Arminius that reprobation is foreign to God's character, but goes further by locating contingency not in foreseen human choice alone but in a formally defined portion of responsibility built into creation itself.

Karl Barth, in Church Dogmatics II/2, re-centered predestination on Christ; the Divine Principle re-centers it on the True Parents and the restored family.

Judaism — Rabbinic tradition affirms both divine foreknowledge and human freedom, as in Rabbi Akiva's dictum in Pirkei Avot 3:15: “All is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given.”

The Unification teaching shares this refusal to sacrifice either pole, but systematizes the relationship through the quantitative language of portion of responsibility, which has no exact Jewish analogue.

Islam — Classical Sunni theology, especially in the Ash'arite tradition represented by al-Ghazali in the Ihya Ulum al-Din, holds to qadar (divine decree) in which every event is willed by God, while the human being “acquires” (kasb) the moral weight of chosen acts.

Unification predestination shares the conviction that no event escapes God's providence, but rejects the Ash'arite account of evil as willed by God: God predestines only the good.

Buddhism — Buddhism has no direct analogue to theistic predestination, but the doctrine of karma and the framework of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) supply a functional counterpart. Actions condition future states without a personal predestining agent.

The Unification doctrine parts ways here decisively: predestination is the act of a personal God whose Will is love, not the impersonal maturing of causal chains.

What makes Unification predestination distinctive is the parental structure of its conditionality. God is not a sovereign dispensing fates nor an impersonal law running its course; He is a parent whose desire for His children's goodness is absolute and whose respect for their freedom is built into the design of creation.

The five percent is not a human bargaining chip — it is the space in which love becomes real.

Key Takeaway

Predestination in Unification theology distinguishes God's Will (absolute) from the fulfillment of that Will (conditional on the human portion of responsibility).
God predestines only the good; no person is created for damnation, and all human beings are predestined for salvation.
The fulfillment of any given providential mission — national, tribal, or personal — depends on the ninety-five percent of God's work meeting the five percent of human responsibility.
Scriptural support comes chiefly from Jeremiah 18:7–10, Genesis 6:6, and 1 Timothy 2:4, read as evidence of real contingency inside a fully providential history.
The doctrine explicitly rejects both Calvinist double predestination and any fatalism that would make human freedom illusory, while affirming God's sovereign direction of history through central figures and chosen peoples.

Does Unification theology teach that everyone will be saved?

Unification theology teaches that God desires and predestines the salvation of all, but actual salvation depends on each person's response through the True Parents' foundation.

How does the Divine Principle reconcile God's foreknowledge with human freedom?

God's foreknowledge is perfect regarding outcomes He wills, but the Divine Principle distinguishes the Will itself from its fulfillment, with the fulfillment conditioned on a formally defined human portion of responsibility.

Why does the Divine Principle reject Calvinist predestination?

Because reprobation — God eternally choosing some for damnation — contradicts both God's parental nature and the scriptural testimony that God desires all to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4).

Key Texts

Exposition of the Divine Principle — Part I, Chapter 6, “Predestination,” is the canonical source for this doctrine.
Cheon Seong Gyeong — Rev. Moon's teachings on God's providential planning and calling of central figures.
Cham Bumo Gyeong — Primary source for Rev. Moon's autobiographical statements on vocational predestination.
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong — Peace messages treating the providence of restoration as the working-out of God's predestined Will.
World Scripture and the Teachings of Sun Myung Moon — Comparative scriptural material on divine foreknowledge and human response.