In classical theology, “omnipotence” means God can do all that is logically possible, “omniscience” means God knows all that can be known, and “omnipresence” means God is present everywhere in His creation.
The Unification Movement affirms all three but reframes them as expressions of God's deeper nature—His four great attributes (absolute, unique, unchanging, eternal) and His dual characteristics (internal nature and external form).
On this reading, God's power, knowledge, and presence are not isolated capabilities but the natural radiance of who He is as the eternal Parent of love, life, and lineage.
This question is treated within the Principle of Creation in the Exposition of the Divine Principle.
Divine Principle Basis
The Exposition of the Divine Principle opens its account of God by deriving His attributes from the structure of creation itself. Because every being exists through the give-and-take of paired elements — internal nature and external form (sungsang and hyungsang) and positivity and negativity (yang and eum) — God as their First Cause must be the harmonized subject of these dualities. From this follows His character as an absolute, eternal, and unchanging Being.
In Rev. Sun Myung Moon's later teaching, this classical framework was sharpened into what he called the four great attributes (sa-dae sokseong) of God — absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal — formally proclaimed in the Jardim Declaration II on August 7, 1998.
These four attributes are how the Unification Movement most often names what other traditions call omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence: God's absoluteness grounds His power, His unchanging eternity grounds His knowledge, and His unique presence as the vertical Parent grounds His presence throughout creation.
Key Concepts
Four Great Attributes — The teaching that God is absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal; the framework through which the Unification Movement expresses what classical theology calls the omni-attributes.
Dual Characteristics (Sungsang and Hyungsang) — The principle that God exists as the harmonized subject of internal nature (mind, consciousness) and external form (energy, the substantial basis of creation), which is why creation reflects both invisible and visible dimensions.
Vertical Parent — The teaching that God is the unique vertical Parent of all humanity — the single source of love, life, and lineage — which underlies His being present to every person and every place.
Heart (Shimjeong) — The irrepressible impulse to love and be loved through an object partner, which is the core of God's internal nature and the medium through which His presence reaches creation.
The Everyday Picture
Rev. Moon often compared the relationship between God and creation to that between mind and body.
Just as the mind is invisible yet directs every cell of the body, and just as the body cannot act on its own apart from the mind that fills it, so God — invisible and formless — is present throughout creation as its inner subject and director.
In a 1995 sermon, Rev. Moon described how Adam and Eve, before the Fall, would have grown up “feeling” God exactly the way a person feels his or her own mind operating within the body — not as a foreign presence but as their innermost self.
The image makes the abstract concrete: God's omnipresence is not God being scattered like fog across space, but God dwelling within things the way a self dwells within a body — wholly there, wholly active, wholly hidden from outward sight.
Deeper Context
The Unification Movement does not begin with the omni-attributes as discrete philosophical predicates, the way medieval scholasticism did. It begins instead with God as the invisible Parent whose nature radiates outward into creation.
Because God is “formless” (muhyeong) — existing as the harmonized subject of internal nature and external form — He cannot be located visibly in any one place, and yet He is the sustaining root of every place. As Rev. Moon expressed it, “God exists in invisible, formless mode. The intention behind creation was for that formless God to manifest as the God of form.”
The classical doctrine of omnipresence is preserved here, but reframed: God is everywhere, not as an observer hovering above creation but as the inner Parent seeking embodiment within it.
The same logic governs omniscience. Because God exists as the vertical Parent, His knowing is not a distant cataloguing of data but the parental intimacy of one whose own heart beats within the children.
Rev. Moon repeatedly emphasized that the spiritual world transcends time and space and that God's mind reaches future generations no less than past ones — He could prepare a person twenty years before that person's birth because the parental heart that knows is itself eternal. This is omniscience as parental foreknowledge, not as cold calculation.
The treatment of omnipotence in Unification thought is the most distinctive of the three. Classical theology tends to assert God's omnipotence as a static given.
Rev. Moon, by contrast, taught that while God's essential power is absolute, His exercise of that power is constrained by His own respect for love and the human portion of responsibility.
Hence, Rev. Moon could say in 2001 that, until the Coronation of God's Kingship, “the absolute God, the omnipotent God, has not been the omnipotent God” — meaning that the expression of divine omnipotence has been historically blocked by the Fall and is being recovered through the providence of restoration.
The “era of totality, comprehensiveness, total authority, and omnipotence” (jeonche, jeonban, jeongwon, jeonneung) which Rev. Moon proclaimed in 1999, names exactly this restoration of God's full sovereign action in creation.
This explains why Unification theology integrates the omni-attributes with the four great attributes.
Absoluteness is the metaphysical ground of omnipotence; eternity is the temporal mode of omniscience; unchangingness is what makes God's presence reliably the same in every place; and uniqueness is what makes that presence one and not many.
The four attributes are the deeper grammar; the omni-attributes are the surface vocabulary inherited from classical theism.
The symbolic existence in this world is the created world. The existence in the form of image is the human being. The substantial existence is God. God exists in invisible, formless mode. The intention behind creation was for that formless God to manifest as the God of form. God is the substance of the invisible world, but He also wishes to become the substance of the visible world.
— Sun Myung Moon (298-106, 1999.01.01) Cham Bumo Gyeong
This passage anchors omnipresence in Unification terms: God is not absent from the visible world but seeks to embody Himself within it. Omnipresence is not detached observation but the active longing of the formless Parent to indwell every dimension of His creation.
God's attributes are absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal. The supreme masterpiece created by fully transmitting these attributes is the human being. Because the body, made on the basis of the principles of the finite material world, cannot be eternal, God intended that when Adam and Eve reached perfection, He would dwell within them and become completely one with them.
— Sun Myung Moon (501-032, 2005.07.14) Cham Bumo Gyeong
Here, Rev. Moon names the four attributes that, in Unification theology, encompass and reframe the classical omni-attributes. Absoluteness corresponds to omnipotence, eternity to omniscience and omnipresence across time, unchangingness to the constancy of divine presence, and uniqueness to the singularity of the divine source.
God is True Parent, True Teacher, and True King. These are the three positions humans hold most precious — parent, teacher, king — and God possesses all three; and on top of them He possesses the attributes of being absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal. You must stand as His children answering to that.
— Sun Myung Moon (294-330, 1998.08.09) Cham Bumo Gyeong, Jardin Declaration II
The Jardim Declaration II gives the formal statement of the four-attribute framework. It places these attributes above God's three roles, identifying them as the deepest layer of His being — the layer in which omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence all participate.
The single settled point of all things is God's sovereignty. Yet because God did not have that sovereignty, He has not been the absolute God, the omnipotent God. From now on God recovers that sovereignty. Through the Coronation Ceremony of God's Kingship He becomes the center of all the created world. The concept you must hold is the absolute, unique, unchanging, eternal sovereignty of God.
— Sun Myung Moon (343-121, 2001.01.21) Cham Bumo Gyeong
This passage shows the distinctive Unification reframing of omnipotence. Essential power is one thing; its full exercise in a fallen creation is another. Through the providence of restoration, that exercise is being recovered, and the four great attributes are the form in which God's omnipotence finally settles into creation.
Form and shape appear in the present, but the world of heart is the same in the past as in the present. Because the God who governs heart bears the bond of meeting people even in the future, the spiritual world transcends time. If in God's mind there is the thought "such and such a man will be born at such and such a time," He can teach him through that heart and bind him in relation. This is possible because there is the bond of the world of heart.
— Sun Myung Moon (063-306, 1972.10.15) Cham Bumo Gyeong
Here, Rev. Moon describes omniscience as a function of the parental world of the heart. God knows future people not by predicting them as a calculator predicts an output, but by already holding them within the eternal scope of His parental love.
Comparative Religion
Christianity — The classical Christian doctrine reaches its most influential formulation in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, where omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence are derived from God's nature as actus purus — pure actuality without potentiality.
Aquinas argues that God is omnipresent by His essence, power, and presence; omniscient because He knows all things in knowing His own essence; and omnipotent in that He can do everything that is logically possible.
The Reformed tradition, especially in Calvin's Institutes, retains the same triad while emphasizing God's sovereignty over fallen history.
Judaism — Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed approaches the divine attributes through the via negativa — arguing that we can never positively predicate properties of God in the same sense we predicate them of creatures, but can only deny their opposites.
God's omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence are therefore not three additional features added to the divine essence but ways of denying limit, ignorance, and absence in God.
The mystical tradition, especially Kabbalah, addresses divine presence through the doctrine of Shekhinah — the indwelling presence of God in creation and history.
Islam — Within the Asma' al-Husna (the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of God), the divine attributes corresponding to the omni-attributes appear as al-Qadir (the All-Powerful), al-'Alim (the All-Knowing), and the testimony in Qur'an 2:115 that “wherever you turn, there is the face of God.”
Al-Ghazali, in his theological writings, worked out how these attributes are real of God, yet unlike anything in creation. Sufi traditions especially emphasized God's omnipresence as the inner presence (hudur) accessible through remembrance.
Buddhism — Buddhism does not affirm a personal omnipotent creator, so the comparative parallel is genuinely limited. The Mahayana doctrine of the Dharmakaya — the absolute body of the Buddha as the ultimate ground of reality—has structural similarities to a doctrine of omnipresence, but it is not theistic in the sense that the other three traditions are. The closer parallel is to a non-personal absolute that pervades all things rather than to a personal, omnipotent God.
The genuine point of agreement among the three theistic traditions is that the divine reality is not a being among beings but the ground of all being, and is therefore not subject to the limits of any one place, time, or capacity.
The genuine difference of the Unification Movement is its insistence that God's omnipotence, while essentially absolute, has been providentially constrained by the Fall and the principle of human responsibility — and that its full exercise is being historically restored. This historical and parental framing of the divine attributes is distinctive.
Key Takeaway
The Divine Principle teaches that God's omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence flow from His four great attributes — absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal — rather than standing as independent philosophical claims.
God is omnipresent, the way a mind is present throughout a body: invisible, yet the inner subject of every part. God is omniscient through the parental heart that holds past, present, and future in a single eternal relation.
God's essential power is absolute, but its full historical exercise is being restored through the providence in which True Parents and humanity fulfill their portion of responsibility.
Together, these teachings preserve the classical doctrine while grounding it in a parental, relational vision of God rather than in abstract metaphysics.
Related Questions
What does it mean that God has dual characteristics?
Unification theology teaches that God exists as the harmonized subject of internal nature (sungsang) and external form (hyungsang) and of positivity and negativity (yang and eum). This is why creation reflects both invisible and visible dimensions and why human beings, as His image, also exist as paired mind-body and male-female realities.
Why did God not intervene in the Fall if He is omnipotent?
The Divine Principle teaches that genuine love requires freedom, and that God established the principle of human responsibility — a 5% portion humans must fulfill themselves — precisely so that love could be real rather than coerced. God's omnipotence does not override this principle, because doing so would defeat the purpose of creation.
How can I get closer to God if He is invisible?
Because God exists as the vertical Parent of love, life, and lineage, drawing close to Him is less a matter of locating Him in space than of attuning the heart to His parental shimjeong.
Prayer, devotion (jeongseong), and a life lived for the sake of others are the documented means by which Rev. Moon taught one to experience God's presence directly.
In Their Own Words
God divides into dual characteristics, becomes the substance of original internal nature and original external form, becomes the substance of original masculine and original feminine voice, and manifests on earth, so that all existence in the cosmos becomes God's substance. From the position of harmonized being of dual characteristics, God is the masculine subject in dimension. That masculine subject, centered on True Parents, enters into the substantial sphere; bloodline becomes one, love and life become one. From that position of unity, as relatives of the heavenly nation and as inheritors of the world of totality, comprehensiveness, and omnipotence in which the ideal of creation has been completed, each of you must occupy the position of host family in the kingdom of eternal life.
— Sun Myung Moon (602-258, 2008.11.16) Cham Bumo Gyeong
This concluding passage gathers the entire framework. The three classical attributes — totality (a near-equivalent of omnipresence), comprehensiveness (a near-equivalent of omniscience), and omnipotence — are presented not as static descriptors of a remote deity but as inheritances that humanity, joined to God through True Parents, can finally enter into.
In Unification thought, the omni-attributes ultimately refer to a Parent who shares His fullness with His children once the providence of restoration is complete.