Claim. The Divine Principle teaches that after God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit each took direct responsibility for the world’s salvation, the era of the Second Coming places a third responsibility on “the people of faith on earth and in heaven” to defeat Satan.
Elaboration. Hendricks cites EDP p. 186: “The period after the Second Coming of Christ … is called the age of the providence based on the believers’ responsibility.” The implied periodization runs God → Jesus and the Holy Spirit → people of faith. Each phase is a different agent taking the lead in providence; the present era is the first in which ordinary believers, rather than divine or semi-divine actors, are the primary actors against Satan. This is the doctrinal basis Hendricks uses to argue that organizational forms which empower ordinary members (“populist” forms) are providentially fitting for the Unification era.
The DP source divine-principles-support-for-the-populist-approach should eventually be re-anchored directly to the EDP p. 186 passage when the DP resource is ingested.
See also. believers-responsibility