What went wrong with the world? On the surface, the cosmos fails to live up to its meaning, given its ubiquitous injustice, inequity, and suffering. Appearances, however, often conceal deeper truths in Origen’s theology. Rather than undermine divine goodness, power, and justice, the unruly universe reveals God’s hidden soteriological designs. God creates the cosmos to arrest the descent of souls and to enable their ascent, culminating with the apokatastasis, when God will be “all in all.” Far from satisfying divine vengeance, suffering serves to purge and perfect souls, enabling their eventual return to God. Origen applies a cosmic hermeneutics to the problem of evil in order to vindicate divine justice. His cosmic theodicy, then, restores the coherence of the cosmos by embedding it within a larger soteriological narrative of the fall and return of souls, which includes a subtle universalism. For Origen, we went wrong and God creates the world to help us set things right
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