Hamartology
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 · The Hyssop that Springeth Out of the Wall · Moses and the Way to Sonship · The Ark of Noah · From Passover to Tabernacles · Creation’s Jubilee · The Restoration of All Things · Secrets of Time · The Laws of the Second Coming · A Short History of Universal Reconciliation
Source abbreviations: NIS = Number in Scripture (Bullinger) · FoT-W = The Feast of Tabernacles (Warnock) · EaM = Evening and Morning (Warnock) · Hys = The Hyssop that Springeth Out of the Wall (Warnock) · WAY = Who Are You? (Warnock) · SLoF = Seven Lamps of Fire (Warnock) · VaA = The Vision and the Appointment (Warnock) · BfA = Beauty for Ashes (Warnock) · BEC1–3 = Basic Elements of Christian Life, Vol. 1–3 (Nee/Lee) · LtW = The Life That Wins (Nee) · KoL = The Knowledge of Life (Nee/Lee) · GC = The Glorious Church (Nee) · Moses = Moses and the Way to Sonship (Noordzij) · Ark = The Ark of Noah (Noordzij) · Jabez = The Inheritance of Jabez (Noordzij) · Plow = Putting Your Hand to the Plow (Noordzij) · PaT = From Passover to Tabernacles (Noordzij) · JMJ = Jesus’ Miracles in the Gospel of John (Noordzij) · BW = Bread and Wine (Noordzij) · Bapt = What Is Baptism? (Noordzij) · CJ = Creation’s Jubilee (Jones) · ROAT = The Restoration of All Things (Jones) · SoT = Secrets of Time (Jones) · LSC = The Laws of the Second Coming (Jones) · FWO = Free Will Versus Ownership (Jones) · SUHUR = A Short History of Universal Reconciliation (Jones) · IGCE = If God Could Save Everyone - Would He? (Jones)
The hamartological question and what is at stake
Hamartology — the doctrine of sin — is about more than a moral diagnosis of the human condition. It raises the most fundamental questions about the divine order: what is the nature of evil, how does it relate to creation, and — above all — does it have the final word? The answer to that last question determines the whole of eschatology. Whoever understands sin as an eternal, ineradicable condition that permanently separates part of humanity from God arrives at a particularist soteriology: God saves some and leaves others lost forever. Whoever understands sin as a power that had a beginning and therefore can also have an end — that entered with the fall and will be taken away in the apokatastasis — draws the logical line through to the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21).
This overview draws on five sources that face the scope of sin soberly and unflinchingly, without granting it the final word. The numerical patterns of Scripture fix the depth of human failure in the structure of the biblical text itself [Bullinger, NIS]. The notion of sin as carnality and leaven that deeply penetrates the church stands at the center of the pentecostal line of the restoration tradition [Warnock, FoT-W; EaM]. The ontological complexity of fallen human nature — the fallen flesh as a structural, not merely moral, problem — is carefully mapped [Nee/Lee, BEC1–3]. The slavery of the flesh as a form of Egypt that operates even in the spiritual life provides the most vivid image of human bondage [Noordzij, Moses; Plow]. From the biblical law a hamartology is developed that takes sin seriously precisely because it knows sin’s limit: sin is real, weighty, and universal — but it had a beginning, and it will have an end [Jones, ROAT; CJ].
Apokatastasis is the thread running through this argument. Not as a conclusion that falls only at the end, but as the key already sounding in the definition of sin and the structure of the fall: how sin is understood determines whether the restoration of all is possible.
The manifold nature of sin: missing the mark, lawlessness, and carnality
Sin is not a simple concept in Scripture. The Greek New Testament employs at least four distinct terms, each with its own emphasis. Ἁμαρτία (hamartia) — the most frequently used word, occurring 63 times in the Greek text — means literally the missing of a target: the failure to reach the destination God has set for humanity [Bullinger, NIS]. Ἀνομία (anomia) is lawlessness: acting outside the ordered structure of the divine Law. Παράπτωμα (paraptōma) is a false step, a deviation from the straight path. Παράβασις (parabasis) is the transgression of an explicitly stated boundary. That the Greek New Testament distinguishes these terms, and that synonymous variation in a single passage can multiply several of them at once, is itself a sign of the complexity of the phenomenon.
The most decisive concept for the hamartology of the restoration tradition is lawlessness: “Everyone who commits sin also commits lawlessness — for sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). That definition ties sin directly to the law, and therefore to the law as the normative framework for both judgment and its limit. A law can be broken, but it also establishes the conditions under which debt is settled. The Jubilee law (Lev. 25) decrees that all debts are cancelled in the fiftieth year; the Deuteronomy law limits the number of stripes to forty (Deut. 25:2-3). Once sin is thought of as lawlessness — as a juridical defect that can be addressed by the law itself — the possibility opens of a bounded judgment and an ultimate restoration [Jones, ROAT].
Alongside this juridical conception stands the organic-ontological conception of sin as flesh (sarx). The flesh is not the body but the mode of existence of the fallen human: self-directed, cut off from God, bound to soulish desires. Egypt is Noordzij’s most pregnant image: the slavery of the flesh is the slavery of Egypt, the condition of one who lives under the dominion of the self [Noordzij, Moses; Noordzij, Plow]. That flesh presses the human into a bondage that goes deeper than the sum of individual sinful acts; it is a condition, not merely a habit. In the same direction points the notion of leaven: sin does not work as an excresence that can be cut away, but as a fermenting process that leavens the whole mass once it is present (1 Cor. 5:6-8) [Warnock, FoT-W; Noordzij, BW].
Both conceptual pairs — juridical and organic — belong together. The juridical frame provides the ground for the settlement of debt; the organic frame explains why that settlement must go deep: not merely a verdict but a liberation from slavery is the final goal. Precisely this double insight — sin as guilt and as power — calls for a double redemption, and that double redemption is the ground of the apokatastasis: Christ does not merely pay the debt but takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29).
The classical Western distinction between mortal sin (peccatum mortale) and venial sin (peccatum veniale) plays no central role in the sources of this overview; the juridical line of the restoration tradition replaces it with the question of the severity of the transgression in relation to the law and the corresponding judgment. Particular attention belongs to the sin against the Holy Spirit (Matt. 12:31-32), which Jesus designates as “unforgivable.” That pronouncement is placed in its covenantal-historical context: “neither in this age nor in the age to come” refers to the epochs of the Mosaic economy and the outpouring of the Spirit, not to an absolute eternity [Jones, SoT]. The severity of the sin against the Holy Spirit is tied to the specific epoch of the Spirit’s work, not to an eternal exception to the apokatastasis — even the gravest categories of sin are defined by their relation to the law and its limits, not by a separate ontological class of “irremediable evil.”
The fall and the beginning of sin
Sin is not an eternal given. It had a beginning — and what has a beginning can also have an end. That insight, simple as it is, has far-reaching consequences for eschatology.
Genesis 3 describes the fall as a concrete historical rupture. Adam transgressed an explicit boundary; he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in defiance of God’s command. It is significant that he did so deliberately: while Eve was deceived by the serpent (1 Tim. 2:14), Adam’s transgression was intentional [Warnock, WAY]. The core of that transgression is not curiosity or sensuality but the self-willed setting of personal judgment above the word of God — the decision to be independent. Self-will is the essence of sin, and Amalek is its personification: whenever God would bring his people into full obedience, Amalek attacks — for the human will resists surrender [Warnock, EaM].
The fall did not occur in a vacuum. Before the fall of humanity came the fall of Satan — the cherub whose pride drove him to rebellion. Satan brought his own attitude into the human story: the desire to be like God, to possess the knowledge of good and evil apart from God. But God is not the author of evil; he tolerates it for a time as an instrument, while evil itself has no independent being — it is the absence of the good (privatio boni), the void that arises when the creature turns away from the Creator [Warnock, WAY; Jones, SUHUR].
Decisive for the apokatastasis-hamartology is the consequence that follows from the temporal nature of sin: sin is a historical phenomenon, not an eternal reality. It entered creation at a specific moment — the fall of Genesis 3 — and it will leave creation when God’s restorative plan reaches its completion. A power that has an origin is by definition not eternal. That logic runs as an invisible thread through the hamartology of the restoration tradition.
Original sin and total depravity
How Adam’s sin passes to his descendants is one of the most contested questions in hamartology. Western Christianity has answered this question through Augustine: Adam’s guilt has passed by propagation to his descendants, so that every human being is guilty and corrupted from birth. But this doctrine rests on a translation error of great historical significance.
The Greek text of Rom. 5:12 reads eph’ hō pantes hēmarton — “because all sinned,” or: “on account of which all sinned.” Jerome, the Latin translator of the Vulgate, rendered eph’ hō as in quo — “in whom” — thereby introducing the idea of inherited guilt that the Greek original does not contain. Jerome himself acknowledged difficulty with the Greek at this point [Jones, CJ]. The Greek-speaking church fathers read Rom. 5:12 not as inherited guilt but as inherited mortality: through Adam’s sin everyone died — not in the sense that his guilt was imputed to each, but in the sense that his mortality passed to all. The punishment for Adam’s sin was death for the entire human race; the guilt for one’s own sins each person bears for themselves.
This distinction is decisive for the apokatastasis. If each person bears their own sins on their own account, then also their own judgment for their own guilt — and the biblical law sets limits for that judgment itself. The leprosy of mortality is a congenital imperfection, a “blemish” that all carry as the inheritance of Adam’s fallen condition; it is not guilt charged to the individual account [Jones, LSC]. The first work of Christ — his blood as the covering of guilt — addresses individual guilt; his second work — the actual removal of mortality and sin — addresses the universal inheritance of Adam.
The rejection of inherited guilt as a theological concept does not mean that the depth of human sinfulness is denied. Total depravity — the permeation of sin through every dimension of the human person — is a serious reality. The flesh has a hidden potential for evil that only becomes visible when placed under pressure:
“The corruption of human nature is total — not in the sense that man can conceive only of evil, but in the sense that his deepest motives are pervaded by selfishness, pride, and self-will, even when he does good.”
[Warnock, EaM]
The church itself carries this legacy: its spiritual bankruptcy is the primary problem God must deal with in the last days — not the corruption of the outside world but the hidden leaven of carnality within the house of God itself [Warnock, FoT-W].
The restoration tradition holds a clear position on the relationship between human will and grace, distinguishing itself from both Pelagianism and Augustinian inability. Pelagianism — the view that the human will can choose the good without liberating grace — runs aground on the hamartology of fallen nature: the flesh is not subject to God and cannot fully accomplish the good (Rom. 8:7). Semi-Pelagianism, which credits the human with a first movement of the will to which grace then responds, likewise underestimates the depth of bondage. At the same time, the restoration tradition does not adopt a determinism that treats the will as wholly passive. The human will is real, but it is not autonomous — it is owned by God, not by the individual [Jones, FWO]. Grace does not liberate the will by bypassing it but by restoring its proper ownership: from self-rule back to surrender to God.
Sin as a life principle: the layered ontology of fallen humanity
The hamartology of Nee and Lee goes deeper than the moral and juridical description of sin. It analyzes fallen human nature as an ontological complex: the human being who lives outside God does not only carry guilt but has also been organically intertwined with a foreign life principle.
Before the fall two trees stood in the garden: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:9). The tree of life is the principle of the divine nature, offered as gift. The tree of good-and-evil is the principle of moral independence: determining for oneself what is good and evil, apart from God. Adam ate from the wrong tree — and thereby the self-sufficient judgment of good and evil became the life principle of humanity [Nee/Lee, BEC3]. Sin is therefore not merely a transgression but the adoption of the wrong life principle — precisely why repentance does not mean “do better from now on” but a turn of the spirit (metanoia): a fundamental change of the life principle itself.
That choice had structural consequences for the constitution of fallen humanity. Three lives are active within it: the human life itself, the life of Satan (as an inner contamination, not merely an external influence), and the life of God (available in Christ, John 10:10) [Nee/Lee, KoL]. Four laws govern the spiritual life: the law of God that demands the good, the law of the good in the spirit that wills the good but cannot carry it out, the law of sin in the flesh that irresistibly pulls toward evil (Rom. 7), and the law of the Spirit of life that brings liberation (Rom. 8:2). The conflict of Rom. 7 — “the good that I want, I do not do” — is not the failure of the individual but the structural outworking of sin as a life principle that holds the flesh in its grip.
Essential is that sin in this framework must be overcome not only juridically but also organically. Forgiveness of guilt is necessary but not sufficient; the sinful life principle must be expelled and replaced by the life of Christ. This is not a gradual improvement but an exchange: not the old man improved but removed, and Christ set in its place as the new life (Gal. 2:20) [Nee/Lee, BEC2; LtW]. This organic depth makes the atonement so comprehensive: Christ does not merely take away the sin of the world juridically but enters as the life-giving Spirit to renew humanity from within.
Consequences of sin: death, conscience, and guilt
The fall had three immediate consequences that together describe the condition of fallen humanity: a separation from God (spiritual death), a defilement of the conscience (guilt), and the accusation of the adversary (juridical position of the enemy) [Nee/Lee, BEC1].
Spiritual death is the severance of the life-communion with God that characterized the beginning of human existence. “In the day you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17): the warning was fulfilled immediately in the separation from God. That death is not an ending but an estrangement — the human spirit that was designed as the receiving organ of God’s Spirit has become deadened; the contact is broken. Blindness is the most evocative biblical image: not the blindness of the man born blind on account of his own sin or his parents’, but blindness as a universal consequence of Adam’s fallen state [Noordzij, JMJ]. The same blindness is expressed in the 38-year wilderness wandering as a figure of the unbelief that is not an isolated incident but the structural disposition of the heart [Noordzij, JMJ].
The conscience became burdened with guilt. God’s law demands satisfaction; the conscience registers the charge. Only the blood of Christ cleanses the conscience — not the rational affirmation of forgiveness, not the philosophical conviction that God is gracious: “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Heb. 9:22) [Nee/Lee, BEC1]. Hyssop — the lowest plant, growing from the crevice in the wall — is the symbol of the humility with which Ps. 51 connects cleansing (Ps. 51:9): the acknowledgment of the depth of one’s own sinfulness is the unavoidable gate to the cleansing God provides [Warnock, Hys].
The accusation of Satan is the third dimension: Satan acts as the accuser of the brothers, day and night (Rev. 12:10), and his accusation carries juridical weight as long as the debt has not been settled. Victory over the accuser comes “by the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 12:11): the blood of Christ covers the debt Satan points to [Nee/Lee, BEC1]. This juridical framework — guilt, accusation, payment — connects directly to the Jubilee principle that later grounds the apokatastasis: the debt is finite, the payment is complete, the liberation follows necessarily.
Physical death as the inheritance of the fall is the mortality that rests on the whole race of Adam — not as a penal judgment for individual sins but as the inheritance of Adam’s fallen condition [Jones, LSC]. That mortality is lifted in the resurrection: Christ’s second work, which goes beyond the covering of guilt to the actual removal of the mortal inheritance. From the beginning, hamartology carries within it the line toward resurrection.
The temporality of sin: a beginning and an end
The most distinctive contribution of the restoration tradition to hamartology is its emphasis on the temporality of sin. Sin is not eternal — it had a beginning and it will have an end. This is not a pious wish but a conclusion that follows from the structure of the biblical law and the nature of God’s character.
The juridical argument proceeds along three lines. The first is the definition of the law: “the law destroys sin, not the sinner” [Jones, ROAT]. The law is a corrective institution, not an instrument of permanent retribution. Its goal is the restoration of just order, not the eternal punishment of the transgressor. A punishment that outlasts the corrective purpose it was meant to serve is pure revenge — and that is incompatible with the character of the God who gave the law. The second line is the Jubilee law (Lev. 25): in the fiftieth year all debts are cancelled, all slaves freed, all alienated property returned — the image of an eschatological restoration in which no debt can continue [Jones, CJ]. The third line is the limitation of stripes to forty (Deut. 25:2-3): if human law is already constrained by that boundary — so that the one punished retains his dignity — then divine judgment, determined by that same law, is likewise bounded and not endless [Jones, ROAT].
Alongside the juridical argument stands the typological. The goat sent into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16) carries the sins of the people far away — to an uninhabited land, outside the community, but not into an eternal fire. The definitive removal of sin is the ultimate goal of atonement [Jones, LSC]. The first work of Christ (his blood as covering for guilt) is the foundation; his second work (the actual removal of sin and mortality) is the completion — what the scapegoat typologically prefigured.
Decisive for the temporality of sin is also the message of the cross. Warnock identifies a shift in how the cross is preached: the old cross killed the sinner; the modern cross merely frustrates him:
“The old cross killed the sinner. The new cross merely frustrates him. The preacher brings his own desires and his own heart to the altar. God and he agree to carry out his designs, and he arises as he was. Once the servant has made known his preference, it is certain that he serves himself and not the Lord.”
[Warnock, SLoF, citing A.W. Tozer]
The true working of the cross is the death of the self — a death that addresses the root of sin, not merely its fruits. That radical death to the self-life is the beginning of the liberation the cross promises [Warnock, EaM; Noordzij, Bapt]. The flesh is not improved but put to death: as Saul had to be killed by Samuel after placing his own judgment above the word of God, so the self-willed carnal life must be brought through the cross [Noordzij, Moses]. Not behavioral adjustment but the exchange of life — that is the hamartological ground on which the apokatastasis is built.
The temporality applies collectively as well. The work of God in the church in the last days is a disclosure and liberation of what may be called hidden sin: the divided hearts, the Ishmaels of human manufacture alongside the promised Isaacs, the inner famine that reveals what was already empty [Warnock, BfA]. That God brings his church through a period of exposure and judgment before the completion is the typological meaning of the Day of the Lord: not a final judgment over others but a refining judgment that begins at the house of God itself (1 Pet. 4:17).
The Adam-Christ symmetry: apokatastasis as the hamartological endpoint
Hamartology reaches its eschatological endpoint in the Adam-Christ parallel of Rom. 5:12-21 and 1 Cor. 15:22. The structure is clear and its consequences far-reaching: just as the sin of one man drew the entire human race into its fall, so the righteousness of the One brings the entire human race to justification. The question the apokatastasis position asks is: how far does the second half reach?
The text allows no asymmetry. “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22): the subject “all” (pantes) is structurally identical in both halves. Whoever reads the first half extensively — Adam’s fall reaches the whole of humanity without exception — but restricts the second half to believers, makes Christ less powerful than Adam:
“If Adam’s sin merely created the possibility of death for people, and yet everyone died, then it would be reasonable that Christ’s righteous act merely created the possibility of life for people. And yet only a small fraction of humanity would obtain this life. Can Christ then be weaker than Adam?”
[Jones, CJ, Chap. 5]
The expression with which John describes the sacrifice of Christ reinforces this argument: Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (airōn, John 1:29). The Greek airōn is a present participle: an ongoing, actual action of removal. Not the covering of sin but its actual elimination is the nature of his work. The sin of the world — not of a selected portion of the world — is the object of that removal [Jones, FWO]. If the sin of the world is genuinely taken away, not merely covered, there is no ground for an eternal condition of lostness.
The scope of the atonement is confirmed once more by Col. 1:20: “and through him to reconcile all things to himself… whether things on earth or things in heaven.” The word “all” (ta panta) carries no implicit restriction. An atonement theology that reduces this “all” to a limited group faces the question of how it reads the text — and the inverse question: if Adam’s sin reached all humanity, how can the reconciliation of Christ be narrower? [Jones, IGCE].
The juridical foundation for the universality is the go’el figure — the kinsman-redeemer of Lev. 25:47-55. To act as redeemer, one must be a blood relative of those being redeemed. Christ became human to acquire the right of the nearest kinsman over all whom Adam made debtors. As go’el he possesses three requirements: the legal right (he is human), the means of payment (his blood covers the whole debt), and the motivation (God’s love is universal). When all three are present and apply to the whole of humanity, the conclusion is inescapable:
“If you had the legal right to redeem all people, and you had the means to do so, and you loved them as much as God loves the world, what would you do? Yes, God would indeed save all humanity if He were able to do so. And that is precisely why He actually did it.”
[Jones, IGCE]
The early-church tradition of evil as non-being (privatio boni) — defended by Gregory of Nyssa before the political reversal of 553 AD — confirms the hamartological ground of the apokatastasis by another route. If evil has no independent substance but is the absence of the good, then it has no eternal right to exist. When the good is fully restored, there is no room left for the absence of the good — and thereby evil is not merely suppressed but abolished [Jones, SUHUR]. Sin is then genuinely temporal: a void that is filled, not an eternal rival of the good.
Conclusion: the apokatastasis as the end of sin
The hamartology of the restoration tradition takes sin more seriously than any theology that accepts it as an eternal constant. Precisely because sin is real, weighty, and universal — operating as guilt, as power, as carnality, as death — its restoration must be nothing less than its complete removal. An atonement theology that merely covers sin without removing it fails to do justice to the scope of the problem.
The temporality of sin is not sentimental optimism but a theological conclusion: sin had a beginning in Adam’s fall, is as lawlessness bound by the limits of the law, is settled as debt through the Jubilee principle, and as power reaches its end in the apokatastasis. What Christ removes is the sin of the world — not the sin of a chosen portion, but of all who are in Adam.
The hamartological endpoint is 1 Cor. 15:22: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” The same all. Adam’s scope and Christ’s scope are structurally identical. And if the sin that began in Adam is removed by the One who is greater than Adam, then the final word is not sin but restoration — the apokatastasis panton, the restitution of all things, the completion in which God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).
Last revised: 2026-06-13. This article is part of the Hamartology discipline overview at apokatastasis.wiki.