The incarnation and Passion of the One enabled the One to get a fix on evil. The One destroys evil by taking it into death. The One incorporates some evil into the good, making it a greater good.
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Phenomenon explained : "The defeat of evil". Christianity maintains that a day will come in which evil will be a thing of the past, it will be completely defeated and there will be nothing but goodness left, excepting perhaps in the outer darkness. There will be nothing but good in those who are with God, and their will be nothing but good in the universe. |
If evil consists of that which does not proceed from the One and therefore cannot be directly known by the One, it follows that the One must somehow learn about evil in order to be able to deal with it. The One must get a fix on evil. It makes sense that the One should enter into the All in order to do so, for that is where evil is expressed. This is what the Christian doctrine of the incarnation is all about. The One entered the world, and suffered a representative load of evil, all of his earthly life and in particular in his Passion. This was sufficient for a thorough understanding of evil.
However, merely understanding evil is not enough to be able to deal with it. Through the representative burden of evil, the incarnate One took on all evil, and then died. Death resulted in the complete separation of the good and the evil. The good rejoined to the One. The evil, now no longer in the good and being able to parasite on it, and without the power to maintain an independent existence, withered and shriveled. In time, it will cease to exist. From this perspective, it is effectively destroyed. History is a mopping up operation.
Because the One now perceives evil, another possibility emerges. Evil can resonate with the good, making a greater good.
The defeat of evil does not, however, of itself change things in the here and now. The evil in us is not separated from the good until we die. It will persist in us as long as the needs it meets remain unfulfilled. If we dismiss one evil, another will arise and step in the gap. That is why the gap must be filled with a good response to the needs. That requires a purposeful connection with the One.
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Credibility: It is one thing to explain how evil can be dealt with, and another to actually deal with evil successfully. For those who allow themselves to be guided by the Bible, and therefore believe that evil will be dealt with successfully, this explanation is foundationally credible, because it involves no contradictions or paradoxes, whereas all other explanations do. |