Novelists like Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Cormac McCarthy, and others give us characters who cannot fit into this “present evil age” (Gal. 1:4). The Messiah came, not to a purified and enlightened world spiritually prepared for his arrival, but rather to a humanity no nearer to its original goodness than on the day Cain murdered his brother Abel. Indeed, the barbarity of crucifixion reveals precisely that diagnosis. From beginning to end, the Holy Scriptures testify that the predicament of fallen humanity is so serious, so grave, so irremediable from within, that nothing short of divine
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