Claim. Moon claims he never set out to become the True Parent but discovered the role while disentangling the fundamental problem of human life, and would willingly hand over the authority if a representative would step forward.
Elaboration. Moon makes a striking concession about his own self-understanding: “It is not easy to be True Parents. I would willingly hand over the authority of the True Parents, so if there is some representative here who wants to take it, please step forward. I never thought about becoming the True Parent, but as it turned out, I could not avoid taking responsibility for the Unification Church. And so on the way, I found myself as the True Parent” (3.4. True Parents’ expectations of us).
The rhetorical structure: had I known from the start, then everyone would have known; rather, I was “digging into the fundamental problem of human life without knowing it, and came all the way here as a result.” Self-attribution is presented as discovery, not aspiration. The reasoning offered is teleological: through disentangling the providence, the liberation of True Parents occurred, and “I came to know that God needs liberation. Since God was liberated through me, He cannot help but absolutely love me.”
This is rhetorically important. UC apologetics often confront the suspicion of self-coronation: how did Moon arrive at the conclusion that he is the Messiah/True Parent? His answer here is that the role found him, not the reverse — and that he would yield it if a qualified candidate appeared. The offer is presumably rhetorical (no one in 1991 could plausibly step forward), but it functions to deflect the self-aggrandizement charge.
The claim sits in tension with stronger statements elsewhere in the same chapter where Moon flatly declares “I have come here before the world to reveal the secrets of the universe for the first time in history” (§4.5). The two postures — humble discovery and definitive proclamation — both appear, sometimes within the same speech. Critics (ex-member, apologetics) typically read the humility as performative; defenders read the duality as authentic, reflecting both providential weight and personal modesty.
Worth a thread once counter atomics on the messianic self-disclosure question exist. The textual datum itself is valuable: Moon does, in his own words, narrate the True Parent identity as something he encountered en route, not something he set out to claim.