Exploring the Chambumoron, Lectures and Discussion Part 1 - 30th November 2024

Right, morning everyone. It's lovely to see you here. Those of you who are online, I wish you were here in person. It's always nice to know who's online. Currently, we have Ron, Trevor, and Peter. Okay, great. So, it says here 'discourse on Chambo Ron'. As Chris said, the word 'Ron' apparently means discourse. However, when they actually put the thing up, they didn't say that; they said theology. Anyway, what does the word discourse mean? I don't like the word in the way it's used nowadays because of a French postmodernist philosopher called Foucault, who wrote loads of stuff about basic corruption in the intellectual world in Europe and America. He was the one who tried to bring out this word 'discourse' and used it in a particular kind of way. But if you look in a dictionary, it says a verbal exchange, an inter-verbal interchange of ideas, and a formal and orderly and usually extended expression of thought on a subject. It's a mode of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience that is rooted in language and its concrete contexts. So, that's what the word means, and that is what I intend to do today. What is on the tin is what you're going to get, and it's not going to be what anybody else does. Supposedly, this is what it's actually described as: True Parents theology course materials. This is the first slide.

I personally don't like theology. I don't do theology; I don't teach theology. Even though I studied loads of theology, I'm Jewish by birth but never received any Jewish kind of education. I was brought up a Christian, but I stopped being a Christian when I was a teenager because I didn't like Christianity. I went to church every day; I went to that kind of school, and every Sunday I had to recite the Nicene Creed, which I know off by heart. I remember going to my RE teacher and saying, 'Well, I don't understand this. What does it mean? I'm supposed to say I believe it.' Oh, well, you just have to know it off by heart and recite it, and that means you're a Christian. If there's anything here you reject or disagree with, then you're not a Christian. Okay, there we go. So that's why I don't like theology; it's too much like that. Anyway, here we are. This is the course materials. There's a lot of them. This is the introduction, which covers these four points here. We wake up, make our way through it, and see how we get on.

So, the first thing, the first slide: the reason for the declaration of the only begotten daughter. The proclamation of the only begotten daughter is for the sake of Heavenly Parent. These are the different points we will be going through: Heavenly Mother to attend God as Heavenly Parent, restore the dignity of Heavenly Parent, honour Heavenly Parent, and reveal the truth of the Divine Principle. I don't like that expression there, 'truth of the Divine Principle', because originally, when they wrote the book in Korean, it wasn't called the Divine Principle. There was just some Australian pastor who, in the 1950s, happened to be witnessed to and liked it and said, 'Oh, this is what you should call it: the Divine Principle.' It has always been called the application of the principle or exposition of the principle. That's how it's been understood by the people who are the original authors. Unfortunately, we've become corrupted in our spiritual community, and we now say it's the truth of the Divine Principle, which again goes back into a very Christian way of looking at these things, the Nicene Creed, etc. Okay, so we're going to come on to this in a moment. There can only ever be one only begotten son and only one only begotten daughter. So, what do the words or the phrase or the title 'only begotten son' and 'only begotten daughter' mean? I'm going to look at that next. We're just going to go through these first few ones.

The first thing is there will forever be one God. That goes back to Abraham and traditional Jewish teaching that there's only one God. 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.' There is only one God, and God is one, not a divided being. There will only forever be one true parents, which is fairly new compared to what it was like 50 years ago. There will forever be only one begotten son, and there will forever only be one begotten daughter. So, I'll explore what those mean. What does 'only begotten son' and 'only begotten daughter' mean? Does anybody here have any ideas? One thing is this is not defined anywhere in the slides, and no lecturer has explained what the phrase 'only begotten son' and 'only begotten daughter' means. If you ask them, I don't think the ones I've asked have been able to answer the question: what does this phrase mean? The whole thing is about that, but if you're doing a discourse, you have to try and uncover what these words mean in English or in Korean, etc. So, all I'm doing here is what I'm supposed to be doing if we're going to have a discourse. Anyway, does anybody have any ideas about what 'only begotten son' and 'only begotten daughter' mean or what they believe it means?

The word 'begotten' is important. Yes, that's right. 'Begotten' means son or daughter of. Okay, so the first thing is, where does the title come from? It comes from the Gospel of John, the fourth gospel in the New Testament, where Jesus is several times described as being the only begotten son. It's not something that Jesus ever said about himself; it's just something which the author of the Gospel of John decided was his theology about who Jesus was. That's why he describes Jesus as being the only begotten son. Then it was carried on into the Nicene Creed, which we're going to look at later, and then also how this has been translated. Even though in the Gospel of St John, if you look in the King James Version, it says 'the only begotten son', in other more recent translations of the Bible, it doesn't actually use that expression. The Korean Bible is translated from the King James Bible in the late 19th century. During the 19th century and early 20th century, as far as I remember, his grandfather, who was a bishop, was involved in that translation. They just did it entirely upon the Korean, from the King James Version. It wasn't originally from translating from the Greek or the Hebrew into the Korean; it was from the English. As far as I know, there aren't any new Korean Bibles. I'm not aware of any new translations. Does anybody know? No, I have no idea.

So, what does 'begotten' mean? As Joanna said, to beget, which is the present tense, means to bring a child into existence by the process of reproduction. A child, which is a human being, but also cats beget cats, dogs beget dogs. That's just how you have a child. In the Bible itself, there are 139 verses which have that word in 17 books of the Bible. Anyone who's read the Bible, especially the Old Testament, will come across it over and over again. So, Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, Jacob begat Judah and his brethren. From the King James Version, Judah begat Perez and Zerah of Tamar, and Perez begat Hezron, and Hezron begat Ram. It goes all the way down, and Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, to whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. You find that in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew, and of course, you find a lot of it in the Old Testament, all the lineages of the sons of Noah go on until you get to 70 different descendants of Noah. So, that's the present tense, and 'begat' is past, and 'begotten' is also past tense. My English isn't good enough to remember how to phrase that. Anyway, something that is begotten is brought into existence by parents.

The Greek, which is what the Gospel of John was written in, the word is 'monogenes'. That's what that word there is; it's only part of it, it's only the 'genesis' part. This is what the word means. This is when traditional Christian theology, by C.S. Lewis, who wrote 'Mere Christianity', comes into play. He ended up being a professor at Oxford University. He started off as a professor of philosophy, and he began as an atheist. However, studying philosophy led him to the conclusion that God exists. He wrote a very good book about that whole journey. This is what he wrote in 'Mere Christianity', which is well worth reading. It's an amazing book because he came from that kind of background, and he was able to engage with and present the Christian faith in a way that people who weren't Christians could understand and make sense of. That's what he wanted to do for himself to unpack it. C.S. Lewis also wrote the Narnia stories. We don't use the word 'begotten' much in modern English, do we? Does anybody use that word often? No, but everyone still knows what it means because this book was written, and these talks he gave were during the Second World War and eventually put together into chapters and published as a book in 1952. At that stage, everyone read the Bible regularly. To beget is to become the father of; to create is to make. That's an important distinction.

The difference is this: when you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies. Women didn't feature very much in this process, except that the word 'man' in those days covered both men and women. Nowadays, people don't understand that's what the word actually means. A man begets human babies; a beaver begets little beavers; a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. When you create, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest; a beaver builds a dam; a man makes a wireless set, or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set, say a statue. If he's clever enough, a carver may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. You can see these; the Greeks are particularly good at this. You can see them in the British Museum, but of course, it's not a real man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think; it is not alive. So, we see the distinction between begetting and creating.

If we look at the words 'only begotten son' in John, the King James Version says, 'the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.' Again, you get emphasis here upon truth. It says again a bit later on, 'No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.' Again, in the bosom of the Father, 'For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.' For God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already because he hath not believed in the name of...

The only begotten Son of God. Any comments on these verses? This is the King James Version. I don't like the last verse. Why do you think it emphasises the name? It condemns anybody who doesn't believe. Yes, that's right. It says that anyone who doesn't believe is condemned. He who has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God is condemned. That verse has affected the whole of Christianity, leading to the persecution of heretics, people being burned at the stake, and others being condemned because they didn't believe a particular part of the Nicene Creed, for example. They were expelled from the Roman Empire and later condemned. It's not good. It may be in the Bible, but does that mean it's true? That phrase is in the Bible, but is it true that God condemns people and sends them to hell if they don't believe that Jesus is the only begotten Son or if they don't believe in Jesus' name? This is a particular theology developed by a specific Christian spiritual group that authored the Gospel of John. They obviously had conversations, but there were some people who disagreed with them. What are we going to do with these people who we don't agree with? Well, we'll kick them out and tell them that if they don't believe this, they are condemned. This has affected the whole of Christianity, and we have to wonder if this will affect our own spiritual community. Some people think like that within our own spiritual community, and I think that's very problematic.

To remind you of what C.S. Lewis said, he didn't start the shop. This is the first thing to get clear: what God begets is God, just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God, just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not of the same kind; they are more like statues or pictures of God. Here, C.S. Lewis is explaining what it means to say that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God. It means that no other human being is begotten by God; only Jesus is one of a kind. Why is that? Because he is the second person of the Trinity. Jesus is God because he is begotten. That is why Christians believe Jesus is God, because he is the only begotten Son of God. Gods create gods; cats give birth to gods. If you want to know more about that, just read the Greek mythology about Zeus and all these gods having gods. In the Bible, it says God created Adam and Eve; he didn't give birth to them. Adam and Eve were not the only begotten Son or daughter of God; they were created by God. This is a traditional biblical view. Christianity changed because it wanted to assert that Jesus is the begotten Son of God; therefore, Jesus is God, and that's what the words mean. That's what 'begotten' means.

Now, why has nobody explained this until now in our spiritual community? Is it embarrassing? Why haven't the lectures explained this? This is what the words mean: only begotten Son, only begotten daughter. Then you have to decide if that is true. Is it true about Jesus? Do we believe Jesus is the only begotten Son of God? Was he the second person in the Trinity? Was Jesus God, or was he merely a human being? Other translations of this have become a problem within Christianity. Ordinary Christians believe Jesus is the only begotten Son of God; that's what it says in the Nicene Creed. However, more recently, Bible scholars have been examining this and trying to understand what's going on here, especially since the development of modern biology. People realise that gods don't actually have sex with human beings and give birth in the way they were believed to by the Greeks. The translation of this has changed. The King James Version states, 'For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.' If you read the Douay-Rheims, a French Catholic translation from the late 19th century, it says, 'For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.' This does not say that Jesus is begotten; it just states that he is God's one and only Son.

There are some differences between Jesus and other sons, but not because he is begotten. Trying to work around this, the New Catholic Bible states, 'For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may gain eternal life.' The Message, a very recent version of the Bible, states, 'This is how much God loved the world: he gave his Son, his one and only Son, and that is why no one need be destroyed by believing in him; anyone can have a whole and lasting life.' Different translators interpret the Greek in various ways, and other scholars have started looking at these different translations to figure out what's going on here. The modern translations of 'monogenes' as 'one and only' introduce a contradiction into scripture. They are interested in how scripture has been understood and how it has been translated. There are other sons of God mentioned in scripture, such as in Genesis, Job, Hosea, Matthew, and Ephesians. The simple answer to how Christ is the only Son is that all these other sons are created, and none are begotten. That is what the words mean; that is what the original version of the Bible written in Greek means. Jesus was begotten; everyone else is just created, like Adam and Eve. Everything is created, but it's not God.

If 'begotten' is omitted from 'monogenes', this crucial difference between these other sons of God and Christ is also omitted, introducing a contradiction into scripture and therefore into theology. However, if 'begotten' is faithfully retained in rendering the Greek word 'monogenes', then the contradiction disappears. Christ differs from the other sons of God in this crucial way: he is the only begotten Son of God; all others are not begotten but created. This is traditional Christian theology. Traditional conservative Christians naturally ask why these modern translations have changed the translation of this word 'monogenes' from 'only begotten' to just 'only' or 'one and only'. Having considered the question of the etymology of 'monogenes' and the evidence of its usage in the New Testament, there is clearly no solid reason for adopting the meaning 'one of a kind' or 'unique' in place of 'only begotten'. The only reason that could explain 'only begotten' being displaced by 'one of a kind' or similar meanings is a reason remote from the actual evidence—an overriding theological reason. People are now reading the Bible with a different theological perspective than those who wrote it, thinking they need to change the translation to fit their theology as opposed to what was originally written.

The possible theological reason is that 'only begotten' is essential to maintaining the historic and scriptural doctrine of the Trinity, conveying the important truth that a son is of the same substance as the father, which we will look at in the Nicene Creed. This is a truth embodied in the faithful creeds and confessions of the church, from which it has no warrant to depart. It is astonishing that a large part of the church today, by adopting modern Bible versions that omit the concept of 'begotten' in the translation of 'monogenes', are being silently and unwittingly infiltrated by antitrinitarians. The Trinity is the idea of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, which is traditional historical Orthodox Christianity going back to the time of the Nicene Creed and before. Various modern scholars have thought about this and realised there are problems with the idea that Jesus is begotten. If you want to believe that Jesus is literally the Son of God, literally begotten, that is one perspective. However, if you don't, because of modern biology, you might think that the ancients didn't understand modern biology and wrote it that way. You might wonder why the early Christians did that. There are many reasons; for example, the disciples thought Jesus was a human being. He had parents, and they didn't believe in the virgin birth, but they could also see he was not like them. He was different.

When they met the Father, they realised he was obviously a human being, but there was something different about him. His personality, character, and the atmosphere he created were very different from anyone else they had ever encountered. I think that was the same experience the disciples had; he was not a normal human being in some way. Then, of course, there was the resurrection. How many other people had ever been resurrected? Nobody before or since. He is one of a kind in that sense. By believing in the resurrected Jesus, one could experience forgiveness of sins, and one's life could be completely transformed and changed. Many people have been born again through believing in Jesus and had their hearts changed and sins washed away. No other founder of any other religion has followers who say they experience that through a relationship with the founder of their faith. Muslims believe that Muhammad was a prophet, but none of them believe that Muhammad can forgive their sins. Neither do Jews believe that Moses forgives their sins or that Abraham does, nor do Buddhists believe that Buddha does. It's just that they are unique. No other religion is like that. For Christians, it is evident that there is something different about Jesus, not only when he was alive but also in his resurrection. By believing in him, we can have a relationship with the living Christ, the resurrected Christ, and that is life-changing.

Then they had to think about how to explain all that. This led to intense discussions about who Jesus was. The early Christians were obviously different, and there were arguments and discussions among Christians about these things. Eventually, they became so fed up with arguing and fighting that when Constantine, the emperor of the Roman Empire, wanted Christianity to be the ideology of the empire, he became annoyed with the constant disputes among Christians. He wanted all people in the Roman Empire to believe the same thing. Therefore, he called the Nicene Council and urged all the bishops to agree upon what they believed. Anyone who claimed to be a Christian had to believe this, this, and this. They needed to stop all the arguments. Anyone who didn't accept it would be expelled from the Roman Empire. That was the context of intense discussion about who Jesus was. People thought it was really important to believe the same thing about Jesus, because if you didn't, the Gospel of John states that if you don't believe Jesus is this or that, you will be condemned. That was how it worked. People thought what was more important was not how you lived your life but what you believed. I remember when my wife and I went to get married. We met with her parents, who come from an Evangelical Christian background. My wife wanted to get married in their church, so we went for an interview with the minister and a couple of the elders who had known my wife since she was a child. They asked me what I believed about Jesus. I said I believe in Jesus, but I think it's more important that you believe in Jesus, not just what you believe about him. I don't think it makes any difference what you believe about Jesus; believing in Jesus, trusting him, and living a Christian life is more important than the specifics of your beliefs. When I said that, they had to agree, but they still wouldn't marry us in the church, so we got married in my church, the Church of England. That's how it is for me, but for some people, that's not the case. There are some people within the Christian church who are changing these things. How is Jesus begotten? That starts with the Nicene Creed. I'll come back to that. Forty minutes and nineteen seconds have passed, so if I'm going to fit in with the Chairman's announcement, I better stop. Does anyone have any questions or want to make a cup of tea and have a discussion? Does anyone have any questions online, by the way?

It's really helpful to hear much more about the history. I always had problems with this term 'only begotten'. I went to the kind of school you did, and this was a challenge for me too. I remember thinking that when the angel Gabriel came to Mary, God had sex with her, and that's how Jesus was born. I thought, 'Oh gosh, you must be joking.' This was during high school, and it just did not make sense to me. When I was at university, I became a materialist, thinking that was the only way to see sense. But then, I had this incredible experience with a boyfriend who wasn't even born again himself, which swept me off my feet. After that, I thought, 'Forget about the term only begotten.' So, for me, it's quite difficult that it raises its head again because I wish it had never been there. My personal feeling is, why is it so important anyway?

I'm really grateful to hear some of the history which I didn't know. Does anybody else have any questions or points they'd like to raise? Pet Stevens has some comments regarding the term 'begotten'. I would expect his comments to be long, so I’ll read them now, and then we can have a break. This is part of the break, really, these kinds of questions and comments. Good morning, Peter. He attributes to the term 'begotten' that it can't mean 'born' because Adam and Eve were also born sinless. That would mean that Jesus couldn't be the only begotten. So, 'begotten' must mean 'become perfect'. That's not what the word means. It means the Father is not the only begotten Son because Jesus is begotten before the Father. If you assume that Jesus is begotten, a person is the only begotten Son until another son is born to God. Then neither is the only perfection a standard for 'begotten'. If the mother is not perfect, there’s only a begotten daughter. Yet, God creating mankind is not the same as begetting them. CS Lewis has made that very clear. We are to be His; we are in His image, just like a picture or statue is in His image. We're not created things; we are children of God. Please read my above comments as Peter Stevenson's question.

So, he's basically accepting the idea that the Father is the only begotten Son of God, but then he argues that that's not what the word means. Are there any other questions or comments? It's always nicer to sit around a table, have a cup of tea, and chat. Let's do that. See you back up here at 11:00.