Original Sin

Biblical Unitarians largely reject the Augustinian doctrine of inherited original guilt — the teaching that Adam's specific guilt is imputed to all his descendants — while affirming that Adam's sin introduced mortality and a tendency toward sin into the human race. This is similar to the Christadelphian and conditionalist position: what is transmitted from Adam is mortality and a sinful nature (a tendency toward evil), not legal guilt for Adam's personal act.

This means that each person is responsible for their own sins — not for Adam's — though all do in fact sin and are therefore in need of the redemption provided through Christ. The universal reality of human sin is affirmed; the mechanism of its origin is understood differently from the Augustinian tradition. Ezekiel 18:20 ('the soul who sins shall die; the son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father') is invoked as evidence against inherited guilt.

This understanding of sin and human nature is consistent with Biblical Unitarianism's Arminian soteriology and its affirmation of genuine human freedom: if humans bore the guilt of Adam's act irresistibly and were therefore totally depraved, it would undermine the genuineness of their free response to the gospel. The Biblical Unitarian framework treats human beings as genuinely responsible moral agents who sin of their own free will, though in an environment shaped by the Fall.