Claim. Sang Hun Lee defines education foundationally as the process of guiding children to attain resemblance to God’s Divine Image (Sungsang/Hyungsang, Yang/Yin, Individual Image) and Divine Character (Heart, Logos, Creativity), grounded in Genesis 1:27-28.
Elaboration. The Unification Theory of Education begins not from pedagogy but from creation theology. Because God created man and woman in His image (Genesis 1:27) and immediately gave them the three great blessings of being fruitful, multiplying, and exercising dominion (Genesis 1:28), education must be defined as the process by which children come to actually resemble what they were created to resemble (A. Resemblance to God and the Three Great Blessings).
Lee distinguishes two aspects of this resemblance. The Divine Image consists of Sungsang and Hyungsang, Yang and Yin, and the Individual Image — a human is born already possessing this image but in immature form. The Divine Character — heart, logos, and creativity — is what humans inherit by realizing the three blessings. The blessings map onto resemblance to God’s natures of perfection, multiplication, and dominion respectively.
This framing has structural consequences for the rest of the chapter. Because resemblance is the goal, education cannot be reduced to information transfer, technical training, or socialization. Any pedagogy that does not address Heart, Logos, and Creativity is by definition incomplete. It also means the philosophy of education (Sungsang aspect) takes priority over the science of education (Hyungsang aspect) — Lee opens the chapter by arguing that modern education has cultivated the latter while the former is in decline, which is why schools have become “places for buying and selling knowledge.”
The claim is distinctive against rival traditions. Where Plato grounds education in the Idea of the Good, Christianity in agape, Rousseau in natural goodness, and Marxism in class formation, Lee grounds it in a specific theological anthropology: humans are created images-in-progress whose maturation is the very content of education. Critics from secular pedagogy will challenge whether “resemblance to God” can do real curricular work; Lee’s answer is the three-form structure (heart, norm, dominion) developed later in the chapter.
See also. three-great-blessings-as-three-ideals-of-education, three-forms-of-education-heart-norm-dominion, education-originates-in-family-by-divine-design