From Purchase to Homecoming
Three Degrees of Redemption
We are not merely the redeemed; we are restored sons.
So writes George Warnock in The Hyssop that Springeth Out of the Wall about the heart of what redemption is meant to be. It sounds like a small nuance. But for anyone who thinks it through, the difference is enormous: to be purchased means a debt has been settled. To be brought home means a relationship has been restored.
Mortification and resurrection are the two movements that make this distinction concrete. Not as two separate moments in Christian experience, but as one continuous movement — from debt-cancellation to truly-being-home.
(Warnock — Systematic Theology)
What Does Restoration Theology Teach Us About Redemption as a Way?
The apokatastasis.wiki sources agree on one thing: redemption is not a one-time transaction but an ongoing movement. And that movement has a structure. George Warnock describes that structure through three Greek verbs: agorazo (to purchase), exagorazo (to redeem from the law) and lutroo (to restore to the original owner). Three degrees, three stages. Each is redemption, yet each differs in depth.
The first stage — the purchase — is the basic liberation moment. Someone pays the price. The debt is settled. But Warnock points out that this is only the beginning. The second stage is liberation from the power of commandments as the way to God — the entering into grace as the new climate. And the third stage — lutroo — is the deepest: brought back to whom you always belonged. Restored in sonship.
Mortification is the name for what dies in this threefold process. Resurrection is the name for what takes its place.
Cees Noordzij describes the same rhythm through the three principal feasts of Israel. Passover is the type of liberation — leaving the slavery of the flesh, a new beginning. The Feast of Unleavened Bread is the type of ongoing sanctification: the active removal of old leaven, making room for something new. Pentecost is the reception of the Spirit as the necessary continuation. Whoever understands this rhythm also knows why mortification is not the endpoint but a phase that makes the next possible.
(Noordzij — Systematic Theology)
Three Voices
Warnock: The Hyssop That Opens the Way
Warnock’s most characteristic image for the path of mortification is the hyssop — the smallest plant in the biblical world, but precisely for that reason the instrument through which the cleansing blood flows. He writes: “Unless we are willing to become the hyssop, the Blood cannot flow through us.”
This is not a spirituality of self-destruction. It is about position: being willing to be the lowest so that something greater can flow through you. The kenosis as a structural pattern, not as a one-time crisis.
And what follows this becoming-the-hyssop? The resurrection Warnock describes is no moral improvement of the old man. In his soteriology the new man of 2 Corinthians 5:17 is truly new — an ontological recreation in Christ. The old man is not improved but crucified (Galatians 2:20). What rises is of another kind.
Jones: The Corrective Fire of the Jubilee
Stephen Jones approaches mortification from the law-structure he develops throughout his work. Judgment for him is by definition corrective in nature. The fire does not consume to destroy but to purify. He writes:
The fire is the divine law. It is not torture or punishment; it is righteousness. God’s judgments have a corrective nature. With God there is no endless punishment without grace. Judgment always ends in grace, for this is the law of the Jubilee.
(Stephen Jones — Systematic Theology)
Mortification here is the law coming into operation. What dies is what falls outside the destination. And the Jubilee-law sets a limit: there is a maximum to judgment, built into the structure of creation itself.
Jones adds a fundamental anthropological precision. We do not sin because we are by nature evil — we sin because we are mortal, vulnerable, anxious, self-protective. What dies in mortification is not the person but the mortality-condition that drove us to sin. What rises is the human being who belongs to his Creator and knows it.
Nee-Lee: The Exchanged Life
Watchman Nee and Witness Lee arrive at the most compact formulation:
The life that overcomes is not attained, but received. It is not a life that has been changed, but a life that has been exchanged.
(Nee-Lee — Systematic Theology)
Mortification and resurrection here are no activities but an exchange. One life is handed in — the life that lives in the soul, driven by fear and self-preservation. The other life is received: God’s life that takes up residence in the spirit. Nee distinguishes three lives in the believer: the human life, the life of the fallen nature, and God’s life. Redemption is the process by which the third displaces the second and takes the first into service.
The overcomers Nee describes are not morally superior to others. They have simply accepted the exchange that has already taken place in Christ.
Apokatastasis Reflection
If redemption is a movement from agorazo to lutroo — from purchase to homecoming — what then are the limits of that homecoming? Who remains excluded?
The apokatastasis.wiki sources — including the thematic synthesis The Gospel — The Good News — do not press toward a closed answer. But they sharpen the question more than traditional theologies: if God as owner of all souls juridically bears responsibility for his creation, if the corrective fire has a purpose and an end, if the exchanged life is a gift and not an achievement — at what moment does the movement cease?
Noordzij writes that the inward mortification of the soul-life and transformation into Christ’s image are the heart of daily participation in Christ. Redemption is essentially ongoing, not one-time. If the engine of the process is God’s own Spirit — can it remain unfinished?
An Invitation
In which stage of Warnock’s threefold division do you recognize yourself? Is there redemption-as-purchase — the liberation from what you are holding onto? Is there the stage of loosening — the removal of the old leaven Noordzij describes? Is there already something of the third stage visible — the truly-having-been-brought-home?
The apokatastasis.wiki sources do not invite a sequence you can enforce. They describe a movement that approaches you from outside — a fire that corrects, an exchange that is offered, a pattern of becoming-the-hyssop that you do not invent yourself but recognize when it happens to you.
Who does that work in you? And for whom?