God is formless and invisible in His essence, but He reveals His image through perfected human beings.
The Divine Principle teaches that Adam and Eve were created as the visible form of God — living icons through whom the invisible Creator wished to dwell permanently in the visible world. To see God is not to acquire a physical image but to enter into a union of love through a perfected conjugal family.
This answer draws on the teaching of God's dual characteristics and the principle of substantial embodiment, as set out in the Exposition of the Divine Principle and expanded in Cheon Seong Gyeong and Cham Bumo Gyeong.
Divine Principle Basis
The Exposition of the Divine Principle, in the Principle of Creation, describes God as an invisible subject that contains the harmonized unity of two pairs of dual characteristics: internal nature (sungsang) and external form (hyungsang), as well as masculinity (yang) and femininity (yin). In His essence, God is formless—but precisely to take on form through perfected human beings. Adam and Eve were meant to become the substantial embodiment of God: not a separate entity from Him, but the visible image of the invisible Creator.
In this sense, the Divine Principle does not answer the question of God's appearance by describing His features; it answers it by explaining how His image becomes visible in creation.
Key Concepts
Formless God (muhyeong / 無形) — In His eternal essence, God has no physical form; He is a spiritual subject of love, life, and lineage.
Dual Characteristics (iseong seongsang / 二性性相) — The teaching that God harmoniously contains internal nature and external form, along with masculinity and femininity; every created thing reflects this structure.
Substantial Embodiment (che / 體) — The means by which the formless God takes on visible form: through perfected human beings in whom He dwells.
True Parents (Cham Bumo) — Perfected Adam and Eve in whom God fully dwells; they become the visible, horizontal image of the invisible, vertical God.
The Everyday Picture
Rev. Moon often compared knowing God to knowing one's own mind. In a sermon on July 16, 1995, he observed that the mind is invisible — yet this does not mean we do not know the mind; on the contrary, the mind leads the entire body as its subject, and we experience it directly without ever seeing it.
God is like that: formless and invisible to the physical eye, yet knowable through the heart, felt in the soul, leading us as an inner subject.
This is why the question “What does God look like?” in the Divine Principle shifts from a question about external appearance to a question about relationship: to see God means to enter into union with Him through love, not to examine Him as an object.
Deeper Context
The Divine Principle opens its answer about God's appearance with a foundational claim: in His essence, God is formless. But this formlessness is not the final reality; it is the precondition for another truth, in which God desires to be seen and felt through perfected creation.
The symbolic being of this world is all of creation. The image-being is the human being. The substantial being is God. God dwells invisibly, in a formless state. The purpose of creation was for the formless God to appear as the visible God.
— Sun Myung Moon (298-106, 01/01/1999)
Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 2
This passage establishes a three-tiered structure of God's self-revelation: the universe is a symbolic image of God; the human being is a direct, embodied image of God; and God Himself is the ultimate spiritual substance. God's form, then, is not something external to creation but is progressively disclosed within it through increasingly concrete levels of resemblance. This differs sharply from classical theism, which tends to treat the divine image in creation as primarily metaphorical rather than substantial.
The next question is why the Divine Principle cannot simply say that God is “male” or “female.” Rev. Moon answers through the teaching of dual characteristics:
God divides Himself into dual characteristics, becoming the substance of original internal nature and original external form, and the substance of original femininity and original masculinity, appearing on earth. God is a neutrally harmonized being of dual characteristics, and in terms of position and dimension is the masculine subject.
— Sun Myung Moon (602-258, 11/16/2008)
Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 2
God contains both principles in harmony; positionally, He acts as subject (correlated with masculinity), yet He does not exclude femininity — rather, He brings it forth from Himself. Adam and Eve together, as a conjugal unity rather than as separate individuals, fully reflect this structure. This is why the visible manifestation of God requires not a single person but a married couple, and why any answer about God's appearance in the Divine Principle ultimately returns to the True Parents as a unified whole.
Rev. Moon makes this explicit in perhaps his most direct statement about what God looks like:
God created because He needed an object. Without an object, love cannot be felt. He created an object in order to attain perfection, and He created in order to take on a body. God too must take on a body. To take on a body, an object is needed. The ones upon whom He clothed the body of the object were Adam and Eve. This is why the form of Adam and Eve becomes the form of God.
— Sun Myung Moon (270-272, 07/16/1995)
Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 2
This is one of the most concrete statements in Rev. Moon's entire corpus on the subject of God's appearance. Perfected Adam and Eve do not merely resemble God metaphorically; they are His visible form, because He dwells in them in a complete union of love, life, and lineage.
This idea extends well beyond conventional understandings of divine likeness: not only is the human being made in the image of God, but God takes on the likeness of the human being when the human being reaches full maturity. This also gives the Divine Principle its distinctive answer to the question of how a bodiless God can love: He created a visible object because, without it, love would remain an inner potential rather than a complete reality.
How, then, can one see God in earthly life, before the consummation of growth? The Divine Principle answers: through spiritual eyes and through the heart.
The original Adam and Eve were meant to grow while seeing God. They saw with spiritual eyes. God appears as substance through Adam and Eve. The mind is invisible, but this does not mean we do not know the mind. We do know it. The mind, as subject, leads everything.
— Sun Myung Moon (270-271, 07/16/1995)
Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 2
The mind-body analogy is central to Rev. Moon's account of how the formless God is known. Just as a person does not “see” their own mind with their eyes yet unmistakably knows it as the subject that directs their whole being, so too a person united with God in love knows Him not as a distant object but as the inner reality of their heart.
In the original design of creation, Adam and Eve were meant to grow while contemplating God with spiritual sight, until their own maturity allowed God to take on bodily form in them definitively.
Finally, in the afterlife — in the spirit world — God does not appear as an abstract grandeur or a symbolic figure upon a throne. There too, He continues to be known through His perfected children:
The formless Father — God — takes on the form of Adam and Eve and becomes the eternally abiding Father in the world of visible being. At that point Adam and Eve become True Parents, True Ancestors. God becomes a Father with a body, and so the invisible and the visible become one.
— Sun Myung Moon (341-104, 12/31/2000)
Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 2
For the Divine Principle, this is the ultimate answer to the question of whether we will see God face to face. Yes, we will — but in the form of the True Parents, in whom God dwells fully and forever. This does not diminish God's transcendence; it discloses the mode of its manifestation — through a union of love, rather than through the appearance of a separate image.
Comparative Religion
Christianity — Classical theism, as developed by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, teaches that God is incorporeal, simple, and immaterial: God is not a body, because a body is a composite entity and God is absolutely simple. St. Augustine, in the Confessions, describes God as an ineffable spirit who cannot be imagined through any sensory image.
The Eastern Christian tradition, beginning with Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century, distinguishes between God's ousia (essence) and energies: God's essence remains unknowable, but His energies — His action, grace, and uncreated light — are knowable and even “visible,” as in the radiance on Mount Tabor.
Judaism — Moses Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, systematically asserts God's incorporeality as one of the fundamental principles of faith.
Maimonides treats anthropomorphic descriptions in the Torah — “the hand of God,” “the face of God” — as pedagogical concessions to human understanding, not as literal attributes. His “Thirteen Principles of Faith” contains a distinct article stating that God has no body and no bodily properties, a principle that entered daily Jewish liturgy in the form of the hymn Yigdal.
Islam — Central to Islamic theology is the doctrine of tanzih — God's absolute transcendence — formulated in the Qur'an as: “There is nothing like unto Him” (Qur'an 42:11). Al-Ghazali, in Ihya Ulum al-Din, insists that any comparison between God and created things is a grave error. Long-running debates in Sunni theology between the Mu'tazilites (who denied God's attributes as distinct realities) and the Ash'arites (who affirmed them without falling into tajsim, or anthropomorphism) have shaped the classical consensus. The general Sunni position is that anthropomorphic expressions in the Qur'an are to be affirmed: “without asking how” (bila kayf).
Buddhism — Mahayana Buddhism has no Creator God, so there is no exact parallel. However, the doctrine of trikaya — the three “bodies” of the Buddha — resonates with the three-tiered structure of the Divine Principle: dharmakaya (the formless body of truth) parallels the formless God; sambhogakaya (the enjoyment body, accessible to advanced practitioners) parallels the God seen through spiritual eyes; and nirmanakaya (the transformation body, the historical Buddha) parallels God appearing through the True Parents.
What all four traditions share is the recognition that the ultimate essence of the divine transcends any sensory depiction. What distinguishes the Divine Principle is its emphasis on a concrete, conjugal, embodied manifestation: for Rev. Moon, God's formlessness is not the final word but the starting point of another truth — one in which God longs to be seen in a perfected human couple.
This position combines the Christian aspiration to incarnation with the Semitic emphasis on transcendence, while locating the point of embodiment in a conjugal family rather than in a single individual.
This is the Divine Principle's distinctive contribution to a millennia-long discussion about the nature and visibility of God.
Key Takeaway
- In His essence, God is formless and invisible — no physical eye, in this life or in the spirit world, can see Him as an object of contemplation.
- God harmoniously contains dual characteristics: internal nature and external form, masculinity and femininity; He is therefore neither “male” nor “female” in the human sense.
- The visible form of God is perfected Adam and Eve — the True Parents — through whom God permanently dwells in the visible world.
- In plain terms, God is like the invisible mind that directs the body, and the True Parents are the “body” through which God becomes knowable.
- To see God is not to acquire a visual image but to enter into a union of love through the heart and through conjugal life — this is the ultimate purpose of creation.
Related Questions
Does God have a body?
In His essence, no; God is a formless spiritual subject. However, the Divine Principle teaches that God created Adam and Eve as the means by which He could “take on a body” — dwelling in perfected human beings and thereby becoming manifest in the visible world.
Is God male or female?
God harmoniously contains both masculinity and femininity as two of His four dual characteristics. Positionally, God acts as the masculine subject, but the complete image of God requires a conjugal pair — a husband and wife together.
Will we see God face-to-face in the spirit world?
Yes — but not as a distant figure on a throne. The Divine Principle teaches that in the spirit world, God appears in the form of the True Parents because He eternally dwells in them in a complete union of love.
In Their Own Words
God dwells in a formless state, and therefore cannot be seen even after one dies and enters the spirit world. Consequently, in order to have a relationship with human beings who live in the body, God too had to appear on earth as a Father possessing a body.
— Sun Myung Moon (501-032, 07/14/2005)
Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 2
This passage makes clear that God's invisibility does not disappear with physical death. Even in the spirit world, God in Himself remains hidden from direct sight — and for precisely this reason, it was necessary to create Adam and Eve as the means through which His formless essence could be made visibly manifest.
The next step is that the human being must become the image of God. He must come to resemble God. Because he carries within himself something like God, he is without doubt a little god.
— Sun Myung Moon (264-153, 10/09/1994)
Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 2
The formula “little god” (sochin Hananim) in the Divine Principle is neither pantheism nor the deification of the human being in the sense of dissolution into the divine.
It expresses the idea that each human being, upon attaining the fullness of growth, becomes a living, concrete reflection of God's nature — and it is in this sense that God “looks like” a human being, rather than the other way around.