Grace Through Type

While nature alone cannot be redemptive, the letterform—Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic—occupies a unique place of “overlap” between the spheres of common grace and saving grace. It is the place of the Almighty’s condescension, one in which the Maker of stars freely uses a part of humanity to redeem His people unto eternal life—the letterforms, the typeface in which the gospel of Christ is printed on a page become the bridge for innumerable people to cross into eternal joy Himself. In our English Bibles, the tiny lowercase “r” that begins the word redeem, the capital “L” of the title Lord, the majestic lowercase “b” of that outrageous word but all contribute to the saving work of God by the proclamation of His good news. Christ wears the mask of the typographer in both kingdoms at just this point. 

Not Responsible for My Own Being

“To live the life of active fellowship with God is, therefore, to live out of the event of freedom from sin and death. Evangelical freedom is the freedom that comes from not being finally responsible for my own being: by the mercy of God I am restored to know myself to be a creature in fellowship with my creator and savior. And to such freedom I cannot liberate myself: self-liberation is precisely the ‘yoke of slavery’ (Gal. 5:1) from which I have been set free.”

[John Webster, Holiness, 94

Pure Tones of the Psalm of Grace

“There is no gift that has not been earned by Him. … The covenant of redemption does not stand by itself, but is the basis of the economy of salvation. It is the great prelude which in the Scriptures resounds from eternity on into our own time and in which we can already listen to the pure tones of the psalm of grace.”

[Geerhardus Vos, “Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” in Covenant and Justification, 133]

We Will Not Make It Right

What would sin, evil, and death look like if we stripped away our efforts to turn them back, to paper over their effects in the world? I think the world would look like The Road, and I think that is what McCarthy is (partly) getting at in the book. McCarthy’s man and boy live in a reality in which the results of the Curse are seen in every aspect of creation, not merely in humanity: dead, black trees that collapse, water and snow and air that are completely polluted, an ocean the color of lead and devoid of life, the total lack of the fruit of the ground and of livestock, skies that rain fire down upon them but block out precious light and heat. The entire creation groans against the man and his son, giving them nothing in return for man’s curse-causing sin.

The majority of the human beings they encounter are already corpses, while the few still living are miserable indeed. These people, creatures made in the image of God, inThe Road are all devouring one another, or being devoured, cannibalism being the ultimate display of the human self- and mutual-destruction that sin engenders. While the author states that this is his story “about the good guys,” their goodness is seen as an exception to the human condition, a condition which is no longer hidden by the luxuries of modern life.

Two passages cited in entries below point us in this direction, one from the beginning and one from the end of the story. First, “The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night” (28). Something prior to the catastrophe was hiding the true state of the world and human society, including its morality. Second, “On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again” (291). Again, there was some aspect of the world which no longer was, which cannot be made right again. The man and the boy cling inseparably to Goodness, all while knowing that their clinging belief is at base irrational and presuppositional: there is no reason to be good other than to be not evil. Goodness is at the end of the ladder of causation.

Knowingly or not, McCarthy has painted the most vivid picture of human sin and evil that I have ever seen, one that makes me truly examine how I think of my sinfulness and Christ’s forgiveness of it. This is what sin and misery are like. Yet The Road also gives me more hope because there is coming a time when this frail world will be remade into what it was Meant To Be, when all these things will be made right. But he is surely right that it will not be us who does so.