God’s Eucatastrophe

Here in the cross of Christ, and in his resurrection on the third day, we find exactly such an event in history as Tolkien describes as necessary for any complete fairy-story (see “The Eucatastrophe”). The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the Great Eucatastrophe, that central event in God’s Story – in the real world – that is both rooted in the character of God and reflected in the stories we tell (see “Tolkien on Stories and Sub-creation”). In Christ’s victory on the cross we find a reality that explains our confident intuitive hope that good will triumph over evil. It may also be that we will find in what is accomplished through the cross a greater redemptive purpose for evil. That is the question to which I will now turn: What is the final and ultimate end or goal that this victory achieves and for which evil was ordained in the first place? Does it make all the evil and suffering through the ages worth it in the end because of what is accomplished through evil? To do answer these questions, let’s take a step back and look at the wider scope of redemptive history, and of reality in general.