Last year I shared some thoughts about all this in a series entitled "A Theology of Everything." Some of this series is an attempt to clarify and deepen some of those reflections.
When creaturely existence was (or is or will be) united with God it is protected from finitude and contingency. Creaturely existence, therefore, was created good but vulnerable. Finitude existed as a potential future for creaturely being. Our fall into contingency was the actualization of this potential due to an existential "turning away" from divine union. When creaturely existence stepped away from divine union it suffered what I've called "an ontological drop" into finitude. In that drop, creaturely existence was exposed as contingent and began to suffer the vulnerabilities intrinsic to finitude.
All this seems straightforward, just couched here in abstract theological language. But in describing the Fall in this way what we call "the problem of evil" is recast. Specifically, as described in the last post, evil isn't an alien intruder. Nor is creation "broken." Creaturely existence is just being itself. Finite and contingent.
In this view, finite existence has an ontological integrity proper to its nature. Nothing is wrong with existence, it's just that existence is finite. Consequently, when we ask questions like “Why does cancer exist?”, “Why are there school shooters?”, or “Why are there natural disasters?”, there are straightforward answers: “Cancer exists because cells begin to multiply…,” “School shooters exist because disturbed individuals…,” “Hurricanes exist because low-pressure systems develop over the Atlantic….” These are contingent events within a finite existence. This is just what existence is in itself. A metaphysical question about why God "allows" such events to occur is, therefore, being posed at the wrong scale. The question is too fine-grained, ontologically speaking. The proper frame of the question concerns existence as an ontological whole. The question posed at its proper scale would be: "Why is creaturely existence finite and contingent?" And, once again, the answer is: "Because that's what creaturely existence, as creaturely existence, just is."
But again, creaturely existence suffering its contingency was not God's plan. Finitude became exposed upon our separation from God. More simply and conventionally stated, evil exists because we've fallen away from God. And the whole of existence, in being exposed to our finitude and contingency, suffers the consequences of that separation.
We misattribute curse to finitude itself because we only encounter it outside its intended relation to God. The curse is not mortality or decay, which are proper to finitude, but the lost communion that leaves finitude exposed. Death is proper to finitude. The curse is being exposed to death apart from God. This sits at the heart of our bivalent attitudes toward finitude. On the one hand, death is expected, natural, and good. It is the circle of life. At the same time, we name death as evil and a curse, especially when it is painful or untimely. Our ambivalent feelings here point toward multiple truths. Finitude, as finitude, is a good. Mortality included. And yet, in light of our lost ontological relation to God, being exposed to finitude is experienced as a curse.
