I can’t tell whether or not he’s appealing to some sort of natural law that compels us all to judge ‘doing good’ as good, or if he’s saying that all people who do good are showing the results of Christ’s work of atonement whether they acknowledge it or not. Can someone exegete this?

A hypothetical question: Why would you let your thoughts about this man torture you? [...] That is unless you actually like being offended.

Amen to that. Reminds me of when Margaret Thatcher died, and the British Twittersphere was immediately filled with two responses:

1. People who had hated Margaret Thatcher (often people who had been born after she left office…) and who wanted to make it perfectly clear how glad they were she was dead.
2. People who supported Margaret Thatcher but who, instead of actually mourning her death, rushed to retweet and berate those in the first group, to tell us that “now we see the true face of those who opposed her”, express how deeply, deeply offended they were, and so on.

This pie chart sets out the phenomenon more wittily and in greater detail.

The first group (who equate to those in the red wedge on the pie chart) can be tedious, but hey, Margaret Thatcher was a controversial leader who inspires strong emotions. The second group (those in the green wedge on the pie chart) seem to be in the darker place overall: see C.S. Lewis on the desire to “paint black a little blacker”.

(What the pie chart omits, incidentally, is all the bewildered and grieving Cher fans misreading #nowthatcherisdead as Now That Cher Is Dead…)

Then, before I could stop it, an awful thought popped into my mind: “Oh no. How long will it take John Piper to get on the radio, TV, his blog, or Twitter to explain to the world that this was God’s judgment on sin and tell the parents who lost children in this tornado that they got exactly what they deserved?”

Maybe it’s me, but when I heard about the tornadoes, my main thought wasn’t “I just bet [insert person I'm annoyed with] is going to say something stupid, just you wait.” It was “That’s where my roommate went to school, where a former co-worker lived for years, where my uncle’s family is.”

An hypothetical question: Why would you let your thoughts about this man torture you? You’re allowed to be upset with his way of thinking about tragedy, but only to an extent. If you know you’re likely to be offended by this guy’s Tweets, stop following him.

That is unless you actually like being offended. Then I can’t help ya. Spending your time worrying about what some guy is going to say about a tragedy can’t be all that profitable.

I mean, what self-respecting new Calvinist publicly retracts anything? ;)

When tragedy strikes my life, I find it stabilizing and hope-giving to see the stories of the sheer factuality of other’s losses, especially when they endured them the way Job did. Job really grieved. He really agonized. He collapsed to the ground. He wept. He shaved his head. This was, in my mind, a pattern of what must surely happen in Oklahoma. I thought it would help. But when I saw how so many were not experiencing it that way, I took them down.

The rest here.

I’m just sorry your second link had to be written. Thanks for sharing it, though.

*facepalm*

On the other hand, Wendy over at Theology for Women has a well-reasoned piece on the deafening silence from the neo-Reformed leadership on the SGM mess.

I’ve noticed that Paul seems to get sneered at a bit more these days in some circles. Usually not bad enough to make demons and slave owners look good in comparison, but still…