After Outrage, What?: From Outrage to Outreach

July 29, 2015

by Scott Oliphint

Recent effects of despotic decisions by the Supreme Court have properly produced outrage. But outrage can subside, and it can become all too easy for us to slide back to our everyday routines. In the midst of our outrage, then, it might be worth pondering the question, “After outrage, what?” The abortion issue rightly focuses on the senseless death of the baby. If we zoom out from that focus, however, we’ll notice someone else in the picture as well. Taking a wider view of the situation can give the church an effective, gospel-driven, way to address this tragedy.

It was John Adams who said “Facts are stubborn things.” If Adams lived in today’s America, he would have to amend that statement to something like, “Facts are stubborn things, but their stubbornness pales into insignificance compared to the stubbornness of folly.” As the recent Obergefell decision, as well as the less recent Roe vs. Wade decision, show, the intractable darkness of foolishness can suppress the stubbornness of facts in the blink of an eye. In Obergefell, foolishness suppresses the obvious facts of gender, substituting in its place a vacuous and intentionally undefined notion of “love.” In Roe vs. Wade, foolishness suppresses the obvious facts of human life, and substitutes a penumbral notion of privacy. In each case, foolishness covers facts like a slimy, diseased blanket.

Washington, now thoroughly adept at causing and celebrating the destruction of a nation, will not solve the problems of folly that it has sanctioned. Instead, it will continue to feed itself by stoking its perpetual survival with whatever fuel is in vogue on a given day. The only solution in…

…continue reading at Reformation21.

Scott Oliphint

Dr. Oliphint (PhD, Westminster) is professor of apologetics and systematic theology at WTS.

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A Sanctified Syllogism

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by David Garner