부활 · 復活 · Returning to Life
Korean: 부활 (buhwal)
Hanja: 復活 — to return / to revive
Full phrase: 부활섭리 (buhwal seopni) — Providence of Resurrection
Also known as: Spiritual resurrection; Returning resurrection; The three-stage resurrection
What Is Resurrection?
Resurrection (부활, buhwal; 復活) in Unification theology does not refer to the physical revival of a decomposed body. It designates the progressive restoration of fallen human beings from the domain of Satan's dominion back into the direct dominion of God's love — a process that unfolds in three providential stages across the full arc of human history and continues into the present age.
The Exposition of the Divine Principle defines resurrection with disarming simplicity:
"Resurrection is the process by which fallen people are restored, through the Providence of Restoration, from their fallen state back to the original state."
What appears to be a single event in popular religious imagination is, in the Unification understanding, an ongoing spiritual transformation — measurable, gradual, and inseparable from the individual's active response to God's Word in each successive age.
Resurrection means the process by which fallen people are restored through the Providence of Restoration back to their original, unfallen state. Therefore, if we repent of our sins and become better people today than we were yesterday, we have been resurrected by that much.
— Exposition of the Divine Principle, Chapter 5
This definition reframes the entire question of resurrection: it is not a future eschatological event to be awaited, but a present spiritual trajectory to be pursued.
The individual who deepens their relationship with God, separates themselves from Satan's accusation, and advances through the conditions of indemnity is — by that progression—actively resurrecting.
Section I — Etymology and Korean Terminology
The term 부활 (buhwal, 復活) is a Sino-Korean compound: 復 (bu) means “to return, to restore, to revive,” and 活 (hwal) means “life, living, vitality.” The Hanja compound 復活 therefore carries the precise meaning of returning to life — not the generation of new life, but the recovery of an original living state that was lost.
This etymology is theologically significant. In Unification teaching, the Fall did not destroy the capacity for life — it displaced human beings from the domain in which true life (centered on God's love) is possible. Resurrection is therefore not a creation event but a restoration event: a return (bok, 復) to the original living relationship with God (hwal, 活) that the Fall severed.
The full providential phrase is 부활섭리 (buhwal seopni, 復活攝理) — the Providence of Resurrection — which refers to God's ongoing, structured work of guiding fallen humanity back through the three stages of the growth period toward completion. The term 재림부활 (jaelim buhwal, 再臨復活) — Returning Resurrection — is used specifically for the providence by which spirit persons already in the spirit world assist living people on earth, thereby advancing their own resurrection by completing unfinished providential work through a physical body.
Three further technical terms appear in the Exposition and in Rev. Moon's sermons: 영형체 (yeonghyeongche, 靈形體) — “spirit form body,” the spiritual constitution of the restoration-stage resurrection achieved through the Old Testament; 생명체 (saengmyeongche, 生命體) — “life body,” the higher constitution achieved through New Testament faith; and 생령체 (saengnyeongche, 生靈體) — “living spirit body,” the completed constitution of the perfection stage, achievable only through receiving the True Parents in the Completed Testament Age. These three correspond precisely to the three stages of creation — formation, growth, and completion — and mark the ascending levels of spiritual transformation that constitute the three phases of resurrection.
Section II — Theological Definition within the Divine Principle
The Exposition of the Divine Principle opens its chapter on resurrection by addressing a fundamental interpretive problem in Christian theology: the biblical promise that the bodies of the dead will rise physically (1 Thessalonians 4:16; Matthew 27:52) appears to demand a miraculous physical restoration that modern reason cannot accept.
The Exposition's answer is not to dismiss the biblical texts but to reread them through the lens of a carefully established distinction between two kinds of death — and therefore two kinds of life.
The first kind of death is biological: the cessation of physical functions. The second is spiritual: the separation of the human soul from God's love-dominion and its consequent subjugation to Satan's dominion.
Jesus' statement in Luke 9:60 — “Let the dead bury their own dead” — cannot refer to biological death on both sides of the sentence.
It uses “death” in two different senses simultaneously. The disciples burying the father are biologically living but spiritually dead — they have rejected Jesus and remain in Satan's accusation. They are “dead” in the theologically decisive sense.
From this analysis follows the Unification definition: the death caused by the Fall was not biological but spiritual — the transition from God's dominion to Satan's.
Therefore, resurrection — restoration from the Fall's death—cannot be a biological event. It is the spiritual transition in the opposite direction: back from Satan's dominion into God's.
This is confirmed in John 5:24:
"Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life."
The crossing from death to life is resurrection — and it happens at the moment of faith, not at a future last day.
The death brought by the Fall was not a physical death but a spiritual death — the state of falling under Satan's dominion by leaving God's love. Therefore, resurrection — being restored from the death of the Fall — cannot mean the physical body coming back to life, but rather the process of being restored from Satan's dominion back into God's direct dominion of love.
— Exposition of the Divine Principle, Chapter 5
A secondary but important clarification follows from this analysis. The Exposition teaches that physical death — the body's return to dust — was not introduced by the Fall. It was part of the original creation design: the physical body was always meant to be shed at the end of earthly life, like a chrysalis that a butterfly leaves behind.
Before the Fall, humans would have understood this transition as joyful — a graduation into the spirit world. It is only because the Fall severed the connection between physical and spiritual worlds that death became frightening and the spirit world became unknown.
Resurrection, by restoring the relationship with God, also restores the proper understanding of physical death as a natural transition rather than an ultimate catastrophe.
Section III — Providential Context: The Three Stages of Resurrection
The Providence of Resurrection unfolds across three historical ages, corresponding precisely to the three stages of the creation growth period — formation (소생, sosaeng), growth (장성, jangseong), and completion (완성, wanseong). Each stage is governed by the Word appropriate to that age, and the resurrection accessible to people living in each age is determined by the providential stage in which they live.
Formation-stage Resurrection (소생부활, Sosaeng Buhwal) was the providential dispensation of the Old Testament Age, from Abraham to Jesus. During this period, God provided the Law as His Word. Those who obeyed the Law with sincerity achieved a formation-stage spiritual constitution — the spirit-form body (영형체).
After physical death, these individuals entered a corresponding level of the spirit world. Their resurrection was real and progressive, but incomplete: they had returned partway toward God but had not yet attained the standard of life that would permit entry into Paradise or Heaven.
Growth-stage Resurrection (장성부활, Jangseong Buhwal) became accessible with the coming of Jesus Christ and continued through the New Testament Age into the present. During this period, God provided the Gospel as His Word. Those who believed in Jesus and received the Holy Spirit achieved a growth-stage spiritual constitution — the life body (생명체).
After physical death, such individuals enter Paradise (낙원, nagwon) — a higher level of the spirit world than formation-stage souls achieve, but still not the heavenly kingdom proper (천상천국, cheon-sang cheon-guk), which requires completion-stage resurrection.
The Exposition makes a statement that has been deeply significant in Unification theological reflection: as of Jesus' death on the cross, the heavenly kingdom remained completely empty. No spirit person had yet achieved a completion-stage (생령체, living spirit body) constitution, because that could only be achieved by living through the direct ministry of True Parents in physical flesh — an opportunity the cross foreclosed for two thousand years.
Completion-stage Resurrection (완성부활, Wanseong Buhwal) becomes accessible in the Completed Testament Age through the ministry of the returning Lord. The Exposition teaches that the Lord of the Second Advent brings the new Word — which it designates 성약 (seong-yak), the Completed Testament — that fulfills and supersedes both prior covenants. Those who receive, believe, and attend the returning Lord in his physical presence on earth, and who participate in his global restoration work, achieve completion-stage resurrection: the living spirit body (생령체).
These individuals, while still living on earth, constitute the citizens of the earthly kingdom of heaven (지상천국, jisang cheon-guk). When they shed their physical bodies at the end of earthly life, they enter the heavenly kingdom of heaven (천상천국) — the highest domain of the spirit world — as the first generation of its actual population.
Until today, not one spirit person has entered the heavenly kingdom, because no one on earth has yet achieved a living spirit body through receiving the returning Lord. This is why the heavenly kingdom is still empty. It waits for the age of completion-stage resurrection to fill it with those who have been fully restored through the True Parents.
— Exposition of the Divine Principle, Chapter 5
Section IV — Returning Resurrection: The Spirit World's Role in Earthly Providence
One of the most distinctive and theologically consequential aspects of the Unification doctrine of resurrection is its account of 재림부활 (Returning Resurrection). Because the spirit person's spiritual body can only grow through interaction with a physical body — and because the spirit world offers no further growth opportunities after physical death — those who died without completing their providential mission are unable to advance spiritually without returning to assist people on earth.
The mechanism is as follows: a spirit person in the spirit world identifies a person on earth whose providential mission corresponds to the unfinished work of that spirit person. The spirit person then “returns” — not by reincarnating in a new body, but by entering into a collaborative spiritual relationship with the living person.
When the living person completes their mission through the spirit person's assistance, the spirit person advances in resurrection by the same degree. The living person's physical body becomes, provisionally, the vehicle through which both the spirit person and the earthly person advance.
This framework explains, among other things, the appearance of Elijah and Moses at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:3) alongside Jesus, and the statement in Matthew 27:52 that “the tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised.” The Exposition argues that this second passage cannot refer to physical bodily resurrection, for if deceased saints had literally reappeared in Jerusalem, the evidence would have been overwhelming and undeniable. Rather, spirit persons from the Old Testament Age spiritually returned to collaborate with people in the New Testament Age, advancing their own resurrection in the process.
Spirit persons must return to the earth and assist earthly people in fulfilling God's will. By doing so, they fulfill through the earthly person's body what they could not accomplish during their own lives on earth. In this way, both the spirit person and the earthly person advance in resurrection together.
— Exposition of the Divine Principle, Chapter 5
The Returning Resurrection doctrine also provides the Unification explanation of the phenomenon of spiritual gifts (charisma) in the Christian tradition: healings, prophecies, visions, and glossolalia are understood as the result of returning spirit persons working through earthly believers. This demystifies spiritual phenomena without dismissing them — they are real, but their mechanism is providential rather than miraculous in the sense of violating natural law.
Section V — Shimjeong Resurrection and Substantial Resurrection
Beyond the three-stage typology of the Exposition of the Divine Principle, the Cham Bumo Gyeong preserves Rev. Moon's proclamation of two additional categories of resurrection that emerged directly from the providential work of True Parents: 심정부활 (shimjeong buhwal) — Resurrection of the Heart — and 실체부활 (silche buhwal) — Substantial Resurrection.
On April 17, 1960 — seven days after his Holy Wedding with Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon — Rev. Moon proclaimed the Day of Shimjeong Resurrection. This proclamation declared that for the first time in six thousand years of human history, God and humanity had formally re-established a bond of shimjeong (심정, the heart-impulse of love) — a bond that the Fall had completely severed. The logic follows directly from the Exposition: since the Fall was fundamentally a violation of the love-heart relationship between God, Adam, and Eve, the restoration of that heart relationship — not merely the intellectual acceptance of truth, but the experiential re-establishment of the shimjeong bond — is the deepest level of resurrection. Without shimjeong resurrection, substantial resurrection has no foundation.
The reason Jesus could not enter heaven is that he could not solve the problem of heart. The first thing, the ten-thousandth thing — it is always heart. The door of heart must be opened before the door of heaven can open.
— Sun Myung Moon (097-303, 03/26/1978) Cham Bumo Gyeong
On April 17, 1961, Rev. Moon proclaimed the Day of Substantial Resurrection.
Where shimjeong resurrection is the restoration of the inner bond of heart with God, substantial resurrection is its outer expression: the actual re-creation of the human being in body as well as in spirit, such that the physical person becomes a genuine embodiment of God's love rather than merely a spiritual participant in it.
Substantial resurrection requires that shimjeong resurrection be established first — the reverse path from the Fall, in which the spiritual violation preceded and caused the physical violation.
For the Day of Substantial Resurrection to come, there must be substantial parents, and substantial children must be established. You must advance to a place of glory through substantial resurrection. To do so, you must fight a bloody battle. In this way, the sovereignty of glory must be established.
— Sun Myung Moon (011-337, 04/17/1962) Cham Bumo Gyeong
Together, these two proclamations — shimjeong resurrection and substantial resurrection — frame the structure of True Parents' providential role: they do not merely teach about resurrection but inaugurate it through their own marital union, establishing for the first time a foundation from which both the inner (heart) and outer (body) dimensions of resurrection can be transmitted to humanity.
Section VI — Comparative Perspective
The Unification doctrine of resurrection engages and diverges from the major world religious traditions in ways that illuminate the concept's distinctive character.
Christianity has historically maintained two distinct resurrection doctrines in tension: the spiritual resurrection associated with Paul's teaching in Romans 6 and Colossians 3 — in which the believer is already risen with Christ through baptism and faith — and the bodily resurrection of the dead at the Last Day, promised in 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4, and Revelation 20. Much of Christian theological history has been devoted to managing this tension.
The Unification teaching resolves it by collapsing the physical resurrection into a metaphorical reinterpretation (the body of believers rising as a community, not the individual corpse reviving) while fully developing the progressive-spiritual resurrection trajectory as the primary meaning of the term.
This position aligns more closely with realized eschatology theologies (C.H. Dodd, Rudolf Bultmann's existential demythologization) than with traditional Protestant or Catholic bodily resurrection doctrines — though the Unification framework notably rejects Bultmann's reduction of resurrection to mere subjective transformation, insisting on its objective providential structure.
Judaism holds physical resurrection (תחיית המתים, tekhiyat ha-meitim) as a central dogma, particularly in Pharisaic tradition and codified by Maimonides as one of the Thirteen Principles of Faith. The Unification critique of a literal physical resurrection is therefore a more radical departure from Jewish than from many liberal Christian interpretive traditions.
However, the Unification emphasis on the gradual and this-worldly dimension of restoration — on God's providence as a historical process requiring human participation at each stage — resonates more deeply with the Jewish sense of covenant as a multi-generational relationship unfolding through history than with Christian emphases on instantaneous individual salvation.
Buddhism has no direct doctrine of resurrection, but the related concept of pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination) and the Bodhisattva doctrine in Mahayana Buddhism bear comparison with the Returning Resurrection teaching.
The Bodhisattva vows to remain available to assist sentient beings in their liberation rather than entering nirvana — a structural parallel to the Unification spirit person who returns to assist earthly people. Both models insist on the interdependence of spiritual advancement across the boundary between living and the deceased.
The Unification doctrine differs in insisting on a teleological historical direction: the goal is not the cessation of suffering through enlightenment but the positive establishment of God-centered families and a God-centered world.
Islam holds a bodily resurrection (al-qiyama, القيامة) on the Last Day as one of its six articles of faith. The Quran is explicit on the physical nature of the resurrection and the subsequent judgment.
The Unification teaching's rejection of physical bodily resurrection as the primary meaning of the term represents as thorough a departure from Islamic doctrine as from mainstream Christian orthodoxy.
What the two traditions share is the insistence on accountability — the understanding that what was done in this life has permanent consequences for one's afterlife condition, a position the Unification teaching fully affirms while relocating the primary locus of restoration from the afterlife to the earthly providential course.
Section VII — The First Resurrection and the 144,000
The Exposition of the Divine Principle devotes specific attention to the “first resurrection” mentioned in Revelation 20:5-6 and to the 144,000 described in Revelation 7 and 14. Both of these figures are interpreted providentially.
The first resurrection is the completion-stage resurrection achieved by those who are the first in history to attain the living spirit body — by attending the returning Lord directly during his earthly ministry, participating in the global restoration conditions he establishes, and thereby becoming the first human beings to enter the heavenly kingdom of heaven as its actual residents. This is “first” in the sense of being temporally before any subsequent generation — not in the sense of being the only resurrection.
The 144,000 is interpreted as the number of representatives needed to establish a global horizontal indemnity condition corresponding to all the unfinished providential work of the Old and New Testament ages.
The Exposition traces the numerical logic: Jacob had 12 sons (family-level restoration); Moses led 12 tribes (national-level restoration); Jesus established 12 apostles (world-level, but only spiritually). The returning Lord must establish 144 (12 × 12), representing all levels of the providential hierarchy, multiplied by a further factor of 1,000 representing the cosmic and spiritual-world dimension, yielding the 144,000 whom the returning Lord must gather as the core of the first resurrection community.
The first resurrection refers to the resurrection in which people — for the first time in providential history — cast off original sin and are restored to their original, created nature, fulfilling the purpose of creation. The sole hope of all Christians is to participate in this first resurrection.
— Exposition of the Divine Principle, Chapter 5
Section VIII — Practical Dimension in the Life of a Blessed Family
For a blessed family living in the Completed Testament Age, the doctrine of resurrection is not an abstract theological position but the framework within which daily spiritual life takes on its deepest meaning.
Every act of Hoon Dok Hae — reading the Word of True Parents and reflecting on its meaning — is an act of resurrection: the individual is advancing, through contact with the completed truth, from a lower to a higher spiritual condition.
Every act of jeongseong (정성, sincere devotion) — early morning prayer, attendance at holy days, service to one's spouse and children — is a movement in the direction of completion-stage resurrection.
Every act of living for others — the central practical expression of true love in the Unification teaching — reverses the self-centeredness that defines the fallen state and constitutes, in the most direct sense, a step of resurrection.
The ancestors of a blessed family who have already passed into the spirit world are understood to be engaged in Returning Resurrection — working through their living descendants to complete what they were unable to finish during their earthly lives. This gives the practices of ancestor liberation (해원식, haewon-sik) and ancestor blessing — which became increasingly central to Unification practice after 1999 — their theological grounding.
When a blessed family liberates and blesses their ancestors, they are actively facilitating the Returning Resurrection of those spirit persons, enabling them to advance in the spirit world and to provide more effective assistance to the living family in return.
This is the day we proclaimed shimjeong resurrection to heaven and earth. On the day when the problem of heart remaining in the human world is resolved at the world level, the earthly kingdom of heaven and the heavenly kingdom of heaven will surely be established.
— Sun Myung Moon (097-306, 03/26/1978) Cham Bumo Gyeong
The ultimate practical horizon of the resurrection doctrine is therefore the full population of the heavenly kingdom of heaven — not by a sudden apocalyptic event, but by the gradual accumulation of individuals and families who, through the Blessing and the life of the Completed Testament Age, achieve completion-stage resurrection one by one. The earthly kingdom of heaven is not a place to be built after resurrection; it is built by resurrection, family by family, tribe by tribe, until the world itself becomes a community of resurrected people.
Section IX — Academic Note
The Unification doctrine of resurrection has attracted scholarly attention from several angles within New Religious Movements (NRM) studies and comparative theology.
George Chryssides, in The Advent of Sun Myung Moon (1991), identifies the resurrection doctrine as one of the clearest examples of the Exposition's systematic engagement with the hermeneutical problems of liberal Protestant theology. By demythologizing the physical resurrection while retaining a robust theological content, the Divine Principle occupies a position analogous to that of the “progressive revelation” tradition within Protestantism — yet arrives at a far more structured and historically grounded conclusion than liberal theologians such as Paul Tillich or Rudolf Bultmann, who tended to reduce resurrection to a symbol of existential transformation without providential content.
Eileen Barker's work on the Unification movement notes the therapeutic and motivational function of the resurrection doctrine within community life: the belief that every act of devotion and sacrifice contributes to one's progressive resurrection, and that spirit-world ancestors are actively collaborating with living members, provides a sense of cosmic participation that sustains extraordinary levels of commitment.
From a sociological perspective, this is an unusually comprehensive integration of soteriology and everyday practice — the doctrine does not describe a future event but provides a framework for interpreting the meaning of present action.
The Returning Resurrection doctrine has also attracted comparative attention from scholars interested in ancestor veneration traditions across East Asian cultures. Bryan Wilson and Karel Dobbelaere, in their study of the Japanese Unification movement (A Time to Chant, 1994), observe that the ancestor blessing practices derived from the Returning Resurrection doctrine resonated strongly with pre-existing Japanese religious sensibilities around ōharae (purification) and kuyō (memorial services for the deceased).
The Unification framework provided these practices with a systematic theological rationale that distinguished them clearly from popular spirit-medium traditions while preserving the intuition of an ongoing relationship between the living and the deceased.
A point worth noting for academic context: the Unification doctrine explicitly rejects the doctrine of metempsychosis (transmigration of souls/reincarnation).
The Exposition addresses this directly — Returning Resurrection is sometimes superficially confused with reincarnation, but the two are structurally different. In reincarnation, the same individual soul enters a new body and loses memory of the previous life.
In Returning Resurrection, the spirit person retains its identity and returns as an assistant to a different living person without inhabiting or replacing that person's soul. The Unification teaching thus affirms the uniqueness and continuity of each individual spiritual identity while fully embracing the co-operative relationship between the living and the departed.
Key Texts
The primary doctrinal source is Chapter 5 of the Exposition of the Divine Principle, available in full at Chapter 5: Resurrection. The Korean original is available on 8books.net. Proclamations of the Day of Shimjeong Resurrection and the Day of Substantial Resurrection are recorded in the Cham Bumo Gyeong.
Further Reading
Foundational theology The Human Fall · Original Sin · Fallen Nature · Providence of Restoration
Related concepts Indemnity · Spirit World · Shimjeong · Dispensational Time-Identity
Completion and result True Parents · The Blessing Ceremony · Cheon Il Guk · Foundation Day
Primary sources Chapter 5: Resurrection — full text · Cham Bumo Gyeong · Cheon Seong Gyeong
This glossary entry is part of the Glossary of the Unification Church on True Parents Legacy. Content is based on the teachings of Sun Myung Moon as preserved in the Exposition of the Divine Principle, the Cheon Seong Gyeong, the Cham Bumo Gyeong, and related texts on tplegacy.net. It does not represent an official statement of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU).