Mark Driscoll is an evangelical preacher out west with a massive following. Over 7,000 attend his Sunday sermon. He’s shaking things up with his tough-guy image — he wears a black skateboarders jacket — and provacative subject matter. One of his popular youtube videos is titled Biblical Oral Sex. He’s come to be known as The Cussing Pastor.
What intrigues me, though, is that he’s making Calvinism cool. And, philosophically, John Calvin stands out because his strand of Christianity is deterministic. That is, humans don’t have free will, but simply are pawns in a game whose moves were written out by God at the beginning of time.
Driscoll’s message, according to the NYT, is this:
[Y]ou are not captain of your soul or master of your fate but a depraved worm whose hard work and good deeds will get you nowhere, because God marked you for heaven or condemned you to hell before the beginning of time.
I find it surprising that people find religious determinism of this intensity to be attractive. In the Calvinist world, God has already decided your fate and whether or not you’re going to heaven or hell. Perhaps, conveniently, if you come to a Calvinist church, you’re the type of person that God willed to be saved?
This model does solve a key problem in traditional Christianity. If you have free will, then you can sin now and ask for forgiveness later. In fact, you can be an absolutely horrible human — a Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolph Hitler and Al Franken all rolled into one — and then ask for a deathbed conversion and still enter the Pearly Gates.
But in the Calvinist model, every “slip” in your life is not a product of your own volition, but a signal that you’re on the wrong track. You are encouraged throughout your entire life to avoid such signals.
Mr. Calvin thus created pretty strong incentives for proper behavior.
As my buddy put it, “It’s really a pretty sophisticated trick John Calvin pulled, but (as evidenced by the historical zealotry of Calvinists) it works quite well.”
Or as another says, “A brilliant piece of psychological control, but a little too convenient to be divinely inspired. But then again, we can’t possibly know His will, and it’s conceivable that God simply delights in creating bits of evidence designed to convince rational people that he does not exist.”
Liberty Is For Me 