Bruce Chilton
Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion
Bard College, Annandale, New York
Divine Heart Principle: Part I is a work of fundamental theology, “fundamental” in the sense that it assesses the nature of God, and applies that assessment to the condition of humanity. When theology is effective, anthropological analysis is also involved, and that is the case in Divine Heart Principle.
The beginning point remains God, and here Ye-Jin Moon offers a Trinitarian account of the divine nature, with a distinction made between “God’s Origin position prior to creation, when one cannot divide God into any Division,” and “the posterior position after God chose to create and became Heavenly Father/Heavenly Mother to human beings” (p. 34). This deliberately contrasts with traditional claims that the Trinity pertains to God in God’s self, quite apart from how God manifests. But the fact is that Trinitarian thought is often challenged when it comes to distinguishing how God is from how God is revealed, so that such adjustments as Ye-Jin Moon introduces are philosophically productive, and well worth consideration.
The greater contrast with classic Trinitarianism is that Ye-Jin Moon avoids the language of Father, Son, and Spirit, and that for two reasons. First, she opposes “male-centered” language, literally from the first page of the book, attributing unsatisfactory patriarchal conceptions to her father, Sun Myung Moon. Ye-Jin Moon is open and emphatic in this regard, marking her work as a major revision of Unification theology, and she explicitly criticizes the treatment of women within the Movement (p. 35). Her intent is to produce a “sex/gender-balanced revision, correction, and expansion” of her father’s theology (p. 1). That criticism features also in the second reason for which she revises Trinitarian language.
The Trinity emerged as a central teaching of Christianity at a time when the most burning issue was Christology, a topic that included Jesus’ identity as messiah and his natures as divine as well as human. Ye-Jin Moon rejects this aspect of Christianity, and regrets that her parents, by comparing themselves to Jesus, “elevated themselves to semi-divine beings, unrelated to the Heavenly Parent who has entrusted equal human value/responsibility to every human being” (p. 4, see also pp. 9, 19, 34). While offering a theology that is grounded in the Bible, Ye-Jin Moon is emphatic in refusing a basic Christian doctrine and in correcting her parents’ views. On both those fronts her book is likely to cause controversy, but she is to be admired for her courageous, categorical statements.
Her correction against patriarchy in the conception of God brings Ye-Jin Moon to her insistence that a balance of purpose and love, a “Dual Position” of the two (pp. 36-43), must be attributed to God, in accordance with her own Divine Heart Principle. Following a trend in feminist theology, she cites Proverbs 8:22 in order to stress the complementarity of female and male, Wisdom and Word (p. 51). The emphasis upon divine creativity results in a positive evaluation of the movement from the single Heavenly Parent to the duality of choosing to create (p. 57). Indeed, “Origin-Division-Union Action” are held to be the “Four Position Foundation” of the creativity that God displays and conveys to his children (a thought also expanded on pp. 166, 169-172, 178).
Because creativity is attributed both to God and God’s children, the issue of free will emerges, both God’s and humanity’s. Ye-Jin Moon repeatedly insists that “His/Her position is always limited to 95 percent of creating the ideal Collective Reality,” while the 5 percent that humanity is responsible for has persistently suffered from the Fall (pp. 130-131). Until people appropriate the heart principle, the Bible offers a symbolic intimation of the ideal. She reads the account in Genesis of the days of creation (pp. 130-155) along these lines.
Ye-Jin Moon devotes considerable attention to angels, which she sees as entirely spiritual, but an issue of consistency with sex/gender balance emerges when she describes male angels as created first, with female angels only to emerge after humanity’s maturity (pp. 174-177, 276-278). This appears an unnecessary qualification of femininity, especially in view of her overall purpose. The reason for an unusual emphasis on the male sexuality of angels only becomes clear later in Ye-Jin Moon’s work. Her account of how Three Blessings are conveyed in Genesis, with Five Roles of human activity corresponding to the Blessings, is more robust and transparent (pp. 186-189, see also 248-251, 263-264).
Procreation is involved in both the Blessings and the Roles, and this brings Ye-Jin Moon to a discussion of human sexuality (pp. 223-227). Her description of divinely intended “absolute sex” is powerful, but also serves as prelude to a discussion of the Fall or “Original Sin.” The approach intensifies Augustine’s conception by radically collapsing the angelic Fall into the human Fall. In The City of God, Augustine portrays the defect of the angels as occurring prior to creation, when their love of God degenerated into a love of self. The struggle between those two loves is the overall thesis he pursues through history. The effects of self-love in this sense cripple humanity from the time that it enters into the relationship between Adam and Eve. Ye-Jin Moon conflates the angelic Fall and the human Fall. It becomes a single, cataclysmic event of sexual wrong. The serpent of Genesis becomes Lucifer, conceived of as one of three principal archangels; he seeks out Eve, not to offer knowledge, but to engage in sexual intercourse (pp. 269-272, 278-282). Because Eve “fornicated with an angel” (p. 284), the unfolding of creation was derailed, and indirectly Adam became involved in homosexuality as a result of his sexual relationship with Eve, such that “homosexuality continues to remain one of the critical, unrestored indemnity conditions that have been afflicting human lineages” (p. 285).
By this stage in the book the particular reason for a focus on angels in Ye-Jin Moon’s thought comes into bold relief. In Augustine Neo-Platonic theology, they are agents in the governance of reality; in biblical presentations they are more in the nature of messengers; but in Divine Heart Principle their role is instantiated in the case of Lucifer’s alleged intercourse with Eve. Eve herself is characterized as involved in a “double sin” (p. 304, italicized in the book): her sexual intercourse with Lucifer and her implicating Adam in her own depraved sexuality.
The stark contradiction between Ye-Jin Moon’s deliberate revision of her father’s approach away from a patriarchal stance, on the one hand, and her literal doubling down on Eve’s responsibility for the Fall, on the other hand, invites reflection. The precedent for her position on Eve lies in Sun-Myung Moon’s Divine Principle, where Augustine’s coordination of the Fall of angels and humans is also instantiated by an act of intercourse. The reference to intercourse between angels and women that does appear in Genesis (6:1-2) could be taken as a biblical encouragement for such an approach, but that then begs the basic question: Is the story about Adam and Eve in the Garden about sexual intercourse in the first place?
When Genesis 3 is read in its own terms, those who have the inherited version of Augustine’s “Original Sin” in mind might feel disoriented. There is no Satan, or devil, or Lucifer, or fallen angel at all. Just a snake. “Eve” not called by that name until after God confronts the couple in the Garden, but is “the woman,” reinforcing the sense that “Adam” simply means “man.” There is no apple, but an unidentified fruit. And there is no sex. Because Ye-Jin Moon wishes to free her father’s theology from inherited patriarchalism in its various forms, it would have been wise to attend to the text of Genesis in itself.
This portion of the book of Genesis is the work of an ancient pre-Christian composer known as the Yahwist because of the way in which God is named. Part of the skill of the Yahwist’s narrative is the way it shows us that language can be deceptive. By portraying the interaction of characters, the Yahwist conveys the insight that language, introduced according to Genesis in order to name and extend God’s creation of reality, can be distorted in order to produce falsehood and deceit. It also acknowledges that those distortions can be inadvertent. Augustine, whose background prior to his conversion was as a professional teacher of rhetoric, and his flights of argument are sometimes strained. He did not interpret the book of Genesis well when he developed his account of “Original Sin;” rather, he pushed the text in the direction of his preferences.
Those preferences enabled Genesis 3 over time to be mythologized into the conviction that sin is synonymous with sexuality. That view has had profound and sometimes disturbing consequences, but also some almost comic results, as recently shown in Umberto Grassi’s book, What God Kept for Himself: Atheism, Sodomy, and Radical Dissent in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2026). Equating sin and sex undermines both a positive evaluation of human sexuality and a realistic assessment of the range of human sin. A fundamental theology always tends to become a pastoral theology, and for that reason its human implications need carefully to be weighed.
Ye-Jin Moon’s Divine Heart Principle undertakes to reform the approach of her father, and in many aspects, she succeeds. But in pressing ever further on a doctrine that was already dubious when Augustine invented it, she misses an opportunity to make her reformation more consequential. This first volume takes her discussion only into the “Second Try” stage of humanity, defined by Noah and his wife, so there is more on the way, and readers might yet be surprised by the further adjustments this resourceful thinker might introduce.