The Cheon Il Guk Scriptures

The Cheon Il Guk Scriptures

Mrs. Moon set out to revise Cheon Seong Gyeong. She also commissioned two new anthologies of Rev. Moon’s words, Pyeong Hwa Gyeong (Peace Scripture) and Chambumo Gyeong (True Parents’ Scripture). She said it was necessary to refine and polish what was “not organized and good order”

it was reasonable for Mrs. Moon to see the Cheon Seong Gyeong, even the Eight Textbooks as a whole, as only a half-finished concept and not a corpus that would stand the test of time. Consider that the Eight Textbooks are a motley collection, ranging from a huge 600+ volume corpus of Rev. Moon’s speeches that is still being assembled, to the single speech “Owner of Peace and Owner of Lineage,” and even “Family Pledge” that can be written on a single page. Peace Messages, another of the eight, includes speeches from different occasions that have large portions built from identical paragraphs. The first Cheon Seong Gyeong also contains numerous duplications, because it is an amalgam of 16 booklets developed in Japan with overlapping content. Further, it does not include material from speeches beyond March 2003, leaving out the entire last decade of Rev. Moon’s teachings.

In assembling the three Cheon Il Guk Scriptures—Cheon Seong Gyeong (2014), Pyeong Hwa Gyeong and Chambumo Gyeong, Mrs. Moon displayed growing confidence to assert her messianic authority, as co-revelator of the Word. No doubt Rev. Moon encouraged her in this regard, as their last worldwide public speaking tour in 2010-11 was titled, “Cosmic Assembly for the Settlement of the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind Who, as God’s Embodiment, Proclaim the Word.” Not only do the three volumes, totaling over 4,800 pages, contain many more extracts from Rev. Moon’s speeches than the first Cheon Seong Gyeong, they also include extracts from Mrs. Moon’s speeches. Thus, Cheon Seong Gyeong includes 43 excerpts from her speeches given in the months following her husband’s passing.[11] Pyeong Hwa Gyeong includes the full text of 16 of her speeches among its 168 public addresses. Chambumo Gyeong, which delineates the course of True Parents’ life and ministry, covers not only Rev. Moon’s life but also Mrs. Moon’s, with excerpts from her speeches wherever appropriate. In short, it is a scriptural portrayal of the True Parents—Rev. and Mrs. Moon together.

The term “Original Substance” refers to the True Parents themselves as the original embodiments of the Word. With its teaching that True Parents are the fundamental duality of God as masculine and feminine made manifest in the world, OSDP anticipated the shift from Exposition’s focus on the Messiah and Lord of the Second Advent to the Cheon Il Guk Scriptures’ focus on True Parents. However, OSDP fell short of being a thoroughgoing rewrite of Exposition, and despite great effort to promote these workshops, they did not prove to be convincing or even particularly inspirational. OSDP’s shortcomings may have encouraged Mrs. Moon to move on to the new educational format that she chose—the three Cheon Il Guk scriptures.

(Extract from Journal of Unification Studies, Vol. 19, 2018 - Pages 1 - 22, Theological Developments in the FFWPU since the Death of Rev. Moon, written by Andrew Wilson)