There were a number of fathers in the early church (the first four centuries C.E.) who believed in apokatastasis, “universal restoration” (Acts 3:21). They believed that the real meaning of the resurrection of Christ was that God’s love was so perfect and so victorious that it would finally win out in every single person’s life. They were so sure about this that their thought partially gave rise to the mythology of purgatory as a place—in the dying process or shortly after death, God’s infinite love can and will still get at you! They felt that no soul could resist such a love once it was revealed to them. (Most Catholics forgot that the original folk belief in purgatory represented an overwhelming sense of God’s always-victorious love and mercy. Like many great mysteries, it deteriorated into its exact opposite, a place of punishment—which is all a worldview of scarcity can devise.)
.. ‘O good Lord, how can all be well when great harm has come to your creatures through sin?’ And here I wanted, if I dared, to have some clearer explanation to put my mind at rest.” And he said, “Since I have brought good out of the worst-ever evil, I want you to know by this; that I shall bring good out of all lesser evils, too.”
Krauthammer: Combatting Evil with Good
But there’s a deeper reason for this rush to banish Confederate symbols, to move them from the public square to the museum. The trigger was not just the massacre itself but, even more tellingly, the breathtaking display of nobility and spiritual generosity by the victims’ relatives. Within 48 hours of the murder of their loved ones, they spoke of redemption and reconciliation and even forgiveness of the killer himself. It was an astonishingly moving expression of Christian charity.
Such grace demands a response. In a fascinating dynamic, it created a feeling of moral obligation to reciprocate in some way. The flag was not material to the crime itself, but its connection to the underlying race history behind the crime suggested that its removal from the statehouse grounds — whatever the endlessly debated merits of the case — could serve as a reciprocal gesture of reconciliation.
.. The result was a microcosm of — and a historical lesson in — the moral force of the original civil-rights movement, whose genius was to understand the effect that combating evil with good, violence with grace would have on a fundamentally decent American nation.
.. Perhaps we can learn a lesson from Arlington National Cemetery, founded by the victorious Union to bury its dead. There you will find Section 16. It contains the remains of hundreds of Confederate soldiers grouped around a modest, moving monument to their devotion to “duty as they understood it” — a gesture by the Union of soldierly respect, without any concession regarding the taintedness of their cause.