Claim. God’s heart has been expressed in three forms during creation and the dispensation of restoration — heart of hope (anticipating Adam and Eve), heart of sorrow (at the fall), and heart of pain (watching providential figures persecuted) — and the education of heart consists in conveying these to children.
Elaboration. Lee structures the education of heart around a specific tripartite phenomenology of God’s emotional life (2. Forms of Expression of God’s Heart). The heart of hope is God’s joyful anticipation during the 15-billion-year creation process; God spent that immense time creating the universe for the sake of His beloved children Adam and Eve, and did not feel the labor as long or difficult because of the joy awaiting Him. The heart of sorrow is God’s grief at the moment Adam and Eve fell into Satan’s realm of death — analogous to parents losing children, but incomparably deeper because God’s prior hope was so great. The heart of pain is God’s bitter feeling at watching the central figures of restoration history — prophets, saints, sages — be persecuted and killed by fallen humanity and Satan’s agents.
This tripartite structure does specific work. It connects God’s emotional experience to three providential phases: creation (hope), fall (sorrow), and restoration history (pain). It also explains the Unification doctrine that God is a God of han — “deep mortification” — accumulated through the providence. “Since the beginning of history, there has been no person who has ever grieved as much as God.”
Lee insists this is not abstract theology but pedagogical content: children must come to understand these three forms of God’s heart. He invokes Reverend Moon’s early ministry, where Moon would “weep bitterly when he spoke about the fall of Adam and Eve.” The tearful sermons of the early UC are presented as the authoritative model for what an education of heart should communicate.
The claim is distinctive against classical theism, which typically denies that God experiences sorrow or change. Lee’s God is deeply affective, and that affectivity is what makes the education of heart possible — children resemble God’s perfection precisely by coming to feel what God feels. Worth a thread on the tension with classical divine impassibility once a counter atomic exists.
See also. education-of-heart-requires-practice-not-just-words, gods-heart-overrides-divine-foreknowledge, god-is-the-god-of-heart