Question. In CSG Book 1 Chapter 1, §4.2, SMM says: “Unification Church members can only say, ‘God naturally exists,’ but this is not the case. God Himself also had to develop. This is the correct answer” (218-263, 1991.8.19). What does “God Himself also had to develop” mean theologically — and how is it consistent with God’s absoluteness, eternity, and uniqueness as taught elsewhere in the same chapter?
Why it matters. The claim is theologically distinctive — closer to process theism (Whitehead, Hartshorne) than to classical theism (Aquinas, Calvin). If taken at face value, it threatens divine aseity. If taken as figurative, it loses the bite SMM seems to want it to have. Either reading shapes how we interpret the rest of the chapter’s claims that God needs a body, needs a partner for love, and is constrained by His own principles (see csg-god-needs-body-via-adam-and-eve, csg-god-cannot-love-without-a-partner, csg-gods-omnipotence-operates-within-principle).
Current best guesses.
- Developmental claim is about God-in-relation, not God-in-Himself. God’s living love and manifest fatherhood develop with creation; God’s essence does not. This rescues aseity but blunts SMM’s “this is the correct answer” framing.
- Developmental claim is about pre-creation timing. SMM may be saying that before the creation existed, even God’s own self-understanding was incomplete — an existential, not metaphysical, development.
- Process-theism-like reading. God genuinely co-develops with creation; aseity is a category error imported from Greek philosophy.
Trace through later CSG books (especially Book 2 on True Parents and Book 13 on the Spirit World) for elaboration. If SMM never returns to it, the tease may be deliberate — a placeholder for a doctrine he chose not to systematize.