Is the Crucifixion a Penultimate Good?

The Story told in the Gospels states the meaning of creation

In confessing the true God to be the “creator of heaven and earth,” the dogma of the church makes a claim about the present as much as the past. As I wrote last week, the Book of Genesis makes the world’s dependence on God be independent of the difference between one moment of created time and another. God now commands everything in existence to exist. This means that what God creates is not a thing— a cosmos— but a history. God does not create a world that thereupon has a history. He creates a history that is a world, in that it is purposive and so makes a whole.

The cross is a part of the history which God creates.

Is it history’s purpose?

If creation is good and if its purposive good is Jesus’s Resurrection, then this implies that the Crucifixion is also a penultimate good. Likewise, if the cross of Christ is for sin, then, as conceptually and morally unimaginable as it might be, it appears that creation’s fallenness, its sin and evil, is also an intermediate good.