Theologoumen--to Frank

If God is Good and God is Love, and the world is His creation, why is there evil in the world? "That is the question." Hamlet was at least a hair off. Stating the reason why there is evil in creation, finding an understanding of evil has baffled the thinkers of the Church throughout the centuries. Perhaps because it is of the very nature of Evil that it cannot be brought under the control or into the grasp of reason or understanding, either intellectual or emotional. It seems to me that Scripture offers not an explanation for evil, but a solution for or resolutions of it. "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." Our Lord and our God does not give us a command, an instruction, an advice that is not in the long run possible. That must be stressed: “In the long run.” He will overcome it. Love will overcome it in the end.

Human history our faith must trust is a process of victory, victory that was once and already won in Christ's resurrection from the dead. Evil subdivides topically or formally into natural and moral evil: the evil that is inescapable in our nature, our lives-that is, death, and the evil that we suffer from our fellow creatures and impose upon our fellow creatures, the worst consequence of which is also death. Christ's Resurrection was both the final victory and
the foretaste of that victory. The work of the Spirit, the life of the Church is the working out of that victory. Patience and trust are the virtues that outlast and overcome suffering. Courage and hope are the virtues that outlast and overcome injustice, tyranny, and murder.

In Christ the Word by which all things were brought into being, out of love for us and for all creation took on the form of our humanity--and of materiality and corporeality and temporality, subjecting Himself to the condition of creation out of love for creation, experiencing sympathy with creation because involved in its
limitation, gross imperfection, and suffering. He experienced the ultimate evil: non-being, death, and experienced with us persecution, derision, torture, pain and fear. Sheer Love, the force before and behind all Creation, raised Him from the dead, triumphed over death,
and the Spirit, filling the whole earth, has in the life of the Church--the life of human love and faith universally--begun the renewal, the healing, the resurrection of all creation as a sort of dialectical pattern expressing and enacting itself in history.