Rebirth

Korean: 중생 (Jungseong)
Hanja: 重生 — born again; second birth
Also known as: Re-birth through True Parents; Change of Lineage; Engrafting into the True Olive Tree

What is Rebirth?

Rebirth (Korean: 중생, 重生) is, in Unification theology, the complete renewal of a fallen human being's lineage, nature, and filial relationship with God — accomplished not through individual spiritual transformation alone, but through a concrete providential act: reception of the Blessing of True Parents. It is the answer to the most fundamental human predicament. Because Original Sin entered the human lineage through the Fall of Adam and Eve, every person born into the fallen world carries, from the first moment of their existence, a lineage connected to Satan rather than to God. To be reborn is to be disconnected from that lineage and reconnected — grafted — into God's lineage through True Parents.

The concept builds directly on Jesus' declaration in John 3:3: “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Unification theology affirms this teaching as one of the most precise and urgent truths in scripture — but argues that Christianity has never understood what it actually requires. To be “born again” is not a metaphor for emotional conversion or a spiritual renewal within the existing lineage. It means a genuine second birth: a new origin, a new bloodline, a new parentage:

To say that you are to be reborn does not mean rebirth through the flesh and blood of parents who are descendants of the fallen Adam and Eve; rather, you are to be reborn through the flesh and blood of the parents who have nothing to do with the Fall. Otherwise, you cannot return to God.

— Sun Myung Moon (22-269, 05/04/1969) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 3

This is the theological core of the entire Unification movement: the claim that True Parents have come as the original, unfallen Adam and Eve — and that through them, the rebirth that all religions have sought is now concretely available to all of humanity.

Section I — Etymology: The Meaning of 重生

The Hanja compound 重生 is composed of 重 (jung) and 生 (saeng). The character 重 carries a double meaning in classical Chinese and Korean: it means both “again, a second time” and “heavy, weighty, of great value.” The character 生 means “life, birth, to be born.” Together, 重生 therefore carries the resonance of “a birth of great weight” — not a trivial repetition but a second birth that carries the full gravity of the first, and more.

The compound 重生 appears in the Chinese classical tradition as a concept related to renewal and restoration — the return of something to its proper, original state after having been corrupted or lost. In the Christian context in East Asia, it became the standard translation for the Greek paliggenesia (παλιγγενεσία) — regeneration, new birth — and for the concept of “born again” in John 3. Unification theology inherits this vocabulary and deepens it: where Christian tradition treated 重生 primarily as a spiritual and personal experience, Unification teaching identifies it as the transformation of lineage itself — the most fundamental level of human existence.

A related term is 재탄생 (jaetansaeng, 再誕生) — literally “second nativity” or “re-birth” — which emphasizes the moment of the new birth rather than its ongoing condition. In Rev. Moon's sermons, both terms appear, often interchangeably. The deeper and more specifically Unification concept is captured in the phrase 혈통전환 (hyeoltong jeonhwan, 血統轉換) — transformation of lineage — which specifies the mechanism by which rebirth occurs.

Section II — Why Rebirth Is Necessary: The Problem of Lineage

The necessity of rebirth flows directly from the nature of Original Sin. The Fall was not merely a moral failure or an act of disobedience. It was a change of lineage: Adam and Eve, through their illicit relationship with the archangel and with each other outside of God's blessing, connected themselves and all their descendants to Satan's love, life, and bloodline rather than God's.

As Rev. Moon taught, this means that every person born into the fallen world — regardless of their personal virtue, their religious commitment, or the depth of their faith — is born with a root connection to Satan:

Since human beings received the satanic blood, people cannot return to God by themselves. So the Messiah must achieve absolute restoration of the lineage, renewing the blood line that was defiled by Satan. This transition must be made. This is why the Messiah must surely come. Without his coming there will be no restoration of lineage.

— Sun Myung Moon (172-53, 01/07/1988) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 8

This is the insurmountable limit of all pre-Messianic religion. Prayer, asceticism, moral discipline, meditation, ritual purity — all of these can purify the individual at the level of personal behavior and even of spiritual awareness. None of them can change the lineage. A person cannot choose their own parentage. They cannot opt out of the family into which they were born. The change of lineage requires an act from outside the individual — specifically, the act of True Parents who stand in the position of the original, unfallen first ancestors.

Section III — Three Stages of Rebirth in Providential History

The Exposition of the Divine Principle teaches that the Providence of Restoration has moved through three distinct stages, each corresponding to a different depth of rebirth available to humanity. These stages are not arbitrary divisions but reflect the progressive expansion of God's sovereignty over the fallen world.

Formation Stage — Rebirth Through Offering (Old Testament Age)

In the age before Jesus, people could not yet receive a direct rebirth through a parent figure. The closest available condition was the offering of things of creation — sacrificial animals, tithes, firstfruits — through which fallen people set symbolic indemnity conditions that positioned them to receive God's work. This is the age of the servant of servants being elevated to the position of servant. Rebirth in any full sense was not yet possible; the foundation for the Messiah was still being prepared.

Growth Stage — Spiritual Rebirth Through Jesus and the Holy Spirit (New Testament Age)

Jesus came as the second Adam — the first man to stand in the position of the unfallen Son of God on earth. Through faith in Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit, people could receive spiritual rebirth: their spirit could be renewed and reconnected to God at the level of the growth stage. This is the rebirth Paul describes in Romans and that Jesus announced to Nicodemus. It is a genuine, life-changing transformation — but it is incomplete. Because Jesus was crucified before establishing a family, physical rebirth — the change of lineage at the level of the body and bloodline — was not accomplished in the New Testament Age. Spiritual rebirth raised believers to the position of adopted children of God, but not yet to the position of direct lineage children.

Completion Stage — Full Rebirth Through True Parents (Completed Testament Age)

With the coming of True Parents — the second Adam and second Eve who stand at the completion stage — the full rebirth of both spirit and body becomes available. Through the Blessing Ceremony, a person's lineage is changed at the root: their spiritual lineage and their physical lineage are both reconnected to God's love, life, and bloodline through True Parents:

Who changes the lineage? It is not something which just anyone can do. You must understand that in order to accomplish this, I have passed through the tearful way of the cross. Because such a standard has been established, all of you without any personal merit are now able to inherit the new tradition through the Blessing. In order to establish the victorious realm of this change of lineage God had to toil for thousands of years and I had to suffer for my entire earthly life. You are the people standing on this foundation. The Blessing is engrafting; your lineage is changed through engrafting.

— Sun Myung Moon (35-178, 10/13/1970) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 8

This passage is decisive. The Blessing is not a spiritual ceremony that symbolizes a change already accomplished through faith. It is the engrafting itself — the moment at which the branch is cut from the fallen tree and attached to the new tree of True Parents. The change is real, providential, and irreversible when the Blessed couple lives up to the standard they have received.

Section IV — The Metaphor of Engrafting

The image that Rev. Moon returned to most consistently to explain rebirth is the horticultural metaphor of engrafting (접목, jeongmok). A diseased or inferior branch is cut from its original rootstock and joined to a healthy, superior tree. The graft takes time to take hold — it requires care, protection, and the right conditions — but once it succeeds, the branch participates fully in the life of the new tree. Its fruit, from that point on, comes not from the old root but from the new one.

Applied to the human situation, fallen humanity is like branches grown from a root connected to Satan. No matter how fine the individual branch may be — no matter how intelligent, virtuous, or spiritually developed the person — the root remains the same. True Parents are the new root, the first tree that has grown from God's original creative intention without any connection to the Fall. To receive the Blessing is to be cut from the old root and grafted onto this new tree:

The term "true parents" means a man and woman who are, spiritually, completely mature. It refers to a man and a woman who have established a vertical relationship with God and a horizontal relationship with each other, at ninety degrees. So in order to engraft young men and women, I gather them together, and engraft to them a bud from Mother and a bud from Father. This is the Blessing.

— Sun Myung Moon (131-174, 05/01/1984) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 3

The metaphor illuminates several important features of the Unification understanding of rebirth. First, engrafting is not a private, interior event — it is performed by a skilled agent (the grafter) who possesses the new rootstock.

Second, it requires the voluntary submission of the branch: the branch does not graft itself. Third, the result is a shared nature — the grafted branch participates in the life of the new tree while retaining its individual character. The Blessed person does not lose their identity; they receive a new root.

Section V — Rebirth, the Holy Wine Ceremony, and the Blessing

The process of rebirth as practiced in the Unification movement unfolds through three successive ritual acts that together constitute the complete engrafting.

The Holy Wine Ceremony is the first and most spiritually decisive step. In receiving the Holy Wine — prepared under True Parents' authority and containing a symbolic connection to their lineage — the participant crosses the threshold from Satan's bloodline toward God's. This is the moment of disconnection from the old root. Rev. Moon described it as establishing the condition, at the spiritual level, through which the participant can stand in a position no longer subject to Satan's full claim over them.

The Matching follows: True Parents discern and designate the eternal counterpart of each candidate — the partner with whom the new lineage will be established. The selection is not based on personal preference or social calculation but on the parental heart of True Parents perceiving what God intended for each individual.

The Blessing Ceremony itself is the moment of engrafting — the formal, covenantal act in which a man and woman, standing in the position of new Adam and new Eve, receive the authority to establish God's lineage in their family. From this moment, the couple is called to maintain absolute sexual purity within their marriage — because the lineage that flows through their union is now God's lineage, and it must be protected with the same absolute standard with which God's love itself is maintained.

The completeness of the rebirth unfolds generationally. The Blessed couple themselves were born from fallen parents and carry the traces of the old root. Their children, conceived within the Blessing, are born directly into God's lineage — the first generation in human history to be born without original sin when the parents have maintained the Blessing standard fully. This generational dimension is why Blessed Families are considered the vanguard of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

Section VI — Rebirth and Jesus: What Christianity Could Not Complete

A central element of Rev. Moon's teaching on rebirth is his analysis of why the rebirth Jesus offered was necessarily incomplete, and why this was not a failure of Jesus himself but a consequence of the rejection he faced.

Jesus came as the second Adam — the first man in history to stand in the position of the direct Son of God, without connection to the fallen lineage through the spiritual preparation carried out through Mary and the ancestral line going back to Tamar, Ruth, and Bathsheba. He possessed, for the first time in history, the authority to engraft humanity into God's lineage directly. But this engrafting required not only a Son but also a Bride — a restored Eve standing alongside the restored Adam to constitute the True Parents that humanity needed.

Because Jesus was rejected by the Jewish people and crucified before he could establish this family, the physical dimension of rebirth was lost. Humanity received, through the Holy Spirit and faith in Jesus, a spiritual rebirth that elevated them to the position of adopted children of God — a transformation of genuine and profound value, but not the full rebirth that was originally intended. As Paul writes in Romans 8:23, the spirit is a “first fruit,” a foretaste of a fuller adoption still to come.

The Unification teaching interprets this passage as a precise description of the situation: through Jesus, humanity received the first fruit of rebirth — spiritual regeneration. The full harvest — complete rebirth of spirit and body through True Parents — awaited the Second Advent. This is not a diminishment of Jesus but an explanation of why his work pointed forward, toward completion, rather than being a final resolution.

Section VII — Rebirth in Practice: The Life of a Blessed Person

For a person who has received the Blessing, rebirth is not a past event to be commemorated but an ongoing reality to be lived into. The change of lineage accomplished at the moment of the Blessing must be substantiated through the couple's daily life, their relationship with God and True Parents, and — most concretely — through the raising of their children.

Rev. Moon identified three births within the life of a Blessed couple. The first birth is the physical birth of the individual — their entry into the fallen world from fallen parents. The second birth is the rebirth through the Blessing — their engrafting into God's lineage through True Parents. The third birth is the birth of their own children within the Blessing — the first generation of children who do not inherit the original sin because they are born from parents who have been grafted into God's lineage and have maintained that standard:

In being reborn, you should not fall behind Adam and Eve. If you did, the fundamental restoration would not be realized. The process of rebirth must start with individuals, then families, peoples, nations, and ultimately the entire world. Today's Christians do not know this fact.

— Sun Myung Moon (58-42, 06/06/1972) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 3

The practical demands of this vision are considerable. Blessed couples bear responsibility not only for their own salvation but for the establishment of a new tradition — a family culture, a standard of love and purity, a living testimony to the reality of the lineage change. Hoon Dok Hae, daily prayer, and the maintenance of the Family Pledge are the primary tools through which this tradition is built and transmitted to the next generation.

Section VIII — Comparative Perspectives

Christianity uses the language of rebirth extensively — “born again,” “new creation,” “regeneration” — but the mainstream traditions have never specified the mechanism of that rebirth beyond faith and baptism. In Catholic theology, baptism is the sacrament of rebirth (John 3:5 — “born of water and the Spirit”), conferring a new spiritual identity and removing the guilt of original sin. In evangelical Protestantism, the born-again experience is a personal conversion event — an interior transformation of the heart through the Holy Spirit. In both cases, the rebirth is spiritual and individual. The Unification teaching accepts these as genuine partial expressions of the deeper truth, while insisting that they do not address the root problem: the lineage itself, which can only be changed through True Parents.

Judaism does not have an equivalent doctrine of individual rebirth, though the concept of teshuvah (תְּשׁוּבָה) — return, repentance — shares the structure of a turning back to one's original, proper condition before God. Conversion to Judaism (giyur) includes ritual immersion (mikveh) described in rabbinic literature as a “second birth” — the proselyte is “like a newborn child” — which resonates with the Unification understanding of rebirth as a genuine new beginning rather than merely a change of status.

Buddhism engages the concept of rebirth most extensively of all traditions, though primarily in the sense of metempsychosis, the transmigration of the consciousness through successive physical lives. The Bodhisattva vow in Mahayana Buddhism — to remain in the cycle of rebirth until all sentient beings are liberated — parallels, in its structure of loving sacrifice, the role Rev. Moon describes True Parents as having taken upon themselves. However, Buddhist rebirth is a natural cosmological process rather than a providential act requiring a specific mediator.

Korean Shamanism and Confucianism both include ritual concepts of purification and renewal that informed the cultural context in which Rev. Moon's teaching was received. The Shamanist gosa (고사) — a ritual offering to reconnect with ancestral and cosmic powers — and the Confucian practice of ancestral rites both reflect the conviction that one's connection to one's lineage and to higher powers must be actively cultivated and renewed. The Unification Blessing draws on this cultural depth while transforming it: it is not an ancestral ritual but a messianic one.

Section IX — Rebirth in New Religious Movement Scholarship

The Unification doctrine of rebirth through True Parents has attracted academic attention both for its distinctive theological content and for its practical consequences — particularly the centrality of the Blessing Ceremony as the mechanism of salvation.

Early scholarship, including Bryan Wilson's work on new religious movements in the 1970s and Eileen Barker's The Making of a Moonie (1984), noted that the Blessing-centered soteriology gave the Unification movement a distinctive structure of authority: because salvation in its fullest form was mediated specifically through Rev. Moon and Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, membership in the movement was not merely a matter of belief but of participation in a specific providential act. This concentration of salvific authority in a living founder-couple was one of the features that most sharply distinguished the movement from mainline Christianity.

Later theological scholarship, particularly the dialogues convened through the New Ecumenical Research Association in the 1980s and 1990s, engaged the Unification rebirth theology in direct conversation with Christian theologians. Participants from Reformed, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions noted both the genuine resonance of the Unification teaching with New Testament soteriology and its sharp departures — particularly the claim that full rebirth requires a living True Parent couple rather than faith in the already-ascended Christ.

More recent ethnographic work has examined how second-generation Unification members — those born within the Blessing and considered to have been born without original sin — understand and inhabit their identity. This literature, appearing in journals such as Nova Religio and Numen, raises questions about the lived experience of a “reborn” identity: what it means to grow up as the first generation theoretically free from the fallen lineage, and how this theological claim is negotiated within the realities of family life in a still-fallen world.

Key Texts on tplegacy.net

The Blessing Ceremony — the central rite through which rebirth is enacted

The Holy Wine Ceremony — the preparatory act of lineage transition

Original Sin — the condition that makes rebirth necessary

True Parents — the agents through whom rebirth is accomplished

Cheon Seong Gyeong — primary source, especially Books 3 and 8

The Exposition of the Divine Principle — a doctrinal framework for understanding rebirth in the context of restoration