What Genesis 1:28 actually says
Genesis 1:28 (ESV) reads: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” It is the first speech God makes to human beings in the biblical narrative. It comes after God has called them into existence, blessed them, and declared the creation good. The verse contains three imperatives — be fruitful (multiply individually), multiply (extend into family and lineage), and have dominion — and it has been read for two and a half millennia as the founding charter of the human vocation.
What is striking about the verse is how compact it is. Twenty-five words in English carry the entire program God sets for the species. Almost every later biblical narrative — the call of Abraham, the deliverance from Egypt, the gift of the land, the kingdom of David, the great commission — can be read as God returning to one or another part of this sentence and trying again. Christian tradition has long noticed that Genesis 1:28 sits at the headwaters of the rest of Scripture. The reading laid out below presses the observation further.
The Divine Principle’s three-blessings reading
Read carefully, Genesis 1:28 contains three discrete blessings: first, that each human being would become an individually perfected person, fully embodying God’s character in their own mind and body; second, that two such persons would become husband and wife and form a family that perfectly embodied God’s love; third, that humanity, having been individually and relationally perfected, would exercise creative stewardship over the natural world. The three blessings are sequential. Each presupposes the one before it.
This sequencing is what makes the reading distinctive. The human pair in Eden never completed the first blessing — they fell before reaching maturity, before they were ready to be joined in marriage. As a result, the second blessing was attempted from a position of incompleteness, and what should have been the founding marriage of the human race went catastrophically wrong. The third blessing — dominion — has been pursued by humanity ever since, but it has been pursued by people who never completed the first two, which explains a lot of what is broken about human civilization. For more on how the broader system builds out of this verse, see the Divine Principle introduction.
First blessing: individual perfection
The first blessing is that each human being would reach what could be called the perfection stage — the third of three stages of growth (formation, growth, completion). “Perfection” here is not the sinless moral perfection of post-Reformation Protestant theology. It is closer to maturity, completion, or fullness. The right image is biological: a plant has a seed stage, a growth stage, and a fruit-bearing stage. The plant is not defective in the growth stage; it is just not yet what it will be. On this reading the human being was meant to mature in the same way, growing into full union of mind and body around God’s love.
The implication that follows is uncomfortable for any reader trained in classical Christian theology. If the first blessing requires reaching a state of completion before marriage and parenthood, then the fall is not primarily about disobedience in the abstract. It is about a particular failure at a particular stage — a failure to wait, to mature, to reach the point where the second blessing could be received without rupture. Genesis 3 is the record of exactly that failure, and the rest of the system flows out of that reading.
Second blessing: a true family
The second blessing — “be fruitful and multiply” — is the call to form a family. Not just a biological family, but a family that embodies God’s love in three generations: husband-and-wife as one organism, parents-and-children as the natural extension, and siblings related to each other in the love that flows from a unified parental center. The original intended family is what this tradition calls the True Family, and the providential center of all of history has been to recover the conditions under which such a family could finally appear on the earth.
This is where the Unification movement’s practice of the Blessing comes from. The Blessing is the matching and sacred-marriage ceremony in which couples receive the grace of being grafted into a restored lineage. The internal logic is that the second blessing was the one that broke in Eden, and the second blessing is therefore the one that has to be restored. The Blessing ceremony is the practical mechanism by which the movement believes that restoration extends into ordinary lives. For a description of what actually happens at one, see our essay on the Blessing ceremony.
Third blessing: dominion over creation
The third blessing — to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” — is the dominion blessing. Dominion is the natural extension of the first two: an individually perfected person, formed in a true family, exercises a kind of stewardship over the natural and cultural world that flows out of love rather than out of mastery. The modern environmental crisis, and the various crises of human exploitation, are evidence of what happens when the third blessing is attempted by people who never completed the first two.
What is distinctive in this account — and what most overlaps with serious creation-care theology in the broader Christian world — is the claim that the third blessing is not separable from the first two. Dominion exercised from an unmatured heart turns into domination. The same imperative that, in the original blueprint, was meant to be a loving cultivation of the earth has, in fallen history, become extraction and conquest. The three blessings, in this sense, are not a theology of human grandeur. They are a theology of what was supposed to happen and didn’t.
How mainstream Christianity reads the same verse
Most Christian traditions read Genesis 1:28 as a single creation mandate rather than as three sequenced blessings. The Reformed and Catholic traditions emphasize dominion as cultural stewardship and have built robust theologies of work and vocation around it. The Eastern Orthodox tradition has a long tradition of reading the verse alongside the doctrine of theosis — humanity growing into the divine likeness — that lines up surprisingly well with this notion of perfection-as-maturation, though the metaphysics are different. None of these traditions, however, draws the strong sequencing claim laid out above.
That sequencing claim — that the second blessing presupposes the first, and that the fall broke the sequence at the seam between them — is what makes the reading either compelling or unconvincing, depending on whether you find the sexual reading of Genesis 3 textually warranted. A Christian reader who reads the fall as a more diffuse disobedience will not accept the sharper reading. A reader who finds the sharper reading textually present in Genesis 3 will find the rest of the structure falling into place. The Compare page lays the two readings side by side.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the Divine Principle teach the three blessings?
The teaching is laid out in Chapter 1 of the Exposition of the Divine Principle (the Principle of Creation), in the section titled “The Three Great Blessings and the Creation of the Universe.”
Is the three-blessings reading unique to the Divine Principle?
The three-imperative structure is recognized by virtually every Genesis commentator. What is distinctive is the sequencing claim — that the second blessing presupposes the first, and that the fall broke the chain at the seam between them.
Does this reading require believing Adam and Eve were literal?
In its strongest form, yes. The Divine Principle reads Genesis as historical and treats the first human pair as the original ancestors. A reader with a more figurative view of Genesis 1–3 will not accept the strongest form of the argument.
What does “perfection” mean in the first blessing?
Perfection in the Divine Principle means reaching the mature stage of growth — the third of three stages (formation, growth, completion). It is closer in meaning to “maturity” or “completion” than to moral flawlessness.
Did the Divine Principle change how Unificationists read Genesis?
Yes. Genesis 1:28 functions almost as a load-bearing verse in the doctrine. The Blessing ceremony, the theology of restoration, and the role of the True Parents all trace back, structurally, to this one sentence.