"No, We Can't!"

I recently came across an article in the New York Times that surprised me - in the best of ways - by managing to combine a culture piece on "evangelicals," that curious and exotic breed, with some specific discussion of doctrine. Pastor Mark Driscoll and his "New Calvinists" may not be to everyone's taste, but they do depart radically from both mainstream happy-clappy evangelism and smells-and-bells High Church formality. The punks and rockers that make up Mark Driscoll's ministry embrace pre-destination, not the most palatable of doctrines to modern sensibilities, even as they scorn so much of the "feminized" over-the-top clean-living standards that characterizes the watchdog groups and Christian-rock concerts that make up what has become the religious right.

I'm not sure what I think of Driscoll. I'm instinctively put off by predestination, but it does make some philosophical sense, and for all my affinity for "smells and bells" it is nice to see a church that can combine populism with strict adherence to some form of doctrine - one cannot accuse the New Calvinists, at least, of hypocrisy.

But what I'm most curious about is not Driscoll himself, but his context. The article discusses a resurgence of Calvinism among American Christians. But it fails to answer the perhaps unanswerable: why? Why now? It seems like a conscious rejection of the human power of the will - that "can-do" attitude that makes up so much of American culture. Is it a discomfort with the Pelagian uber-humanism of American culture contrasted with the recession, where the American dreams of opportunity and self-improvement are dashed against the tragic inevitability of the system-at-large?

Perhaps, in recognizing the limits of human capacity, the New Calvinists are challenging 2008's optimistic mantra "Yes, we can."

No, they reply. "No we can't." At least not without grace.