¶ … Evil in Judaism and Taoism (2) How does the answer to the existential "why" given by the karma theodicy differ from the answer given by the eschatological theodicy?

The karma theodicy suggests that the existence of evils upon earth, and of evils within the individual human life, should be understood in two directions -- looking back at a state before a person was born, and ahead towards a state after a person will be dead. Here life on earth becomes a sort of purgatorial existence -- the heaven to be reached is an escape from earthly incarnation. The reward of people for suffering is ultimately a removal from earth itself, and the justice of the universe is manifest in the logic of this process of death and rebirth. Time, in the karma theodicy, is understood as cyclical: souls have been here before and will be here again, and presumably...

The eschatological theodicy has, by contrast, a different relationship to time: suffering will be rewarded by a transformative event, the eschaton, within the future. The reward for suffering here is a future state -- such as heaven, or a millennial state upon earth -- which promises redemption. But redemption has already been provided by Jesus Christ, so Christian eschatology tends to focus on the second coming of Christ. Contrary to the cycle of incarnations as a process toward liberation in karma theodicy, the one incarnation that matters in Christian eschatology is that of Christ, who was God become man. Christ's sacrifice therefore has a specific relation to time (still reflected in the West's system of numbering years) -- the incarnation of Christ…