Anthropology
Discipline Overview
Thematic article based on the works of E.W. Bullinger, George Warnock, C. and A. Noordzij, Stephen E. Jones, and Watchman Nee & Witness Lee listed below.
Primary sources: Number in Scripture · The Feast of Tabernacles (Warnock) · Evening and Morning · Who Are You? · The Economy of God · Basic Elements of Christian Life, Vol. 1 · Moses and the Path to Sonship · The Ark of Noah · The Inheritance of Jabez · Putting Hand to the Plow · From Passover to Tabernacles · The Feast of Tabernacles (Noordzij) · Creation’s Jubilee · The Restoration of All Things · The Laws of the Second Coming
Source abbreviations: NIS = Number in Scripture (Bullinger) · FoT = The Feast of Tabernacles (Warnock) · EaM = Evening and Morning (Warnock) · FMS = Feed My Sheep (Warnock) · Hys = The Hyssop that Springeth Out of the Wall (Warnock) · WAY = Who Are You? (Warnock) · VaA = The Vision and the Appointment (Warnock) · BfA = Beauty for Ashes (Warnock) · EOG = The Economy of God (Nee/Lee) · BXL1 = Basic Elements of Christian Life, Vol. 1 (Nee/Lee) · BXL2 = Basic Elements of Christian Life, Vol. 2 (Nee/Lee) · BXL3 = Basic Elements of Christian Life, Vol. 3 (Nee/Lee) · LTW = The Life That Wins (Nee/Lee) · KoL = The Knowledge of Life (Nee/Lee) · GC = The Glorious Church (Nee/Lee) · Moses = Moses and the Path to Sonship (Noordzij) · Ark = The Ark of Noah (Noordzij) · Jabez = The Inheritance of Jabez (Noordzij) · Plow = Putting Hand to the Plow (Noordzij) · PaT = From Passover to Tabernacles (Noordzij) · FoT-N = The Feast of Tabernacles (Noordzij) · CJ = Creation’s Jubilee (Jones) · ROAT = The Restoration of All Things (Jones) · LSC = The Laws of the Second Coming (Jones) · IGCSE = If God Could Save Everyone, Would He? (Jones)
The anthropological question and what is at stake
The question of the human person — who he is, for what purpose he was created, what happened to him and what his ultimate destiny is — is not a peripheral question of theology. It cuts directly to the heart of the doctrine of God, soteriology and eschatology. To misunderstand the human person is to misunderstand salvation; to draw the destination of man too narrowly is to narrow the scope of the final judgment as well.
In the tradition represented by the five authors of this overview, the anthropological question is inseparably bound to the doctrine of apokatastasis. The imago Dei is not only the measure of what the human person is, but also the measure of what he must become; the restoration of that image in Christ, the last Adam, is the principle of universal completion. This overview draws on five works that by very different routes arrive at the same thesis: humanity was created in God’s image, destined for sonship, fallen into mortality, and on the way to glorification that encompasses the whole creation.
Imago Dei: God’s image as ground and goal
The most fundamental datum of biblical anthropology appears in Gen. 1:26–27: God makes the human person in his image and after his likeness. How that image is to be understood — structurally, functionally, or relationally — is one of the classic dividing lines in dogmatics. In the five sources surveyed here, three readings emerge that complement rather than exclude each other.
The first reading is functional-purposive. The image is the shape of a vessel made to God’s measure. God created the human person desiring to express himself through him — “Just as a glove is made in the image of a hand in order to contain a hand, so also man was made in the image of God in order to contain God. By receiving God as his content, man is able to express God” [Nee/Lee, BXL1]. The threefold structure of the human person (spirit, soul and body) is the organic result of that purpose: each layer corresponds to a realm of existence and an organ of reception. The grammatical detail of Gen. 1:26 — “Let us make man in our image” — and verse 27 — “God created man in his image” (singular) — points to the Trinity in the creation of man; Christ himself is the true image of God (2 Cor. 4:4), and it is after that pattern that man was formed [Nee/Lee, EOG].
The second reading is eschatologically progressive. The first Adam was made in God’s image but was never the full expression of it — that was reserved for the last Adam, Jesus Christ:
“Adam was made in God’s image, but was never in the full expression of ‘the image of God.’ This was reserved for the last Adam, even Jesus.”
[Warnock, WAY, ch. 5]
Perfection in Scripture is not a state of initial goodness but the state of one who has been “tried and tested and emerged as an approved vessel, complete and whole… lacking nothing” [Warnock, WAY]. Adam stood on probation; the imago Dei as a completed reality is eschatological in character and became reality only in Christ. Adam “was never a heavenly being; and when he transgressed, he did not fall from heaven, as Lucifer did… he was ‘of the earth, earthy’” (1 Cor. 15:47) [Warnock, WAY].
The third reading is relational-psychological. The image is the harmony of inner contraries. At creation Adam was “male and female” (Gen. 1:27b, literally) — an inner unity of spirit (the spiritual, “masculine”) and soul (the desiring, “feminine”):
“And when He created Adam in His image and likeness, Adam was male-female. Also in Adam there was a harmonious unity and a perfect balance between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.‘”
[Noordzij, Moses]
The fall is then a disruption of this inner balance; restoration is the return of the soul to rest, led by the spirit. God himself is the source of this balance: “God is one, perfectly in balance” [Noordzij, Moses].
Viewed through the lens of law, the imago Dei is the foundation of delegated dominion: “Let us make man… and let them rule” (Gen. 1:26). The image here is the juridical starting point of what Jones calls the “dominion mandate” — the delegated authority Adam received, which was lost at the fall and is reclaimed in Christ the Kinsman-Redeemer:
“In Gen. 1:26 we read, ‘Let us make man in our own image… and let them rule.’ This was the dominion mandate given to man, and it was the point where man’s authority began, operating under the sovereignty of God.”
[Jones, ROAT, ch. 6]
An empirical argument joins this: the human frame is stamped throughout with the divine signature of the number seven — the sevenfold life-cycle (70 years = 7×10), the seven-day pulse rhythm, the sevenfold pattern of gestation — so that “the hand that made us is divine” [Bullinger, NIS].
The constitution of the human person: spirit, soul and body
The question of how the human person is constituted — in two parts or in three — is theologically significant. To reduce the spirit to a function of the soul is to lose the organ by which the human person receives God; to equate soul and spirit makes it impossible to explain why Heb. 4:12 speaks of a sword that divides “between soul and spirit.”
The most systematic answer is the trichotomy that Nee and Lee develop in depth across several works. The foundational text is 1 Thess. 5:23 — “your spirit and soul and body” — as proof that the human person is threefold, not twofold; Heb. 4:12 proves that soul and spirit are essentially distinct, not merely functionally so. The soul in turn consists of three faculties: the mind (the knowing, reasoning and remembering part), the will (the choosing and deciding part) and the emotion (the experiencing, loving and grieving part) [Nee/Lee, EOG; BXL1]. The structure is duplicated by the tabernacle typology:
“Our body corresponds to the outer court, our soul to the holy place, and our human spirit to the Holy of Holies, which is the proper dwelling place of Christ and God’s presence.”
[Nee/Lee, EOG, ch. 3]
The same applies to the Canaan typology: Egypt = the body (bondage), the wilderness = the soul (aimless wandering), the good land = the spirit (rest in Christ) [Nee/Lee, EOG]. The decisive point is the ranking: the spirit is not merely a third part but the deepest part, hidden within the soul as marrow is hidden in the bones:
“The soul hides and covers the spirit, just as the bones hide the marrow… Our spirit is hidden and concealed within it.”
[Nee/Lee, EOG, ch. 3]
Consequently the spirit is the exclusive organ for contact with God — “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit” (John 4:24). Body and soul cannot reach God; only the spirit can receive him [Nee/Lee, BXL1]. After regeneration, the human spirit is inseparably united with the Holy Spirit — “he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him” (1 Cor. 6:17) — producing what Lee calls the “mingled spirit”:
“‘He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit.’ We are one spirit with the Lord, but one spirit that is clearly mingled with the Holy Spirit! Such a mingled spirit makes it difficult for anyone to say whether this is the Holy Spirit or the human spirit.”
[Nee/Lee, EOG, ch. 3]
The trichotomy is affirmed here too: “This is God’s order: ‘your whole spirit and soul and body’” (1 Thess. 5:23) [Warnock, EaM]. A restoration sequence attaches to it: the spirit was the first casualty of the fall and the first to be reached in restoration:
“The spirit or mind of man was first to become darkened and lost by the fall, and it is the first to become enlightened and restored. This is the realm of this great spiritual warfare, the warfare of ‘the heavenlies.’ As victory is attained here, that will bring ultimate victory to soul, and body.”
[Warnock, EaM, ch. 2]
Two frameworks are combined here. In Moses and the Path to Sonship a dichotomy is at work — spirit and soul as the two inner dimensions of the human person, coded as “masculine” (leading spirit) and “feminine” (desiring soul) [Noordzij, Moses]:
“The human person has within himself a masculine and a feminine side. Everyone has masculine and feminine hormones. With the inner person it is the same: he is inwardly masculine (=spiritual) and feminine (=soulish).”
[Noordzij, Moses]
In later works (The Ark of Noah, From Passover to Tabernacles) an explicit trichotomy emerges — via the parable of the three measures of meal as spirit, soul and body (Matt. 13:33), and the number symbolism of three as “the complete” [Noordzij, Ark; PaT]. The tension between these two readings is not a contradiction but a difference of emphasis: the dichotomy concerns the functional relationship between the two inner layers; the trichotomy concerns the structural completeness of the human constitution.
A distinct accent falls on the blood: the soul is tied to the blood (Lev. 17:11) and thus to the material-mortal dimension [Jones, CJ]. The earthly human body is “soulish”; the resurrection body is “spiritual”:
“Men are ‘buried in a soulish state, but raised in a spiritual state.‘”
[Jones, CJ, ch. 5]
Jesus’ risen body had flesh and bones but no blood — the spiritual body is of a different order than the soulish one.
The fall: mortality, sin and threefold damage
How the fall of the human person is understood determines directly how salvation is understood. The Augustinian tradition defined original sin as an inherited sinful nature (infusion): every human being is born morally co-guilty in Adam’s sin. The five sources of this overview take a distinct third position: imputation, not infusion.
The most explicit treatment sounds in [Jones, CJ]. The central thesis is:
“Man did not inherit a sin nature from Adam. He merely inherited the liability for Adam’s sin.”
[Jones, CJ, ch. 9]
Mortality is the universal inheritance; sin is the consequence of mortality, not its ground:
“We are not mortal because we sin. We sin because we are mortal.”
[Jones, CJ, ch. 9]
The exegetical key is Rom. 5:12. The Greek phrase eph ho means “on which [death],” not “because [all have sinned].” Jerome’s Vulgate rendering of “quia omnes peccaverunt” made the infusion reading commonplace, but it renders Paul self-contradictory within his own sentence [Jones, ROAT]. Adam’s sin was imputatively reckoned to humanity — God “called us all sinners, as though we had all sinned” — not infusively transmitted:
“Those Church leaders, like Augustine and Jerome, who did not understand Paul’s statement in Romans 5:12, concluded that man received a sinful soul from Adam, rather than mortality.”
[Jones, CJ, ch. 9]
This necessitates two kinds of death: the first death — mortality — is the universal consequence of Adam’s sin, irrespective of personal guilt; the second death — the lake of fire — involves God’s corrective judgment on individual sins and is bounded by the standards of the biblical law [Jones, CJ].
An organic accent places the weight elsewhere: the fall damaged all three layers of the human person, for sin killed the spirit (Eph. 2:1), made the mind an enemy of God (Col. 1:21) and changed the body into sinful flesh (Rom. 6:12) [Nee/Lee, BXL1]:
“Thus sin damaged all three parts of man and alienated him from God. In this condition man could not receive God.”
[Nee/Lee, BXL1, ch. 1]
Before salvation, the human person was “one hundred percent fallen” — purely soulish-bodily, without a functioning spirit as the organ for receiving God [Nee/Lee, BXL1]. Salvation must therefore reach all three layers.
The moral character of Adam’s specific transgression receives its own emphasis [Warnock, WAY]:
“ADAM WAS NOT DECEIVED, neither by the Serpent nor by Eve (1 Tim. 2:14). EVE WAS DECEIVED; but in Adam’s case it was a deliberate transgression. He failed the test of obedience.”
[Warnock, WAY, ch. 5]
Adam consciously chose to share the fate of his fallen wife — and thereby contrasts all the more sharply with the obedience of the last Adam. The collective fall is likewise described through three stages from Rom. 1:21–28: first refusing to honor God as God, then exchanging truth for a lie, and finally expelling God from the mind entirely — a layered descent into an adokimos mind, a mind that cannot pass the test [Warnock, WAY].
The fall can also be described as the disruption of inner balance: in the fallen person, the soul usurps the spirit’s place, desiring and seeking “the blessings more than the Giver” [Noordzij, Moses]. The condition after the fall is a condition of dying: “dying you shall die” (Gen. 2:17b) is the starting point of the path toward restoration [Noordzij, Moses]. The fallen person appears here as one who wishes to claim the divine attribute of aseity — the self-sufficiency that belongs to God alone: “Independence, in God, is His glory. Independence in man is his sin, and rebellion, and shame” [Bullinger, NIS].
Free will: bondage, grace and God’s irresistible plan
Free will is one of the most contested concepts in Christian anthropology. Classical Calvinist anthropology allows no space for a faculty of the will capable of independently choosing the good; libertarianism posits a genuine freedom outside divine sovereignty; compatibilism seeks a middle way. The five sources of this overview position themselves along a spectrum that avoids the polar positions while remaining theologically precise.
The sharpest position rejects the concept of “free will moral agent” as a theological fallacy [Warnock, EaM]:
“The fact is that man is in no sense ‘free’ either as the seed of Adam or as the seed of Abraham. Jesus makes this abundantly clear. Only the Son can make one free, and this is the only true freedom that man can have (Jn. 8:32–36).”
[Warnock, EaM, ch. 1]
The human will is by nature driven by “the will of the flesh and of the mind” (Eph. 2:2–3) and is therefore fundamentally unfree. Freedom is not an innate property but a gift of the indwelling Christ — and paradoxically: true freedom is being taken captive by the Son:
“True liberty consists of vital union with the Son… in becoming bound to the Son with bonds of the Spirit which effectually and experimentally liberate one from the former bondage to sin and self.”
[Warnock, EaM, ch. 4]
The human will (WILL) is the last stronghold of the old life — “the king of Amalek” whom Saul wrongly spares — and true freedom begins only when that stronghold is broken by grace, not by religious self-effort [Warnock, EaM].
A subtle but crucial distinction between two Greek words for God’s will deserves attention here [Jones, CJ]:
“Man always resists God’s will (thelema), but Paul says that no man can resist God’s plan (boulema).”
[Jones, CJ, ch. 13]
The thelema is God’s declared wish — which human beings can and do resist. The boulema is God’s counsel, his ultimate plan — which cannot be resisted. That does not make human life a charade: “in our daily lives we must act as if we have total free will” [Jones, CJ]. But it does make the final outcome irresistible: God’s ultimate intention for creation cannot be blocked by the resistance of individual human beings. Moral responsibility is proportional to authority: “Only unlimited authority can be judged with unlimited liability” [Jones, CJ] — the human person is limited in accountability, while God as sovereign Creator bears ultimate responsibility.
An existential perspective brings a further accent: free choice is a real and essential given of the human condition [Noordzij, Plow]. Elisha made a radical decision at his calling; Mary chose — consciously, in full knowledge of her responsibilities — to sit at Jesus’ feet over her duties in the kitchen:
“Mary had sat at His feet, listening to His words and receiving the bread of life. Jesus called this ‘the good part, which will not be taken from her’ (Luke 10:42).”
[Noordzij, Plow]
That choice is costly and distinguishing: “Whoever knows himself called to serve the Lord must make choices that many will not understand” [Noordzij, Plow]. Yet that freedom always operates within grace: the calling precedes, God takes the initiative, and the believer responds.
Man and woman: equality, distinction and human dignity
The distinction between man and woman is not a peripheral matter in anthropology. Gen. 1:27 links it directly to the imago Dei: “male and female he created them.” Explicit treatment of the male-female relationship in the five sources is spare, but three accents deserve mention.
Adam and Eve appear as a complementary pair: “There is Adam and Eve, two and yet one — Eve being the complement, the likeness, the counterpart of Adam” [Warnock, FoT]. Marriage is a miniature church: “The Christian home is a miniature ‘church,’ and the Enemy knows that if he wins in the home, he automatically wins in the Church” [Warnock, WAY]. The role of the woman as “weaker vessel” (1 Pet. 3:7) is thereby not an indication of inferiority but a creation after the pattern of the meekness of the Lamb, who demonstrates God’s power precisely in weakness [Warnock, WAY].
The imago Dei can likewise be connected directly to the inner unity of spirit and soul as “male-female” in Adam [Noordzij, Moses]. This is an insight broader than biological sex: every human being inwardly carries both dimensions, and sonship to God is the condition of spirit-soul balance, regardless of biological sex [Noordzij, Moses]. Human dignity is thereby not an achievement but a creational given: the human person bears God’s image as his constitution.
The male-female relationship can also be situated within the juridical framework of the dominion mandate [Jones, ROAT]. Adam’s sin placed his entire estate in bondage — “his wife, his children and all that he had” (Matt. 18:25 as type) [Jones, ROAT]. Human dignity is grounded in the way God wove the human person into his creation: as bearer of the imago Dei, as delegated authority, as vessel destined for God’s life.
The path of restoration: kenosis, transformation and the new man
If the fall inflicted a threefold damage — in spirit, soul and body, in inner balance, in the right to the earth — then restoration is equally multilayered. Four lines can be traced.
The first line is kenosis — self-emptying. Jesus took the path of Phil. 2:7–8: “emptied himself and took the form of a servant.” Moses’ forty years in Midian was a stripping of every prestige and self-reliance — and the result was that he “was very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth” (Num. 12:3) [Noordzij, Moses]. Meekness, for Warnock, is not a character trait to be cultivated but the ontological state of one who has fully yielded his will to God:
“The word ‘meek’ implies a total lack of self-interest… someone who surrenders his own will to the will of another.”
[Warnock, WAY, ch. 7]
God brings the human person not one step down but to zero: “God is not out to bring us a step lower, but to bring us to ZERO. For it is only in ZERO-power that we shall be able to bring the powers of evil to ZERO” [Warnock, WAY].
The second line is transformation: the gradual spreading of Christ as life from the spirit through the soul.
“After one is born again, God begins the life-long process of gradually spreading Himself as life from the believer’s spirit into his soul (Eph. 3:17). This process, called transformation (Rom. 12:2), requires human cooperation (Phil. 2:12).”
[Nee/Lee, BXL1, ch. 1]
Transformation is not a passive change but an active, cooperative permeation, in which the mind, will and emotion become one with the content of Christ. The endpoint is glorification: at the return of Christ, the body is also saturated with God’s life (Phil. 3:21). Then the human person is filled in all three layers: “Instead of being empty and damaged in every part, this person is filled and saturated with the life of God. This is God’s full salvation!” [Nee/Lee, BXL1]. The practical key is exercising the spirit — “calling from the depth” — rather than activating the mind as a soulish organ [Nee/Lee, BXL2].
The third line is suffering as birth process. The name Jabez means “pain,” and the calling to sonship passes through suffering:
“All those who according to God’s counsel are destined for sonship are ‘made perfect through suffering’ (Heb. 2:10).”
[Noordzij, Jabez]
Typological figures — Job (who reached the vision of God through suffering, Job 42:5), David (who longed for a pure heart, Ps. 51:12), Joseph (who came to dominion through humiliation) — are not merely historical figures but anthropological waymarkers: every person called to sonship passes through a comparable trajectory of humbling and perfecting [Noordzij, Jabez].
The fourth line is ontological re-creation: the crucifixion of the old man as a completed work, not an ongoing religious effort. “There is no suggestion here whatever of suppressing the old nature… It is a finished work” [Warnock, FoT]. Rom. 6:5–7 describes a change of position — identification with Christ’s crucifixion — and the new human person is not the improved old one but a regenerated reality that grows as seed toward the full form of the flower that produced it [Warnock, FoT]. The metamorphosis of caterpillar into butterfly — “Have I been long enough as an ‘earthly caterpillar’ in the cocoon, to become a ‘butterfly’ ‘from above’?” — is the image for the transition from earthly to heavenly humanity [Noordzij, PaT].
Sonship to God: the destination as corporate reality
Sonship to God is the hinge on which all lines of anthropology turn. It connects the imago Dei (the human person as bearer of God’s image) with eschatology (the manifestation of the sons of God, Rom. 8:19) and with the apokatastasis (the reconciliation of all things). Decisively, this sonship is in all five sources a corporate reality, not an individual achievement.
The “manchild” of Rev. 12:5 is not one person but:
“ONE yet many… a corporate MAN… the corporate MAN of whom Paul speaks in Eph. 4:13, a ‘perfect MAN’… a people walking in such unity and harmony with Christ that they are seen as ONE MAN.”
[Warnock, WAY, ch. 7]
The manifestation of the sons of God (Rom. 8:19) is the goal for which all creation waits in eager longing — and that goal is not military conquest but the liberation of creation “from the bondage of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21) [Noordzij, Jabez]. The Church gives birth to its “male child” (Rev. 12:2–5) — an eschatological-collective anthropological moment, not merely individual rebirth [Noordzij, Jabez].
The Feast of Tabernacles — the third and last of the Jewish autumn feasts — typologically represents the age of sonship: after the Passover age of redemption and the Pentecost age of the outpouring of the Spirit comes the Tabernacles age of the full indwelling of God in his sons [Warnock, FoT; Noordzij, FoT-N]. God’s ultimate purpose in creation is:
“the bringing forth of a corporate Son in His image. This was the real meaning of His command in Genesis 1:28: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.‘”
[Jones, LSC, ch. 14]
The three feast days are God’s pattern for the fulfillment of that purpose: a progressive journey “from the depths of bondage and sin to the heights of the glorious freedom of the children of God and the glorified body” [Jones, LSC].
Apokatastasis placement: the imago Dei as ground and goal of restoration
The apokatastasis — the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21) — is in anthropology not only an eschatological outcome but a matter of principle already embedded at the beginning of human reality. The imago Dei is the ground of restoration: what was, is the measure of what must become. It is also the goal: the human person was destined to bear and express God’s nature, and God does not release that purpose.
The connection with the imago Dei works along three lines. Along the creational line: God created the human person in his image and destined him for sonship — that original purpose is incontrovertible and unrepealed. The path of restoration does not bypass creation but passes directly through it, just as the Ark of Noah carries creation through the judgment-waters toward the new world — “not through destruction but through preservation-in-judgment” [Noordzij, Ark]. Along the christological line: Christ is the true image of God (2 Cor. 4:4; Heb. 1:3), and the path of restoration runs through him who definitively embodies the imago Dei. The human person is restored “to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29) — God desires not uniformity of people “but conformity to the image of His Son” [Noordzij, Moses; Jones, LSC]. Along the eschatological line: the Adam-Christ parallel (Rom. 5:18; 1 Cor. 15:22) makes the universal scope of restoration demonstrable:
“If Adam’s sin only created the possibility of death for men, and yet all men died, then it would be consistent for Christ’s righteous act to create only the possibility of life for men. And yet only a small fraction of humanity would obtain this life. Could Christ then be weaker than Adam?”
[Jones, CJ, ch. 5]
All of humanity is juridically Adam’s estate — sold into bondage with him at the fall — which is fully reclaimed by the Kinsman-Redeemer: “Everything that was lost in Adam is redeemed in Christ” [Jones, ROAT]. That restoration is not a pyrrhic victory but the juridically airtight consequence of the Jubilee principle (Lev. 25): in the Jubilee all debts, slaves and alienated lands return to the original owner — “God will not force this redemption upon them… But He knows that in the end, after the time of redemption has run its course… He will invoke eminent domain over all creation by the law of Jubilee” [Jones, ROAT].
Free will and grace find their synthesis here. God’s plan (boulema) is irresistible: the thelema is resisted, the boulema is not. Human resistance is real but finite; God’s desire that all human beings be saved (1 Tim. 2:4) and his power to accomplish that are infinite. God’s full salvation encompasses all — Col. 1:20 speaks of reconciling “all things to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven” [Nee/Lee, GC] — and the final goal is 1 Cor. 15:28: “that God may be all in all.”
Conclusion: the human person as vessel destined for glorification
The anthropological thesis that emerges from these five sources is as simple as it is sweeping. The human person is not accidental; he is the creature of a God who had a specific purpose for him. That purpose was to fill him as a vessel — with God’s life, with his nature, with the true image of the Son. The fall disrupted that project but did not end it. The imago Dei is damaged but not erased; mortality has crossed it but has not annulled the destination.
The threefold human person — spirit as organ for divine communion, soul as the human center of thinking, willing and feeling, body as the outermost boundary of earthly existence — is simultaneously the description of the fallen condition and the structure of the path of restoration. Regeneration reaches the spirit; transformation spreads from the spirit into the soul; glorification crowns the whole being. And the one who completes this path is not a special religious type of human being but the true human type according to God’s creative intention: the person in whom Christ has taken form, the imago Dei restored to the pattern of the last Adam.
That this restoration concerns all human beings — through corrective judgment, by the way of grace, in a sequence that God determines — is the apokatastasis as the anthropological endpoint: the imago Dei is completed in all, not because all have deserved it, but because God wills to be all in all and has the power to accomplish it.
Last revision: 2026-06-14. This article is part of the Anthropology discipline overview on apokatastasis.wiki.