[Summary: Beginning from the premise that our understanding of God determines our view of life and our whole way of living, we first survey the views of God held in the world. Islam sets the human being up as a servant who submits, and Christianity as an adopted child; Buddhism, Confucianism, and atheism likewise possess no absolute ground for human dignity. The Divine Principle teaches that God can be known through the law of cause and effect and the law of resemblance. Without a single exception, all things exist in dual characteristics — positivity and negativity, and internal nature (sung sang) and external form (hyung sang). God, the First Cause, is the harmonized subject partner of original internal nature and original external form, original positivity and original negativity. Because the core of the original internal nature is heart — the impulse to find joy through love — God did not create out of an overflow of power, but created a partner to love. Positivity and negativity are absolutely equal on the horizontal plane, and internal nature and external form are not two but one; this is the doctrine of the One that brings the quarrel between idealism and materialism to an end. The conclusion is that the God of dual characteristics is precisely “Heavenly Parent,” and that on Foundation Day this original name was restored to God. The human being is God’s visible body. This understanding of God is the true one, and it is the answer to conflict between men and women, to human dignity, to religious conflict, to the environment, and to the age of AI.]
Beloved brothers and sisters, today I would like to re-examine with you one cornerstone that lies at the very bottom of our faith. If someone were to ask you, “What kind of God is the God you believe in?” what would you answer? The life of a person who can answer that question clearly and the life of a person who cannot are two entirely different lives. For one’s understanding of God determines one’s view of life, one’s view of life determines how one lives, and how one lives determines eternity. Our Heavenly Parent’s Holy Community is not simply one more among the countless religions of the world. And yet, surprisingly many young people even among our own children hold their faith in exactly that way. We must come to know that this Principle we are holding on to is not one teaching among tens of thousands, but the very answer that humanity kept asking for six thousand years and could never reach. And so the title of today’s message is “True Parents 1: The Dual Characteristics of Heavenly Parent.” Let us now read the words of True Parents together.
* (True Father) The Principle speaks of dual characteristics. Why are dual characteristics necessary? Without dual characteristics, the harmony of creation cannot come about. It is because there are dual characteristics that beings can give and receive with one another; they are necessary in order to bring forth the beauty and wonder of creation. This is why every being in the world of existence exists in pairs. Why is everything set up in the pair system? Because of love. All things continue to exist because of the original true love in which the original God can take delight.
Today we are going to place the world’s views of God side by side with our own and compare them. Only by comparing can we truly know what we have. Let us look first at the views of God held by other religions.
* Islam
The Islamic understanding of God is one of absolute oneness and transcendence. The human being is Allah’s creature and His “servant.” The very word “Islam” means complete submission to God. To portray Allah in human form, or to say that God resembles a human being, is regarded as blasphemy. No image of God may be made at all. There is only absolute submission. This is why Muslims are so thorough in keeping the precepts of their faith. Five times a day, at set hours, they pray facing Mecca. During Ramadan they fast for as long as the sun is up, and those who have the means make a pilgrimage to Mecca once in their lifetime as a matter of obligation. Because this is a life of duty and responsibility rather than a life of attending God with one’s heart, it is carried out with perfect discipline. Seen from the standpoint of the Principle, however, there is a fundamental limitation here. Because one stands as a servant, one cannot possess the dignity that belongs to a child. The dignity of women in particular is very meager. This is why, under religious law, a man with sufficient means may take up to four wives. And some extremist forces carry out merciless acts of terror in the name of God, going so far as to behead their enemies. Such things are unimaginable within a relationship of parent and child. Nor does this remain a matter only for the believers themselves. Once such an understanding of God becomes a culture, an entire people has no choice but to live under its influence.
* Atheism and secular humanism
Modern secular ethics, which does not presuppose God, draws human dignity from reason and from the social contract. But its metaphysical ground for “why the human being is worthy of dignity” is weak. Where there is no absolute ground for human existence, dignity too becomes relative. For in a capitalist society, the moment human beings begin pricing one another according to ability, cheap human beings come into existence.
* Christianity
There is an enormous gap between God the Father of the Trinity, whom Christians believe in, and the Father whom Jesus himself experienced. Jesus called him “Abba, Father,” and lived and spoke in such complete oneness with God that he could say, “the Father who is in me, and I in the Father”; he attended God as his own true Father. But the God that Christians experience is very different from the God Jesus experienced. Before believing, a person was a sinner and a servant of the Lord; and as it says, “And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23), through faith in Jesus one comes into the position of a child taken in by adoption.
An illustration will make this easy to grasp. Imagine a household with servants, whose master had no children of his own. Being lonely, the master singled out from among his servants one who believed in him well and obeyed him faithfully, a servant who pleased him, and adopted that servant as his son. Now, could that adopted servant frolic and behave freely before the master as a child born to him would? He would always be watching the master’s face, careful in every word and gesture. This is the God the Father that Christians experience today. It is why even ministers, standing in the pulpit, lower themselves by calling themselves servants of the Lord. Only Jesus is the true child who is one with God; they themselves are children adopted in heart. There remains a transcendent distance that can never be closed. In essence, it is because the relationship began as one of master and servant. It was because they followed such an understanding of God that Christian nations, in the age of colonial expansion, were able to make slaves of weaker foreign peoples. Human beings were servants to begin with, so there was nothing strange about it. Or again, even among fellow Christians, white Christians were able to work black Christians like servants. Brothers and sisters who share the same parents could never do such a thing. Could we, among our Blessed Families, make war on one another, kill one another, and work one another as servants because our races differ or because someone is weaker? We could not, because before Heavenly Parent we are brothers and sisters of one family. This all flows out of the relationship between God and human beings.
* Views of God at a glance
| Tradition | Who is God? | Position of the human being | Limitation of this view |
| Judaism | The one God who made a covenant | The chosen people | Cannot embrace humanity outside the chosen |
| Christianity | God the Father of the Trinity | An adopted son | A gulf between Creator and creature |
| Islam | The transcendent, absolute one God | A servant who submits | There are no children who inherit |
| Buddhism | Posits no personal God | Sentient beings who awaken by themselves | There is no parental embrace to return to |
| Confucianism / East Asian thought | Principle (li) and the Way (tao) | The noble person who follows heavenly principle | Cannot reveal the God of heart |
| Atheism | Does not exist | A being that arose by chance | No absolute ground for dignity |
| Unification Principle | Heavenly Parent of love | Children of love, life, and lineage | Fulfills Heavenly Parent’s dream |
Look at this table once more. Humanity has called God Lord, Creator, the Absolute, Principle, and “nonexistent.” But what was the name God wanted? “Heavenly Parent.” Heavenly Parent’s dream was one and the same from the beginning: to gain children to love, and to share joy with those children. A servant, however, cannot fulfill that dream. Neither can a subject, nor a creature, nor an adopted son, nor an enlightened ascetic. Only a child fulfills a parent’s dream. And so God waited six thousand years to find children and to stand in the position of Heavenly Parent.
* The dual characteristics of God as revealed by the Principle
How, then, can we know the invisible God? The Principle has organized this for us in two laws. The first is the law of cause and effect. A visible result must have come out of an invisible cause. The creation is the effect, and God is the cause. The second is the law of resemblance. An effect must resemble its cause.
(Exposition of the Divine Principle) How can we know the divine nature of the invisible God? We can know it by observing the created world. This is why Paul wrote, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). Just as every work of art is a substantial manifestation of the invisible nature of its maker, so all things in the created world are the substantial object partners into which God, who created them, unfolded His invisible divine nature. Therefore, just as we can know the character of an artist by looking at his work, so we can know the divine nature of God by looking at the things He created.
Therefore, even though we cannot see God directly, we can know Him by looking at His works. We have never met van Gogh, yet when we look at his night sky we know how lonely and how burning a man he was. This is because a work of art is the maker’s character unfolded into substance. Now let us look at the created world. Everything that exists has two features in common.
* The first feature common to all things: positivity and negativity
A person is born either male or female, without exception. Animals have male and female; plants have stamens and pistils. Descending to the mineral world, positive ions and negative ions meet to form molecules; electrons revolve around a proton to form an atom; and even in the elementary particles into which an atom is split, there is positivity and negativity. Split an elementary particle further and you arrive at energy. Energy is non-material. It cannot be split any further. Yet even this energy consists of a giving force (+) and a receiving force (−), and it is because of this that force acts and that heaven and earth and all things came to be formed. This energy at the very starting point is a force of love that goes beyond physical force. True Father said: for all things to exist there must be force, and that force is the force of love; and that force of love is God Himself. This is why people gave the name “God” to the love that existed in the beginning. It was out of that love that heaven and earth and all things were created in the pair system. It is not that love began because there were men and women; rather, men and women began because of love. So let me ask you: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Love came first. Because love existed before there was any rooster or hen, they came forth as a pair. The Principle is truth precisely because it can resolve every question a human being can ask.
* The second feature common to all things: internal nature and external form
A human being has a mind and a body. The mind is invisible and the body is visible, and the visible body was formed resembling the invisible mind. Think of the process of building a house. First there is a conception in the mind. That conception is invisible, yet it clearly has a certain shape. Draw that shape and it becomes a blueprint; invest materials, time, and sweat into the blueprint and it becomes a house. What was invisible has become visible. That house, then, is the person’s mind given concrete form in wood and stone. This is not true of human beings alone. Animals have an animal mind, and so they move; plants have a plant mind, and so they take the shape of plants. Even the molecules of minerals have an invisible inner character that leads positive ions and negative ions to bond. Here we call the invisible inner character “internal nature” (sung sang), and the visible outer form “external form” (hyung sang). The two appear to be different things, but in fact, because the external form was formed resembling the internal nature, the external form is also called the second internal nature. Internal nature and external form, together with positivity and negativity, are each called dual characteristics. And because God exists in dual characteristics, everything created likewise exists in dual characteristics, without exception. The human being too is dual characteristics: mind and body, man and woman.
* Brothers and sisters, even a single watermelon seed exists in dual characteristics. Inside that seed the whole watermelon plant is contained. The root, the stem, the leaves are nowhere to be seen, yet all of them are already inside. The invisible comes before the visible, and the invisible determines the visible. This is the relationship between internal nature and external form.
* God, the First Cause
If all things were made with internal nature and external form, positivity and negativity, then what must God, their cause, be like? God exists as the harmonized subject partner of dual characteristics: original internal nature and original external form, original positivity and original negativity. The original internal nature corresponds to God’s mind, and the original external form to God’s body. The views of God in other religions present a transcendent deity — Transcendent One, Creator, Absolute Being — whom the created world cannot resemble; but our understanding of God is one of mutual resemblance. Ours is a God whose internal nature and external form can resonate with our own.
* Original internal nature
What, then, lies in the deepest place of that original internal nature? Heart. Heart is the emotional impulse to find joy through love. It is the root of true love and the very core of God. Until now no religion and no philosophy has ever defined God as “the God of heart.” They called Him almighty God, all-knowing God, holy God, lifting God ever higher, but they could not enable anyone to understand God’s heart. True Parents alone taught it to us: that God is One who cannot bear not to love. That is why creation took place. God did not create out of an overflow of power. He created because there was no one to love. This single statement overturned the whole board of humanity’s understanding of God.
* Original external form
The original external form corresponds to the fundamental energy that causes the phenomenal world to exist. Universal prime energy arises from here. It is not a force that moves without principle or law, unprincipled and arbitrary, but a force that moves according to heart and love, which are the original internal nature. Thus universal prime energy follows the principle of love and the norms of love. Because the universe and nature were created out of this, they are beautiful and complete. And so the word about God’s dual characteristics puts an end to the long war between faith and science. The laws that science uncovers do not compete with God; they are the peeling back, layer by layer, of God’s original external form. Ours is a faith that has no need to fear the microscope. On the contrary, the further science advances, the more clearly the fingerprints of God’s creation stand out.
* Positivity and negativity stand in a relationship of equality
Internal nature and external form stand in a vertical relationship, but positivity and negativity are not in a vertical master–servant relationship; they are in a horizontal relationship of equality. A wife does not become an inferior simply because the husband is the subject partner. Subject partner and object partner are a matter of position, not a matter of higher and lower. Does the left hand become a servant because we mainly use the right? Man and woman are equal because of love. The world has tried to seize equality through struggle and to guarantee it through law and contract. But our equality is not an equality won by fighting; it is an essential equality that flows from the very principle of God’s existence.
* Original internal nature and original external form: not dualism but the doctrine of the One
God exists in dual characteristics, yet He is not two but One. Think of water, steam, and ice. Their properties are completely different. One flows, one flies away, one hardens. Yet in essence all three are the same water (H₂O). Mind and body too are divided conceptually into spirit and matter, but in reality they are one. Split them and split them again, and in the end you arrive at non-material energy. The energy of love cannot be separated into parts. This is original internal nature and original external form; and because their essence is one, they are dual characteristics. Not two, but one. Therefore it is not a doctrine of two gods, but the doctrine of the One, which begins from a single origin. For thousands of years philosophy fought over the essence of the universe: is it mind, or is it matter? Idealism and materialism split apart, and thought split apart; thought split apart, and the world split into democratic and communist camps; the camps split apart, and people died. That quarrel of thousands of years ends here. Mind-only and matter-only are not two different things; from the beginning they set out as one, as the doctrine of the One that is Heavenly Parent’s dual characteristics. Brothers and sisters, do you realize how tremendous this is? With a single word — One — the Principle has untied one of the greatest knots in the history of human philosophy.
* God’s dual characteristics = Heavenly Parent
Now let us come to the conclusion. To speak of “the dual characteristics of God” sounds as though we were speaking of some difficult philosophical deity. Expressed simply, in a single word, we call this “Heavenly Parent.” At last God’s true reality has been rightly found and restored to Him. True Mother proclaimed it on Foundation Day.
(True Mother, Foundation Day 2013) In the Old Testament Age, God was called “Jehovah.” In the New Testament Age, He was called “God the Father.” Now we must attend God rightly. God is “Heavenly Parent.”
Foundation Day is the day on which, after six thousand years, God’s original name — “Heavenly Parent” — was found and restored to Him.
* I am God’s visible body
If human beings are Heavenly Parent’s children, then I am a human being formed in Heavenly Parent’s likeness. In The Way of God’s Will there is this passage: God is the God of no form, and Adam and Eve are God in substance. When mind and body become one centered on God, God becomes the internal God and I myself become the external God. What an astonishing word this is. There is no need to feel disappointed that God is invisible. We have only to become God’s visible body. Just as a mind without a body has no way to express itself, God too, without us who are like His body, has no way to express His will and His ideal. This is why the human being is most precious to God. And for the human being, Heavenly Parent must absolutely exist. “Without human beings, Heavenly Parent has no way to appear.” “Without Heavenly Parent, human beings have no way to possess value.” I ask you to reflect deeply on these two statements.
* The future value of the Heavenly Parent understanding of God
1) The question of men and women. The world is aching today with conflict between the sexes. We have the answer. Men and women are the very structure of God’s own existence; their positions differ, but there is no higher and lower, and they are equal because of love. Humanity has not yet found any deeper ground for the equality of the sexes than this.
2) The question of human dignity. An age is coming in which genes are edited and the price of a life is calculated. If the ground of dignity is nothing more than social consensus, then on the day the consensus changes, dignity disappears as well. But the ground of “I am a child of Heavenly Parent” is one that no one can remove.
3) The question of religious conflict. The boundary lines drawn between one religious body and another have stained humanity with blood. But before a parent, such boundary lines cannot stand. The single name “Heavenly Parent” tears down the walls between all religions.
4) The question of nature and the environment. A view of God that saw all things as objects of conquest has left the earth sick. But the Principle embraces even the natural world, because all things too are God’s symbolic substantial object partners. Every time we look at nature, we are seeing symbolically the God we so long to see and to meet. Among the many religions of the world there is no other theology like this.
5) The age of artificial intelligence. In an age when machines calculate better than people, and write, and paint as well, what is it that makes a human being human? If it were intelligence or ability, human beings would become servants of AI. Our understanding of God — that human beings are children who have inherited God’s heart — will be the last shield to guard the place of the human being in the age of machines.
* Beloved brothers and sisters, today we have walked together the long road of humanity’s understanding of God. Some called God Master, some called Him Creator, some called Him Principle, and some said He does not exist. Every one of those names made God sad. For the one word God longed to hear from human beings was “Heavenly Parent.” That one word True Parents taught to humanity. There are many religions in the world, but this is the only place that opens the way to attend God as our Parent, to inherit that Parent’s heart, and to live as true children. I pray that all of us may live as true children of Heavenly Parent and as true heirs of True Parents.
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