Chapter 25

The Challenge of Evil

Does Universal Salvation Make Evil Not Matter?

The Question on the Table

Here is the sharpest version of this objection. Picture the worst tyrant in history and his victims. On the view I defend, both the tyrant and the victims end up in the presence of God, reconciled and healed. Has evil just been made not to matter?

I want to take that challenge seriously. It is not a cheap shot. It is a real worry, and it comes from people who care about justice. Michael McClymond raises it in his own way in The Devil's Redemption, and it runs along two tracks at once.¹ The first track says that universalism trivializes evil. If the torturer and the tortured both arrive at the same destination, the moral difference between them seems to dissolve. The second track says that universalism proves too much, or makes God complicit in evil. A God who guarantees a happy ending for everyone may seem to permit evil too easily, or even to need evil as part of His plan.

Both charges deserve full answers. And I think the honest reply turns the challenge around. It is not universal restoration that leaves evil standing. It is endless hell.

That is the argument of this chapter. Universalism does not trivialize evil. It is the only view that lets evil be both fully real and fully defeated.

Why It Matters

The challenge of evil matters because it strikes at the moral credibility of the hope. If believing that all will be saved means believing that evil does not count, then the hope is not just wrong. It is monstrous. No one should hold it.

And the worry is not just theoretical. Anyone who has watched a loved one suffer at the hands of another person will feel this question in a raw and personal way. So will anyone who has read even a few pages of twentieth-century history. To say that the one who did the tormenting will be healed, forgiven, and brought into God's joy feels like an offense to the one who was tormented. It can feel like a second betrayal.

I understand that feeling. I share some of it. And I will not pretend the answer is easy, because part of the answer is genuinely hard (I will mark that hard part when we reach it). But I am convinced that the traditional view, the one that keeps the tormentor in endless punishment, is worse on this score, not better. Endless punishment does not vindicate the victim. It freezes the horror in place. It leaves the evil standing, forever unresolved, forever undefeated. And that, I believe, is the real trivialization: not healing, but permanence.²

McClymond himself traces how the challenge of evil has shaped the universalist tradition from its earliest days. Origen's life was marked by the Christian martyrdom of his father and the suffering of his family under Roman persecution.³ McClymond notes that Christian universalism has often emerged in the darkest periods of history, from the Thirty Years' War to the Russian Revolution. He sees this as evidence that universalism is a response to suffering rather than a conclusion of careful theology.⁴ I think he is half right. Yes, the hope is a response to suffering. But the proper question is whether it is a true response. Aspirin is a response to pain, and it works. The fact that suffering gives rise to a conviction does not tell you whether the conviction is right or wrong. What tells you is the argument. So let me make it.

The Argument

1. The Charge Stated Fairly

McClymond's Challenge of Evil is one of the five components of his philosophical appraisal of universalism in section 12 of The Devil's Redemption.⁵ In his telling, the problem is rooted in the very DNA of the universalist tradition. Origen, he argues, developed universal salvation as a response to the problem of evil, not as a result of careful reading of Scripture.⁶

Notice what McClymond is doing. He is not just saying that universalism is wrong. He is saying that it grew from a tainted root. It was an attempt to solve the problem of evil by making evil temporary. And that attempt came not from the Bible but from a mix of Platonic philosophy and gnostic speculation.⁷

McClymond then sorts the universalist responses to evil into four types. The pedagogical view says evil teaches everyone a lesson, and everyone eventually learns. The dualist view says good and evil are both rooted in God or in reality. The illusionist view says evil is not ultimately real. And the voluntarist view says evil is rooted in the will and may prove finally irresolvable.⁸ He maps Origen onto the pedagogical view and argues that Augustinian voluntarism fits the biblical data better. On that view, the evil will may be "stubborn, perverse, and irrational."⁹

So the charge, in its strongest form, is this. Universalism either trivializes evil by turning it into a classroom lesson that everyone will pass. Or it obscures the reality of the evil will by insisting on a final outcome where everyone is healed. On either reading, evil does not get the weight it deserves.

I want to answer both tracks.

2. The Distinction: "Everyone Is Saved" Does Not Mean "Evil Does Not Matter"

The first move is to separate two claims that the objection runs together. One claim is that everyone will be saved. The other claim is that evil does not matter. Universalism holds the first. It does not hold the second. And the gap between them is enormous.

On the view this book defends, evil is real, it is terrible, and it is judged. The tyrant does not stroll into God's presence with a wave and a smile. He passes through fire (see Chapter 12). He endures the purifying judgment of a holy God, and that judgment is not gentle. It burns away everything in him that made him a tyrant. It unmakes him as a torturer. It brings him to his knees in genuine repentance, not the forced repentance of coercion but the broken-open repentance of someone who finally sees what he has done.¹⁰

That is not trivializing evil. That is taking evil so seriously that God refuses to leave it standing. The torturer is not waved through. He is rebuilt from the ground up, at terrible cost to himself, through a process of moral healing that this book has described as "the long healing" (see Chapter 20).

Think about it this way. Suppose a doctor has a patient with a terrible disease. One doctor says, "I will fight this disease until it is cured, no matter how long it takes." The other doctor says, "This disease is too terrible to cure. I will lock the patient in a room and let the disease run forever." Which doctor takes the disease more seriously? The one who fights it or the one who preserves it?¹¹

McClymond worries that universalism makes evil into a mere classroom lesson, as in Origen's pedagogical model.¹² I grant that the pedagogical model, taken alone, is too thin. Real evil is not just ignorance waiting to be corrected by instruction. Some evils are monstrous, and the people who commit them are not just slow learners. They are deeply broken. But the view I defend is not the pedagogical model alone. It is a view in which judgment is real and fire is real. The confrontation with God's holiness is devastating. The healing that follows is a painful and thorough remaking of the person (see Chapter 8 on restorative justice).¹³ McClymond's fourfold taxonomy is useful, but this book's universalism does not fit neatly into any of his four categories. It takes the reality of the evil will with full seriousness. That is the voluntarist's strength. But it also holds that the evil will, though real and stubborn, is not beyond the reach of divine love, divine wisdom, and divine patience.

3. Horrendous Evils and Their Defeat

Now I want to press the argument further, because the challenge of evil is not just about the evildoer. It is about the victim. And here the most important philosophical voice is Marilyn McCord Adams.

Adams argued, in her landmark work Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, that the deepest problem of evil is not the general puzzle of why bad things happen. It is the particular question of how God can be good to this person whose life has been wrecked by horrors. Her term for these worst-case evils was "horrendous evils." She defined them as evils so severe that they threaten to destroy the positive value of the sufferer's life as a whole.¹⁴

Adams drew a careful distinction between two things God must do with horror. First, God must engulf it: fill the victim's life with so much good that it becomes worth living despite the horror's presence. Only one good is great enough for that, Adams argued: the good of loving union with God.¹⁵ Second, God must defeat it: build something of such value around the horror that the horror becomes a meaningful part of a whole so good that even the victim would rather have the whole than lose the horror from it. Not balanced out by someone else's happiness. Not compensated by a general cosmic good. Defeated within the life of the person who suffered.¹⁶

Eric Reitan, in Troubled Paradise, makes this same point by connecting the problem of evil to the problem of hell. He deploys Adams's framework to show that damnation is a horror that God, on the traditional view, "either cannot or will not marshal divine resources to engulf and defeat." The doctrine of hell, Reitan writes, "posits the existence of horror that dwarfs the worst terrestrial horrors and that God never redeems." The problem of hell, then, is "vastly more serious than the terrestrial problem of evil."¹⁷

Andrew Hronich, in Once Loved Always Loved, presses this same point with real force. He quotes Adams directly on why God's love must work at the level of the individual, not just the system:

"A cosmic creator and/or governor who operated with such reasons alone would not thereby be one who placed a high value on human personhood in general or individual persons in particular. On the contrary, such government would thereby show itself to be at best indifferent, at worst cruel. Rather, I contend that God could be said to value human personhood in general, and to love individual human persons in particular, only if God were good to each and every human person God created." Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, quoted in Andrew Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved, ch. 5

Hronich draws a sharp conclusion from this. A God who sacrifices individuals for the good of the system is not a God who values individuals. If divine goodness requires defeating horrors within each person's own life, then no view that leaves anyone in undefeated horror can stand.^14b

Now ask: which view of the afterlife makes this possible?

On the traditional view (endless conscious torment), the victim may be in heaven, but the horror she suffered is never fully defeated in the world God made. The torturer is in hell, yes. But the evil he did is preserved, running on forever in his endless punishment. The victim's suffering is not overcome; it is simply followed by a different state. And for many of history's victims (those who never heard the gospel, or who died too young to respond) the traditional view gives no assurance of heaven at all.¹⁸

On annihilationism (the conditional immortality view), the wicked are destroyed. But destruction is not defeat. As Reitan observes, annihilationism too "magnifies the difficulty of solving the problem of evil." If someone caught up in horror in this life is then annihilated, "that person's existence ends absent the good of union with God, the only good that can outweigh horror."¹⁹ The torturer is gone, but the torture is not reversed. And the horror victim who was never reached by the gospel is simply destroyed, her horrors forever unengulfed and undefeated. Annihilationism does not solve the problem; it seals it shut.

Hronich sharpens the point: on Adams's own definition, annihilation itself qualifies as a horrendous evil. It is an evil whose participation makes the person's life not a great good on the whole. The annihilated person never receives the one good (union with God) that is great enough to engulf her suffering. Her life ends as a net loss. That is exactly what Adams means by a horror left undefeated. The conditional-immortality view, then, does not escape the challenge. It multiplies it.^19b

On universal restoration, God does something different. He heals the victim. He brings the victim into a joy so deep and so real that the horror, though never denied or called good, is genuinely engulfed and defeated by the final good of union with God. And He heals the torturer too, burning the evil out of him, so that the evil itself is destroyed, not preserved. The horror is defeated in the victim's life and in the evildoer's life. Evil is not left standing in either one.

Eric Reitan and John Kronen put the broader point sharply in God's Final Victory. They argue that the doctrine of endless hell makes the problem of evil far more serious, not less, because it holds that some evils persist eternally. Universal salvation holds that none of these evils persist eternally, that all evils are "merely finite in scope and severity and are overcome by goods of infinite merit."²⁰ Adams herself noted that the "problem of hell" is a particularly sharp version of the problem of evil for Christians who believe in it.²¹

Reitan and Kronen also observe that John Hick argued powerfully that his "soul-making" theodicy (Greek paideia, "training, education") is defensible only if universalism is true. This theodicy holds that the evils of this life serve a purpose: they are the conditions under which persons grow and develop morally. But if some persons never complete that growth, if the soul-making process fails for them, then the evils they suffered were pointless. They served no purpose in God's plan. Only universal salvation guarantees that no suffering is wasted.²²

Hronich drives the same nail in Once Loved Always Loved. He quotes Hick's own conclusion: "The sufferings of the damned in hell, since they are interminable, can never lead to any constructive end beyond themselves and are thus the very type of ultimately wasted and pointless anguish." Hick was clear that endless punishment was not a small problem for his theodicy. It was its ruin. And he rejected annihilationism too, on the ground that if some souls are extinguished, "evil would have prematurely marred God's creation." For Hick, the only viable alternative was the salvation of all.^22b

I want to be honest here. Hick's theology has problems. His religious pluralism, the claim that all religions are equally valid paths to the same ultimate reality, is one that this book flatly refuses (see Appendix B).²³ But on this narrow point, his logic is sound: a theodicy that says "suffering has a purpose" needs the purpose to succeed for every sufferer if it is going to work as a theodicy. Universalism is the only eschatology that secures that success.

4. The Moral Difference Is Not Erased

But here is the worry that still presses. If the torturer and the victim both end up healed and in God's presence, has the moral difference between them been flattened? Does it not seem unjust that both arrive at the same destination?

No. Because the destination is the same, but the road is vastly different.

Think of it this way. Two patients arrive at the same hospital on the same day. One has a cold. The other has a disease that has eaten through most of his body. Both will be healed, yes. But the second patient will go through surgery, long recovery, intensive rehabilitation, and years of painful rebuilding. The fact that both walk out the front door healthy does not erase the difference between a cold and a catastrophic illness.²⁴

So it is here. The victim, who was wounded by the evil of another, is healed with tenderness and compassion. She is restored, comforted, brought into joy. The torturer, who did the wounding, is brought through a purifying judgment so severe that everything in him that made him a torturer is burned away (see Chapter 12). He is unmade and remade. The fire he passes through is not a formality. It is the unveiled holiness of God, and it is terrible.²⁵

The moral difference shows up in the depth and severity of the purifying judgment each must pass through. It shows up in the truth that the victim is healed while the tyrant must be radically unmade. Same destination, vastly different road. And the road matters. It matters to justice. It matters to the victim. It matters to God.

McClymond worries that universalism, because it affirms a guaranteed good outcome, slips into the illusionist camp, where evil is not fully real. I reject that reading. The universalism this book defends holds evil to be as real, as terrible, and as deserving of judgment as anything Augustine ever described. The difference is that we hold it to be defeatible, not permanent. Calling evil defeatible is not calling it unreal. A cancer that can be cured is still a cancer.²⁶

5. God Is Not Complicit

The second prong of McClymond's challenge is the "proves too much" worry. If God guarantees a happy ending for all, does that not make Him complicit in the evil He permits? Does it not suggest that He needs evil in order to get to the good ending?

This is the ancient puzzle of the felix culpa (Latin, "happy fault"), the idea that the fall of Adam and the entry of evil into the world were in some sense "fortunate" because they led to the even greater good of the redemption in Christ.²⁷ The worry is real: if the good ending requires the evil, then evil starts to look like a tool in God's hand rather than a genuine horror.

But this worry is not unique to universalism. Every Christian theology that affirms a good ending for anyone faces the same question. If God permits the evil that leads to the salvation of the elect, is He complicit in that evil? The traditional Calvinist, the Arminian, and the universalist all face this puzzle, and they face it in roughly the same way.²⁸

The answer, on every orthodox view, is the same: God permits evil for the sake of creaturely freedom and for the sake of a greater good He will bring about. But He does not need evil, He does not cause evil, and He does not leave evil standing. The felix culpa tradition, when held within proper limits, does not say that evil was good. It says that God is so wise and so powerful that He can bring good even out of evil. That is not complicity. That is sovereignty exercised in love.

"As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today." (Genesis 50:20, ESV)

Joseph's words to his brothers are not an endorsement of what they did to him. They are a statement about what God can do with what people do. God turns evil to good. He does not need the evil to get to the good. He works through the evil that creaturely freedom introduces, and His final work is the defeat of that evil, not its acceptance.²⁹

And here is where universalism actually answers the complicity charge more cleanly than the traditional view does. On the traditional view, God permits evil and then leaves some of it standing forever. The tortured child may be in heaven, but the torturer's evil persists in an unending hell. Evil wins, permanently, in at least some lives. On universal restoration, God permits evil and then defeats every last bit of it. Nothing evil is left standing. Nothing God permitted remains unhealed. If that is complicity, then the only alternative is a God who gives up on His own creatures, and giving up seems a stranger partner for divine goodness than persisting until the work is done.³⁰

This book has argued from the start that the case rests on conviction, not necessity (see Chapter 2). The felix culpa is held within that boundary. I do not say God had to create a world with evil. I do not say evil was required for the happy ending. I say that God, having freely created beings with genuine freedom, and those beings having freely introduced evil, responds to evil by defeating it completely. He is not its author. He is its conqueror.³¹

Engagement with Specific Philosophers

McClymond's fourfold taxonomy of responses to evil is genuinely useful, and I have learned from it.³² But the universalism this book defends does not fit the slot he assigns it. He reads the universalist tradition as fundamentally pedagogical, following Origen. And he prefers Augustine's voluntarism, which holds that the evil will is "stubborn, perverse, and irrational" and may prove permanent.³³

I agree with McClymond that the evil will is real and that it is not just a mistake waiting to be corrected. Where I part from him is on the question of whether it is beyond God's reach. Augustine's voluntarism, at its best, says that evil is real and baffling. That is true. But from the fact that the evil will is irrational, it does not follow that God cannot meet it, confront it, and overcome it. The irrationality of evil is a reason for humility about our explanations. It is not a reason for despair about God's power.³⁴

Thomas Talbott, in The Inescapable Love of God, brings a crucial principle to this discussion. God, Talbott argues, draws the line at irreparable harm: harm that not even omnipotence can repair. A supremely loving Creator would never permit irreparable harm to befall any of His loved ones. He may permit suffering. He may permit the hard consequences of free choices. But He would never permit a harm so final that nothing, not even His infinite love and power, could ever set it right.^34b

Now apply that principle to the challenge of evil. On the traditional view, many of God's creatures end up in a state of irreparable harm: endless torment, or destruction so total that no healing is possible. That is precisely the kind of harm Talbott says a loving God would never allow. Talbott writes that he assumes "God permits no evil, however horrendous it may appear to us in the present, that he cannot eventually overcome and turn to good." If that is right, then universal restoration is not an attempt to dodge evil. It is the only view on which God's response to evil is complete.^34c

Talbott extends this reasoning to the problem of evil itself. In his reflections on the subject, he argues that the universalist has far better resources than any competing theology for what he calls "a religiously satisfying solution" to the problem. If God's purpose in permitting evil is the moral and spiritual development of His creatures, and if that development succeeds for every creature, then every evil God permits has a point. It goes somewhere. It is overcome. On any view where some souls are permanently lost, the evils they suffered remain pointless. The problem of evil stays open forever.^34d

Adams, though not a systematic universalist in her earlier work, saw clearly that the standard theodicies all require universalism to succeed. If God's goodness to each person requires defeating the horrors within that life, then no person can be left in undefeated horror forever. Robin Parry, in The Evangelical Universalist, endorses this reasoning. He writes that he is "inclined to say, with Tom Talbott, that if God loves his creatures, he will not allow them to experience irreparable harm." Parry adds that Adams is "essentially right." A God who allows some people to be irreparably destroyed as a means to bless others acts in a way that is "incompatible with God's loving all individuals." For Parry, the traditional view of hell represents "the eternal frustration of God's loving purposes." His conclusion: "divine goodness requires universalism."³⁵

R. Zachary Manis, though not himself a universalist, presses a related point in Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God. Manis examines the "greatest possible world" theodicy. This view claims that God permits evil in order to defeat it, and that the defeat of evil is itself a great good. But Manis shows that this strategy collapses unless every evil is in fact defeated. If God creates the damned in order to defeat the evil of damnation, but then leaves them in damnation forever, the evil is not defeated. It is multiplied. Manis concludes that all the moral goods such a theodicy appeals to are "obtainable in universalist worlds." Only the universalist can say that every evil God permitted was an evil God defeated.^35b

Reitan traces this thread from Adams through his own argument in Troubled Paradise, showing that the problem of evil, the problem of hell, and the problem of heavenly grief are all deeply connected. Each presses toward the same conclusion: a God who leaves any person in permanently undefeated evil has not yet finished the work His goodness requires.^35c

Reitan and Kronen developed this point carefully in God's Final Victory: the doctrine of hell (what they call "DH") makes the problem of evil harder to solve, not easier, because it adds an infinite evil (eternal suffering) to the list of things God's goodness must account for.³⁶

Eleonore Stump, in Wandering in Darkness, has argued that suffering can be a context for deepening the relationship between a person and God. She is not a universalist, and I do not enlist her as one. But her insight that suffering, in God's hands, can serve relational goods is compatible with the universalist hope and strengthens it: if suffering can serve good in God's hands, then a God who brings every person through suffering to healing is doing exactly what Stump's own framework would predict.³⁷

On the other side, McClymond is right that some universalisms have handled evil badly. Barth's tendency toward what McClymond calls illusionism, in which sin becomes an "ontological impossibility" after Christ's coming, is a genuine problem.³⁸ The gnostic versions of universalism, which taught that the soul was a fragment of the divine that returns to God by nature, hollowed out the reality of evil entirely. I agree with McClymond that these versions fail. But the universalism this book holds is not Barth's, and it is not gnostic. It keeps the full weight of sin, judgment, and the cross.

Counter-Objections

Does Defeating Evil Mean Approving It?

There is a harder version of the challenge that I must face honestly. If God defeats the horrors of each person's life "within that life," as Adams argued, does that mean the victim must one day embrace a world that contained her own torture? Must she look back at what was done to her and say, "It was worth it"? That seems monstrous.³⁹

I want to tread carefully here, because this is the hardest case in the book. And I want to be clear about what Adams's argument does and does not require.

Defeat is not approval. The victim is never asked to call the evil good. She is never asked to be grateful for the torture. Adams drew the distinction sharply: to "defeat" a horror is to build around it something of such value that the horror becomes part of a story worth having, not to say the horror was acceptable. And to "engulf" a horror is to flood the victim's life with a good so great (the good of union with God) that the life is worth living despite the horror's presence. Both are needed.⁴⁰

This is not a theoretical claim. It is something many survivors of deep suffering already report in this life. A person who has passed through terrible loss and found, on the other side, a depth of compassion and closeness to God that she would not trade does not say the loss was good. She says the loss was overcome. If that kind of overcoming is possible within a single human lifetime, how much more is it possible with all the resources of eternity and the unveiled love of God?⁴¹

I concede that this is the point where the argument asks the most of us. And I do not pretend the analogy is complete. Some horrors are so extreme that speaking of "overcoming" them feels hollow. I am aware of that. But the alternative is to say that some evils are permanently undefeatible, that no good, not even the infinite good of God, can outweigh them. And that concession gives evil a kind of ultimacy, a permanent victory, that I believe belongs only to God.

"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God." (Romans 8:18–19, ESV)

Paul does not say suffering is unreal. He says it is outweighed. And he extends the promise not to the redeemed alone but to the whole creation.⁴²

Does Guaranteeing Healing Make God Complicit?

The second pushback returns to the complicity charge. If God guarantees that everyone will be healed, does He not also guarantee that all the evil that precedes the healing will happen? And does that guarantee not make Him responsible for the evil?

No. God's response to evil is to defeat it, not to ignore it. A parent who rushes a sick child to the hospital and stays through the night until the child is healed is not complicit in the illness. A parent who sees the child is sick and walks away is far closer to complicity.⁴³

The traditional view, on which God knows that some of His creatures will suffer forever and permits their existence anyway, faces the complicity charge with at least as much force. If God creates a person He knows will end up in endless torment, and He creates that person anyway, the question of divine complicity is at least as sharp as it is for the universalist who says God creates that person with the intent of healing him fully.⁴⁴

Guaranteeing healing is the opposite of complicity. It is the commitment to leave nothing broken. It is what love does.

Conclusion and the Boundary

Let me gather what the argument has shown.

McClymond's Challenge of Evil runs along two tracks. The first says universalism trivializes evil by giving everyone the same happy ending. I have argued that universalism does the opposite: it takes evil so seriously that God refuses to let it stand. The torturer is not waved through; he is unmade and remade. The victim is not left with undefeated horrors; she is healed, and the evil that was done to her is overcome by a good that is greater. Endless hell, by contrast, preserves evil forever. Which view trivializes?

The second track says universalism proves too much, or makes God complicit in evil. I have argued that the felix culpa is a challenge for every theology, not just universalism, and that universalism answers it more cleanly than the alternatives. God permits evil because He made free creatures, and free creatures introduced evil. He responds not by preserving the evil but by defeating every instance of it. That is not complicity. That is love finishing its work.

Adams gave us the sharpest tool: God's goodness to a person requires both engulfing and defeating the horrors within that person's own life. Only universal restoration meets that standard for every person. Hronich and Parry drove the point home: a God who sacrifices individuals for the good of the system is not a God who loves individuals. And Talbott supplied the governing principle: God draws the line at irreparable harm, and only universal restoration makes that line hold.⁴⁵

Reitan and Kronen showed that the doctrine of hell makes the problem of evil harder, not easier, by adding eternal suffering to the ledger of evils God must justify. And Reitan, in Troubled Paradise, showed that annihilationism magnifies the same difficulty, because the annihilated person's existence ends without the one good great enough to outweigh horror.⁴⁶

And McClymond himself, though he intended the challenge of evil as a weapon against universalism, has shown something the universalist can use: that the question of evil is at the very heart of this debate. I agree. Evil is at the heart of it. And I believe the heart of the answer is a God who does not rest until every evil is defeated, every victim is healed, and every sinner is brought home.

"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." (Revelation 21:4, ESV)

The traditional reading must quietly add an asterisk to that promise: every tear of the redeemed. The universalist takes it straight. Every tear. Every eye. Every former thing passed away. Not some evil defeated and some preserved. All of it gone.

That is the hope. It is not sentimental. It is severe. It costs the evildoer everything, and it costs God the cross. But it defeats evil, fully and finally, and I believe that is what the character of God demands. The cumulative weight of this claim, alongside the arguments of the preceding chapters, is measured in Chapter 29.