The History of God's Providence: A companion to Exposition of Divine Principle

I live with my wife in my hometown in Perthshire, Scotland. Before True Father ascended in 2012, we distributed four hundred and thirty copies of A Peace-Loving Global Citizen, which is an excellent introduction to True Father as a great man of our time. We felt the need to follow up with a book expressing True Father’s ideas.

The Divine Principle is the best introduction to True Father as the messiah, since it explains logically God’s purpose for the Creation, the Fall, the history of restoration, and the need for the messiah. The Exposition of the Divine Principle is an admirable textbook, initiated by True Father in the 1950s and elaborated by Hyo-won Eu in the 1960s. Effectively, the form of the Divine Principle we have today derives from Dr. Eu’s version. Several on-line versions of Divine Principle lectures series from recent years are also available for use in witnessing.

However, not all of our relatives and hometown contacts are able or willing to go on-line to find the truth. The Divine Principle book is also too hard for most people to understand on their own. Usually, church members invite guests to workshops, where trained Unification Church lecturers teach the Divine Principle in detail. Yet, the workshop site is sometimes hundreds of miles from where a guest lives. The fee and the travel expenses can be costly. For a working person with a family, to spare seven days or so to go to a workshop is also not easy. It would take hundreds, even thousands, of years to restore a nation, just by using the workshop process of education.

Our personal experience

In our hometown situation, we feel that a simplified Divine Principle in book form is essential. We can distribute the book as a follow-up to A Peace-Loving Global Citizen. A guest can read the book at his or her own leisure. Some people prefer to find information in a book. It can be more homely and memorable and leave a more permanent impression.

Since I have had considerable experience of lecturing Divine Principle during forty-four years in the church, my wife Chantal urged me to write a book that would make the Divine Principle more accessible and readable, especially for Western people. The result is The History of God’s Providence, which has little more than two hundred pages of easily legible print.

I do not intend this book to be a textbook for church members but rather a way of presenting the Divine

Principle to our guests. It has diagrams and maps. It has eight chapters and follows chronological order, starting with the Creation and the Fall and continuing with the history of restoration through Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses, the history of Israel, the mission of Jesus, the history of Christianity and advent of the returning Lord. It does not have separate sections on Christology, Eschatology, Resurrection and Predestination, although I have interwoven the essence of these ideas with the account of the life and death of Jesus and the developing providence. I have expanded coverage of the history of European Christianity during the last two thousand years. The emphasis on Rome, Britain and United States remains, but I have also included the roles of other European nations. The book introduces Korea’s role from 1870 and True Father’s from 1920, during the account of the situation of the World Wars. It covers True Father’s mission from the end of the Second World War, and is treated in the context of the “Third World War,” namely the cold war and its aftermath, leading to the millennium and Cheon Il Guk. The book concludes with True Father’s passing in 2012.

Hamish & Chantal Robertson with 2 of their children

I joined the church in 1972, and attended Young-hwi Kim’s first One-Hundred-Day workshop at Belvedere in 1973. I lectured Divine Principle, mainly as a center director, in the 1970s. I attended a One- Hundred and Twenty-Day workshop with my wife in New York in 1981, in which Ken Sudo was the main lecturer. I was education director in the United Kingdom 1983–1985. I lectured CAUSA (VOC) and Unification Thought from 1985 until the downfall of communism. I taught English at Sun Moon University 2001–2009, while my wife taught French.

I wrote this book with our own relatives and guests in mind. My wife has translated the material into French and a French edition will be prepared.

We hope the book can be useful to others in hometown outreach and tribal messiah work. You can find the book on this link: www,lulu,com/shop/hamish-robertson/the-history-of-gods- providence/paperback/product-22614518.html both as a paperback and as a hardback.