"We are not told—or not in any way that
satisfies our puzzled questioning—how and why there is radical evil
within God’s wonderful, beautiful, and essentially good creation. One
day I think we shall find out, but I believe we are incapable of
understanding it at the moment, in the same way that a baby in the womb would lack the categories to think about the outside world. What we are promised, however, is that
God will make a world in which all shall be well and all manner of thing
shall be well, a world in which forgiveness is one of the foundation
stones and reconciliation is the cement which holds everything together.
And we are given this promise not as a matter of whistling in the
dark, not as something to believe even though there is no evidence, but
in and through Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection, and in and
through the Spirit through whom the achievement of Jesus becomes a
reality in our world and in our lives. When we understand forgiveness, flowing
from the work of Jesus and the Spirit, as the strange and powerful thing
it really is, we begin to realize that God’s forgiveness of us, and our
forgiveness of others, is the knife that cuts the rope by which sin,
anger, fear, recrimination and death are still attached to us. Evil
will have nothing to say at the last, because the victory of the cross
will be fully implemented."
N.T. Wright
