It’s pretty common to hear Reformed leaders lament modern praise music. They bemoan forgotten hymns, shallow theology, and repetitive refrains. But you won’t hear Piper complain—at least not about the good stuff. “The worship songs that are being written and sung today are about a great God,” he said. “They have set the stage for the theology. I still don’t understand why many churches don’t follow that with preaching that gets the theology of the songs. But at least for the Passion movement, that music is very God-exalting. The things that nineteen-year olds are willing to say about God in their songs is mind-boggling.”

Piper could be thinking about a number of songs belted out by the throngs that packed Atlanta’s Phillips Arena, normally home to professional basketball and hockey franchises. I considered Chris Tomlin’s “Indescribable”: “All powerful, untamable, awestruck we fall to our knees as we humbly proclaim you are amazing God.” I also recalled one of my favorite songs, “Wholly Yours” by the David Crowder Band: “I am full of earth, you are heaven’s worth; I am stained with dirt, prone to depravity; you are everything that is bright and clean, the antonym of me, you are divinity.”

These songs from Passion artists illustrate the conference’s picture of a transcendent God, untamable and wholly unlike us. With intimate knowledge of our depravity, we respond by falling to our knees—actually at Passion, students are more likely to raise and wave their arms. Those physical acts of worship alone prove that these students don’t act like Baptists from previous generations. As I watched Passion, I couldn’t help but wonder, don’t many of these students attend churches where pastors sound a lot like therapists and teach that God just wants us to do good and feel good about ourselves? Some even attend churches that promise health and wealth for faithful believers. If so, why do these youths sing songs about depravity?

Maybe you can only survive so long on a self-help diet. Eventually you get pretty sick of yourself. A biblical understanding of God—big beyond description, active, perfectly holy—tastes much better than junk-food pop psychology. Imagine that this transcendent God still condescended to save his disobedient people. Because he so loved the world, this God of the universe dressed in flesh and suffered on the cross. Yet he did not stay in that tomb. The power of God raised Jesus Christ, who made a way for us to dwell in the house of the Lord forever if we only believe. Transcendent, yet immanent, he transforms us, and then he employs us in transforming the world to renew his creation. For students at Passion, the biblical picture of God feels new, appealing, and exciting.

“I do wonder if some of the appeal [of Calvinism] and the trend isn’t a reaction to the watered-down vision of God that’s been portrayed in the evangelical seeker-oriented churches,” Joshua Harris told me. “I’m not trying to knock them, but I just think that there’s such a hunger for the transcendent and for a God who is not just sitting around waiting for us to show up so that the party can get started.”