Special to CosmicTribune.com, July 7, 2023

Following is the third in a series of excerpts from a new book, What I Saw at the Second Coming: The Big Story by R.J. Morton. Earlier: Part I, Part II

The following excerpt is from Chapter 1: ‘Messiah as Investigative Journalist’

Since we are at the time of the Completed Testament Age … it is time for your families to settle following my words. Therefore, when you listen to my words, you should not treat them casually. I risked my life, urgently teaching you what I have to say and desiring to leave behind at least these words. You must understand this.
– Sun Myung Moon (292-122, 1998.3.28)

The Messiah is generally viewed as an other-worldly or apocalyptic figure who will purge the world of wickedness and set things right, immediately if not sooner.

Sun Myung Moon’s teaching about the Messiah was more down to Earth. The restored Adam would come as a man born naturally like all other men who have ever lived and died, he said. And no, he would not be a dictator.

Sun Myung Moon (1920-2012) was a spiritual teacher, businessman, and philanthropist whose followers consider him the “Lord of the Second Advent”, the Messiah. And they believe he bequeathed his divine essence through his bloodline and the “Blessing” of eternal marriage to all who would receive it, from generation to generation.

His “Divine Principle” connects the dots in the Bible and states that both the Creation and the evolution of civilization after “The Fall” happened over time periods in accordance with the “Principle of Growth” and “Historical Parallels.”

Thus the “Second Coming” of Christ would once again test the Free Will of all men and women as at all other critical providential junctures including the Fall in the Biblical Garden of Eden, the great Flood and the First Coming. It would not be imposed by violent and apocalyptic Divine intervention.

The remarkable success of this North Korea-born anti-communist thought leader in attracting young followers in the East and the West in the 1970s provided an irresistible story line to journalists. The secular mass media in the West exploited prejudices deemed acceptable towards Orientals and conservative anti-communists to project a threatening image of Sun Myung Moon as the ultimate evil incarnate, more menacing and sinister than the worst Nazi or Fascist.

Persecution from leading organized religions made him even more universally controversial. Christians and Jews of all stripes saw him take their youth as followers and concluded after a cursory review provided by press accounts, that he was a heretic, a Pied Piper or, worse, the Anti-Christ. ….

Sun Myung Moon appeared on the scene in the United States and Europe in the 1970s following the work of an advance team of missionaries and early members teaching his “Divine Principle.” Two-day workshops featured a series of lectures with chalk-board diagrams that included comprehensive Biblical and historical detail.

The lectures addressed the same topics: Ideal of Creation, the Human Fall, the Meaning of the “Last Days”, the Mission of Jesus, the Meaning of Resurrection, and Post-Biblical history concluding with the Second Coming of the Messiah.

They also enlarged upon Jesus’ teaching that God is love. To truly know Him is to encounter a God of unbearable suffering, Sun Myung Moon exclusively taught. If God was indeed “Heavenly Father”, how could he not be heartbroken at the suffering of His children in this Hell on Earth, he asked.

The Divine Principle was not delivered by God on tablets of stone, as Moses received the Ten Commandments. Rather, the “Completed Testament”, was written after agonizing research by Sun Myung Moon that began on April 17, 1935, when at the age of 15 he says he met Jesus in prayer near his birthplace in North Korea.

He completed the first draft of the Divine Principle in Busan, South Korea some 15 years later.

That research involved detailed study of the Bible (simultaneously in three languages) and all-night prayers which included encounters with primary sources in the spirit world. He did not believe what he was told during those experiences and checked them out.

One might say that the process entailed shoe leather journalism of the cosmic kind. It continued even when he was imprisoned in South Korea and Japan where he practiced what he preached based in part on what he was processing and validating.

The cruelest early persecution of Sun Myung Moon occurred after he acted on inspiration and left his young family in the South to preach the gospel in the newly communist North Korea where he had been born. Imprisoned in a labor-death camp at Hungnam, he was liberated only following the Incheon landing by U.S. forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s command and the push northward early in the Korean War.

A riveting, day-by-day account of the sometimes-hair-raising experiences and spiritual phenomena of those early days was researched and written by journalist Michael Breen based on dozens of in-depth personal interviews of those who came into contact with Sun Myung Moon. He excluded official Unification Church accounts.

Why couldn’t the process of discovering his New Truth have been easier, with this spiritual leader merely receiving the Word by automatic writing? He said he had no choice but to personally restore or “indemnify” the failures of human responsibility since the beginning of time and continuing to the present era.

An objective assessment of the lives of Jesus Christ and Sun Myung Moon would indeed show that being the alleged Messiah is no walk in the park.

Championing American Press Freedom

My meetings with him, few and brief though they were, reinforced a conclusion reached by serving as a “participant-observer” [See Chapter 3, “Method and Approach: Participant Observer as Pediatric Historian,” of the author’s master’s degree thesis at the University of Texas at Austin (1977, Robert J Morton) and book: The News World of New York City: A Retrospective, 2023, Origin 2021 Publishing] in his media companies from 1976 to early 2013:

Sun Myung Moon understood the media challenge in the United States in ways his disciples whom he charged with running those newspapers struggled to grasp. It certainly went far beyond an exercise in large-scale public relations for a new religion. What he envisioned was much more profound. After all it was the post-World War II mass media that had redefined reality for billions of people worldwide in ways that excluded God and the essence of Judeo-Christianity. Some might say that this doctrine stemmed from an evil, Orwellian force seeking to negate the very causal factors in the rise of advanced western civilization and instead consolidate the foundations of Hell on Earth.”

. . . . Earlier: Part I,  Part II

What I Saw at the Second Coming: The Big Story, Part I

  Part III: What I saw at the Second Coming: The big story