Hell

Hell is the realm of separation from God — the spiritual condition and territorial domain occupied by human spirits who, in their earthly lives, came to embody the false lineage, false love, and false sovereignty of Satan.

In the teaching of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Hell is not an eternal feature of God's creation and not a divine instrument of punishment. It is a wound — a territory that came into existence because of the Human Fall and one that True Parents have come to dismantle through the providence of Blessing, ancestor liberation, and the registration of all humanity into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Hell exists in two parallel forms: the earthly hell (지상지옥, jisang-jiok) — the suffering, broken human civilization built on the foundation of the false parents — and the heavenly hell (천상지옥, cheonsang-jiok) — the lowest stratum of the Spirit World, populated by spirits who lived without true love.

In the Exposition of the Divine Principle, the Spirit World is structured as a vertical hierarchy of three principal regions: the Kingdom of Heaven (천국, Cheon-guk) for spirits of perfected love, Paradise (낙원, Nag-won) as a transitional realm for those who attained spiritual life through faith but did not complete the Blessing on earth, and Hell — the lowest realm where lineage and love were severed from the Creator.

Without liberating hell, the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be completed. Before the Fall there was no hell. By cleansing the root that was defiled with Satan's blood with the blood of Heaven, the original form of the root must be restored — and only then will the fruit be recovered, only then will the gate of Heaven open. From the standpoint of those who know this Will, the words "hell came into being before the gate of Heaven was opened" are tragic words. The very fact that hell exists is tragic. Hell came into being because of the Fall. Since hell exists, hell itself must be turned into Heaven. The True Parents must unfold the entire realm of heart capable of presenting the liberation of hell.

— Sun Myung Moon (139-269, 01/31/1986), Cham Bumo Gyeong

This is the single most defining statement of Unification doctrine on Hell: it is a theological emergency, not a permanent metaphysical category, and the mission of True Parents is precisely to abolish it from existence. The framing differs sharply from classical Christian eschatology, in which Hell is sometimes treated as an irreducible feature of divine justice.

The grounding for this position is found in the Exposition of the Divine Principle, Part I, Chapter 5 (“Resurrection”) and Part I, Chapter 3 (“The Human Fall”), which together establish that Hell is the consequence of the Fall, not the design of Creation.

The Korean term 지옥 / 地獄 (jiok, chiok) is composed of two Sino-Korean characters: 地 (ji), meaning “earth, ground, place,” and 獄 (ok), meaning “prison, dungeon, jail.” A literal rendering is “earth-prison” or “the prison beneath.”

The compound entered Korean usage from Buddhist Chinese, where it translates the Sanskrit naraka, the realm of underworld torment in Indian cosmology. The word's spatial imagery is significant: it depicts confinement, immobility, the impossibility of escape — and this is precisely the picture used in Cham Bumo Gyeong, where Rev. Moon repeatedly speaks of the “walls of hell” that must be dismantled and the “gates of hell” that must be thrown open.

Standard Korean usage carries this Buddhist coloring — jiok as the place where karma is paid for through suffering, with multiple sub-levels distinguished by the severity of past wrongdoing.

Korean shamanism layered onto this an additional dimension: hell as the home of unappeased spirits (원혼, won-hon) — those who died with grief, resentment, or unfulfilled love and now haunt the living. Both meanings inform the Unification appropriation of the term, but neither is sufficient on its own.

The theological-Unification meaning differs in three crucial respects from common usage.

First, jiok in Unification thought is historically caused — it began on a specific date with a specific event (the Fall of Adam and Eve) — not eternal.

Second, it is relational and lineage-based rather than karma-based — what places a spirit there is the inability to love truly because of inherited fallen blood, not the accumulation of bad acts.

Third, it is destined for abolition — what no Buddhist or shamanic conception of hell envisions, Rev. Moon proclaims as the central work of his ministry.

In the Exposition of the Divine Principle, the origin of Hell is traced directly to the Human Fall (Part I, Chapter 3).

Hell did not preexist humanity — it came into being the moment Adam and Eve, instead of fulfilling their portion of responsibility and entering into God-centered conjugal love, fell through the Archangel and inherited his self-centered lineage.

This single event simultaneously created three things: original sin, the false parental position of Satan over humanity, and Hell as the territorial expression of life severed from God.

Because the family was wrongly joined in marriage, hell came into being — and in the heavenly world, paradise, the middle spirit realm, and hell came into being. All of these arose because of the Fall. If they had received God's Blessing, on the foundation of family they would have inherited the bloodline tied to God's perfected love and proceeded directly into the Kingdom of Heaven — but this was severed. Therefore, the entire historical defilement caused by Satan's bloodline must be cut off, completely revoked, and eliminated.

— Sun Myung Moon (297-274, 12/22/1998) Cham Bumo Gyeong

The logic here is exact and binding. Marriage was meant to be the institution through which God's love, life, and lineage would flow to the entire human race; when the first marriage was perverted by an unprincipled relationship between Eve and the Archangel and then transmitted horizontally to Adam, the entire downstream lineage of humanity inherited not God's blood but Satan's.

Hell is therefore the territorial expression of this severed lineage — the place where spirits whose bodies and hearts were never grafted back to the original root come to rest after death.

This understanding has decisive consequences. Because Hell is caused by lineage and not by individual wickedness alone, no amount of personal moral effort can, on its own, break the connection.

The fallen condition is inherited; the only mechanism that can sever it is a new lineage — the lineage opened by True Parents through the Holy Wine Ceremony and the Blessing.

Cross-reference here with the glossary entries on Original Sin, Lineage, and The Fall, which together complete the doctrinal context for Hell.

Unification theology takes the biblical witness on Hell with full seriousness, but reads it through the providential framework of the Divine Principle.

The Bible does not teach a single, unified picture of Hell; it presents a development of imagery across the canon that Unification thought tracks chronologically.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the term most often translated as “hell” is שְׁאוֹל (Sheol)—the realm of the dead, depicted in Job 10:21–22 as “the land of darkness and deep shadow” and in Psalm 88:3–6 as a pit of forgetfulness.

Sheol in the Old Testament is morally undifferentiated — both the righteous (Genesis 37:35, where Jacob speaks of going down to Sheol mourning Joseph) and the wicked descend there. Only in the later prophetic and apocalyptic writings (Daniel 12:2, Isaiah 66:24) does a clearer distinction between final reward and final punishment emerge.

Unification theology reads this development as reflecting the gradual maturation of the providence: in the Old Testament Age, the spirit world was not yet structurally clarified because the Messiah had not yet come.

In the New Testament, three Greek terms are translated as “hell”: ᾅδης (Hades) — the equivalent of Sheol; γέεννα (Gehenna) — derived from the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem where in earlier Israelite history children had been sacrificed to Moloch (2 Kings 23:10, Jeremiah 7:31); and ταρταρόω (Tartarus) — used only in 2 Peter 2:4 for the place of imprisoned fallen angels. Jesus' own teaching uses “Gehenna” most often (Matthew 5:22, 5:29–30; 10:28; 23:33; Mark 9:43–48), invoking imagery of unquenchable fire and “the worm that does not die.”

Crucially, Jesus speaks of Hell as a real possibility for the human soul, but he never describes it as God's intention; in his teaching, Hell is what people walk into when they refuse the love of the Father (Luke 15, the parable of the Prodigal — where the father runs to embrace, not to condemn).

The Apostle Paul's eschatology, particularly in 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, points toward universal restoration: “Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power… that God may be all in all.”

Unification reading: Paul intuited what Sun Myung Moon would explicitly proclaim — that the providence does not terminate while any portion of God's children remains lost.

The Book of Revelation closes the canon with the most graphic Hell imagery (“the lake of fire,” 20:14–15, 21:8). Unification interpretation reads this not as a literal description of an eternal post-mortem state but as apocalyptic-symbolic language for the complete defeat and dissolution of Satan's sovereignty — precisely the work that True Parents have, in the providential sense, already begun.

In order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must overcome hell. The one who overcomes hell is the one who enters the Kingdom of Heaven. To go to the Kingdom of Heaven, those who went to the heavenly world thousands of years ago must come down through their descendants, pass through hell, and arrive at the position of the earth.

— Sun Myung Moon (140-046, 02/01/1986), Cham Bumo Gyeong

This is a striking inversion of conventional Christian eschatology.

In Rev. Moon's teaching, the spirits who reached Paradise in earlier ages cannot enter the completed Kingdom of Heaven directly — they must reconnect through their descendants on earth, and the path leads through hell, because hell is where the work of restoration is being done.

The most distinctive feature of Unification doctrine on Hell is that it frames the abolition of Hell as a historical, providential, datable event—not a theological abstraction. Rev. Moon and Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, as True Parents, performed a sequence of declarations and ceremonies between 1985 and 2009, each specifically aimed at dismantling some dimension of Hell.

The opening of this providence began on February 1, 1985, while Rev. Moon was incarcerated in Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in the United States. He calls this “the Day of the Opening of the Gate of Heaven” (개천문일).

In the seven months from July 1984 to January of the next year — half of the thirteen months of imprisonment — I went into the very bottom of the prison, the bottom of hell, and opened the gate. Because I opened that gate, on the foundation of the realm of heart, the satanic world can be liberated. The walls that had stood between the earthly world and the heavenly world, even the walls of hell, were torn down at Danbury. Centering on True Parents, the four directions of east, west, south, and north were connected, and all the nations of the world could be linked.

— Sun Myung Moon (140-059, 02/01/1986), Cham Bumo Gyeong

A series of subsequent declarations expanded this opening. The Liberation of the Total Spirit World was declared on October 5, 1998, in Jardim, Brazil (the Sixth Jardim Declaration).

On January 8, 1999, in Punta del Este, Uruguay, Rev. Moon proclaimed the Cosmic Blessing and the Eradication of Satan's Lineage (the Seventh Jardim Declaration), which for the first time extended the Blessing not only to ancestors of Blessed Families but to every category of spirit, including murderers and the most fallen souls in Hell.

At seven-thirty in the morning of January 8, 1999, on the position of the number four-four going into eight, in conjunction with the Day of Four-Four, an emancipating origin was established by which families, nations, and the entire world can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Through the Proclamation Ceremony of the Cosmic Blessing and the Complete Eradication of Satan's Lineage, the entire cosmos has recognized this, and accordingly the walls that had stood blocking hell and the good spirits have been broken down and completely liberated.

— Sun Myung Moon (298-217, 01/08/1999), Cham Bumo Gyeong

The culminating event was the Day of the Proclamation of the Abolition of Paradise and Hell and the Registration into the Kingdom of Heaven (낙원 지옥 철폐와 천국 입적 선포의 날) on December 3, 2000, in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

The Father, who is a great strategist, performed the Blessing of murderers. To do that is something that not even God could do, that no one had thought of — striking centered on the principle. So on December 3, 2000, paradise and hell were abolished. How were they abolished? The gate of hell was opened wide, and the gate of paradise and the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven were opened wide as well. Because that crowd was blocked, they were all given the Blessing. When they were given the Blessing, the religious realm was abolished; and because the religious realm was abolished, the realm of hell at the very bottom rises up to paradise. And once paradise too is abolished and disappears, it means it has connected with the Kingdom of Heaven.

— Sun Myung Moon (341-021, 12/29/2000), Cham Bumo Gyeong

The mechanism of Hell's abolition is therefore not a divine fiat that dissolves it instantaneously, but a structured providential process: the religious realm is opened first, the spirits of religious leaders and saints are blessed and connected to True Parents' lineage, and from this elevated foundation, the lower realms are lifted by stages.

Hell does not disappear because it is forgotten — it disappears because every spirit confined within it is given the means, through the Blessing, to be engrafted into God's lineage and rise upward.

This work continues through the Cheongpyeong Workshop (천주청평수련원) in Korea, where the late Heung Jin Moon and Dae Mo Nim coordinate the ancestral liberation and Blessing ceremonies that release spirits from the lower realms. Cross-reference The Blessing, Lineage, and Resurrection for the complementary doctrines.

Christianity — Augustine, in The City of God (Book XXI), argued for the literal eternity of Hell as the just punishment of the unrepentant.

Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (Supplement, Q. 99) systematized this into the doctrine of poena damni (pain of loss) and poena sensus (pain of sense). C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce offered a more psychological reading: the gates of Hell are locked from the inside.

Origen of Alexandria in the third century proposed apokatastasis—universal restoration—and was condemned for it at the Second Council of Constantinople (553). Modern theologians such as Hans Urs von Balthasar (Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?) have revived a hopeful universalism within Catholic orthodoxy.

Unification theology aligns most closely with Origen and Balthasar in its conviction that salvation is universal in scope, but goes further: it does not merely hope that all will be saved but proclaims an active providential mechanism—the Blessing—by which liberation is being accomplished.

Judaism — The Talmud (Eruvin 19a) describes Gehinnom as having seven names, including “Sheol” and “Avadon,” and distinguishes between the wicked who suffer there briefly (the standard rabbinic teaching is twelve months) and those whose punishment is more lasting.

The medieval kabbalistic work Zohar describes seven levels of Gehinnom corresponding to seven categories of sin. Maimonides in Hilchot Teshuvah taught that the truly wicked are karet—cut off—rather than tormented eternally.

The Unification position resonates most closely with the rabbinic understanding that Hell is temporary and remedial, but adds the specifically providential framework that True Parents are the agents of its dissolution.

Islam — The Qur'an describes Hell (جَهَنَّم, Jahannam) with vivid detail across many surahs (Surah 4:56, 78:21–30, 88:1–7) and identifies seven gates corresponding to different categories of sin (Surah 15:43–44). Most classical Sunni theologians teach that punishment in Jahannam is finite for Muslims who have committed sins but eternal for unbelievers; Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and his disciple Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1350) argued, based on Surah 11:107 and other verses, that Jahannam itself will eventually come to an end—a view called fanaa al-naar (the annihilation of the Fire).

The Unification teaching is closest to this minority Sunni position, while emphasizing — as Islam does — that Hell is created by human action, not by God's design.

Buddhism — Buddhist cosmology recognizes multiple narakas (Pali: niraya) — typically eight hot hells and eight cold hells, plus various sub-hells — described in detail in the Devaduta Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 130) and in the Mahayana Sutra of the Past Vows of Earth Treasure Bodhisattva (Dizang Pusa Benyuan Jing). All Buddhist hells are temporary — the duration depends on karma — and Bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha (地藏, Korean: Jijang) is venerated specifically as the savior who descends into the hells to liberate beings.

The structural parallel with True Parents' descent into Danbury and the opening of the gates of hell is striking, though the underlying ontology differs: Buddhism understands hell-realms as karmic projections of mind, while Unification thought understands Hell as a real territory caused by an inherited corruption of lineage.

What makes the Unification doctrine of Hell distinctive across all these traditions is its historical-providential precision. No other tradition specifies a date on which Hell as a structural feature of the cosmos was abolished.

No other tradition centers the abolition on a particular human couple acting as parents to the cosmos. And no other tradition extends the salvific work to the most fallen souls — explicitly including murderers and the spirits of those who in their lifetimes opposed God's providence — without the conditions of personal repentance traditional theology has required.

The doctrine of Hell is not abstract speculation — it imposes concrete obligations on every Blessed Family.

Because each Blessed couple stands in the position of Tribal Messiah, they are responsible for the liberation of their lineage to the 7th, 120th, and ultimately 210th generation through the ancestor liberation and Blessing ceremonies at Cheongpyeong.

A Blessed Family that neglects this duty leaves its own ancestors stranded in lower realms of the spirit world — including, in many cases, in Hell.

In daily practice, this translates into three sustained disciplines.

First, the cultivation of true love within the family, since the spiritual quality one reaches in earthly life — not the doctrines one assents to — determines the level of the spirit world one inherits at the seunghwa (ascension).

Second, regular participation in Hoon Dok Hae (the daily reading of True Parents' words), which gradually transforms the spiritual self while still in the physical body.

Third, service through the Tribal Messiah mission — the active witnessing and Blessing of others, which both atones for ancestral debts and lays a foundation that the spirits of departed family members can use to rise.

Cross-reference Hoon Dok Hae, Tribal Messiah, and Blessed Family for the operational framework.

The point Rev. Moon emphasized repeatedly is that the providence of liberating Hell cannot be completed without the participation of Blessed Families; True Parents have opened the gates, but the descendants must walk through them on behalf of their ancestors.

In the field of New Religious Movements scholarship, the Unification doctrine of Hell has received attention chiefly through the comparative theological studies of George Chryssides (The Advent of Sun Myung Moon, 1991) and Frederick Sontag (Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, 1977), both of whom note the surprising universalism of Unification eschatology relative to its evangelical Christian critics.

Eileen Barker's pioneering ethnographic work, The Making of a Moonie (1984), did not focus on the doctrine of Hell as such but documented members' subjective experience of being engaged in a cosmic-scale liberation project — an experience directly traceable to this teaching.

Massimo Introvigne, director of CESNUR (Center for Studies on New Religions), has written on the providential events of 1998–2001 and identifies the Hell-abolition declarations as among the most theologically distinctive moments in the movement's late period.

James Lewis and Inga Tøllefsen have analyzed the seunghwa and ancestor liberation practices in their broader study of Unification ritual life.

Critical scholars such as David Bromley and Anson Shupe have generally focused on organizational and sociological dimensions rather than the speculative theology of Hell, but their work establishes the historical and institutional context in which the doctrine has functioned.

• Hell (지옥) in Unification theology is the realm of spirits dominated by the false lineage of Satan, existing both as the lowest stratum of the Spirit World and as the suffering condition of fallen earthly civilization.
• Hell did not exist before the Fall and is not eternal; it came into being when Adam and Eve's family was wrongly joined in marriage, severing humanity from God's lineage.
• The structure of the afterlife in Unification thought has three principal levels: the Kingdom of Heaven for the perfected, Paradise for those who attained spiritual life through religion but did not complete the Blessing, and Hell for spirits without true love.
• The mission of True Parents is the historical, providential abolition of Hell, accomplished through a sequence of declarations between 1985 and 2009, culminating on December 3, 2000, with the Day of the Abolition of Paradise and Hell and the Registration into the Kingdom of Heaven.
• The mechanism of Hell's abolition is the Blessing — extended through ancestor liberation at Cheongpyeong to every category of spirit, including the most fallen — by which the inherited lineage of Satan is severed and replaced with God's original bloodline.

Hell exists because original sin severed humanity from God's lineage; the Blessing reverses both — abolishing the inherited fallen lineage on which Hell depends and thus dissolving Hell's grip from the bottom up.

Rev. Moon taught that even Satan must ultimately be liberated and forgiven — not because Satan deserves it, but because God's parental heart cannot be at rest while any of His children, including the fallen Archangel, remain lost.

Through the Blessing — extended posthumously to ancestors at Cheongpyeong — spirits in Hell are regrafted onto the lineage of True Parents, severed from Satan's bloodline, and provided a path to rise through Paradise to the Kingdom of Heaven.

• Cham Bumo Gyeong, Book 11 — The Spirit World and Hell — Rev. Moon's most extensive teaching on the structure of the afterlife and the providential abolition of Hell.
• Cheon Seong Gyeong — The Realm of the Spirit World — primary scriptural compendium of Rev. Moon's words on the spirit world, including the levels of Hell, Paradise, and the Kingdom of Heaven.
• Exposition of the Divine Principle, Part I, Chapter 5 — Resurrection — the systematic theological account of the spirit world and its three levels grounded in the structure of the Fall and Restoration.
• Pyeong Hwa Gyeong — Speeches on World Peace — the Hell-abolition declarations of 2000–2001 in their public-facing form.

• The Fall — the originating event that brought Hell into existence.
• Original Sin — the inherited condition that binds spirits to Hell across generations.
• Satan / Lucifer — the fallen Archangel whose false lineage constitutes the substance of Hell.
• Spirit World — the broader cosmological framework within which Hell is one of three principal regions.
• Resurrection — the providential process of regeneration through which spirits move out of Hell and Paradise toward the Kingdom of Heaven.
• Lineage — the doctrinal key to understanding why Hell is inherited rather than merely earned.
• The Blessing — the providential mechanism by which Hell is abolished.
• Tribal Messiah — the responsibility of Blessed Families to liberate their lineage from Hell.
• Hoon Dok Hae — the daily practice that cultivates the spiritual self capable of avoiding Hell and reaching the Kingdom of Heaven.
• Death — the transition through which one's earthly love-cultivation determines one's destination in the spirit world.