A Long Obedience In the Same Direction

I wrote this about Steve Hays last Saturday, as soon as I knew he had died:

It is fair to say that I have learned more from Steve Hays in my life, than from any other human being. Christian doctrine, philosophy, “how to think clearly”. Steve was first of all a profound Christian thinker, and a prolific blogger at Triablogue, which I started reading in 2006, and where I became a co-blogger at his request, in 2010. He died peacefully this morning.

Looking back, it was actually 2011 when I became a Triablogger.

I am now and always have been a nobody. I never wanted to be anybody. Back when I was young and running for my health, Joe Henderson, a former editor of Runner’s World magazine and, according to Wikipedia, “recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on running”, said something to the effect that “while many are running up mountains, to try to get to the top, some of us just want to run laps around the base.”

To put that idea more Scripturally, it might be stated, “But we urge you, brothers, … to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, …” (1 Thess 4:11).

That has generally been my philosophy of life, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions typically revolve around me looking at a thing and saying “now that ain’t right”.

One of those exceptions turned out to be Roman Catholicism.

* * *

I grew up in a devoutly Roman Catholic family, hearing very frequently that the Catholic Church was the Church that Christ founded, the one true Church. “Thou art Peter, and on This Rock I will build my Catholic Church”.

Later as a teen, I heard the Protestant Gospel (the Biblical Gospel). I read the New Testament, I found the Gospel there, but I didn’t find the Roman Catholic Church. Matthew 16:18 was always thin gruel for me. As an aspiring wordsmith, I soon learned that it didn’t say what they told me it said. And so that contradiction sent me on a journey of explanation. To find out precisely why “that ain’t right”.

I was in and out of Catholicism a couple of times. I left in 1979 for what I considered to be the right reasons. Later someone persuaded me “it wasn’t too bad”, and following up with those folks, I was persuaded that I should try to go into the priesthood. After a few years of that, I ended up getting married, and having lots of kids, but some things about the Roman Catholic Church still didn’t sit right with me.

A friend handed me the 1994 issue of “First Things” with the first “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” statement. That too didn’t seem right.

I wrote a long letter to my parish priest at the time, telling him all my reasons that I did not believe that I could remain Catholic. I never heard from him after that. That was August of 1997.

The Internet was coming online at the time, and I found some of the early Protestant writers who were writing about Catholicism: James White, Eric Svendsen, David King, and several others. James White’s “The Roman Catholic Controversy” had a profound influence on my thinking about Rome in those days.

I joined the NTRMin discussion board, and got to be one of the “adelphoi”, the insiders. (I honestly didn’t understand James White’s “channel”. Never got the hang of the culture there. Not that I didn’t like it, but I didn’t understand how it worked!)

NTRMin helped to shape my thinking theologically. When you leave a thing that’s important to you, as Roman Catholicism was to me, there’s a void. And it’s very important that that void gets filled properly.

After a lot of exploration, I found and attended an OPC church in 2002 and 2003, but it was destroyed in a fire, and Reformed churches in the area were few and far between. I began following several blogs and participating in comments and discussions, especially surrounding political and religious issues.

That’s the first time I had heard of Triablogue. NTRMin (where I had met Jason Engwer) kind of went out of business in 2004 or 2005. Then in 2006, one of my other NTRMin friends said she had started reading Steve Hays and Triablogue. I had seen Steve’s name in a few discussions at NTRMin, so I tuned in over at Triablogue.

Around that same time, I first came across Peter Lampe’s work, “From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries”. That ground-breaking work had been written in 1987, in German, so it was not widely known.

But apparently the Vatican knew about it. They promptly did two studies into the papacy, one historical (1989) and another theological a few years later That was surprising because Rome never does anything promptly. It is said that they think in terms of centuries. But the quick work here well could have been because Lampe’s work shook them up.

John Paul II issued his “Ut Unum Sint” encyclical in 1995, famous for its request that even Protestants help him look for “a new situation” for the papacy.

Lampe’s work was published in English in 2003, and I found it in 2006. Reading that work was a life changing experience for me, for it showed me the first genuine look at what the ancient church in the city of Rome was like, in a way that was based on historical, archaeological, and other physical evidence.

In 2007 I went to a local Michael Horton conference, in which he talked about “Two Kingdoms” theology. Not ironically, a key verse for him was “But we urge you, brothers, … to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, …” (1 Thess 4:11).

I became interested in that, and by 2008, I had landed on Jason Stellman’s blog about Two Kingdoms theology (the now defunct “De Regnis Duobus” blog). I was looking into a subject that might be termed “political theology” or “political philosophy”.

But Stellman was going through his own “transformation”. In those days, the group of Roman Catholic converts who were later to start the blog “Called to Communion” were showing up in Stellman’s comments, and it seemed as if that blog had totally moved off of “Two Kingdoms” and into discussions of Roman Catholicism.

So in June 2009, I started a blog to discuss issues separately from both the Stellman site and the new “Called to Communion” site. By that time, I already had a huge sense that “that ain’t right” – a WSCal-trained pastor was converting to Roman Catholicism.

It was during those discussions that I began to have a fairly robust email conversation with Steve. My earliest emails with him go back to that period. Later, James Swan asked me to blog at his blog, Beggars All. A year later, after I told Steve that James and I had had a bit of a disagreement, Steve asked me to write at Triablogue.

My response was to say, “It would be the dream of a lifetime”.

* * *

I wasn’t one of the insiders who knew of Steve’s health conditions beforehand. I just assumed he’d keep writing. But I do have the ability to do the kind of snooping around that most readers don’t have access to.

As I write, there are 23,546 published blog posts on Triablogue. I personally have written 1,344 of them. Jason Engwer is tagged in 1549 of them. Patrick Chan in 1299. Peter Pike is tagged in 301. Interestingly, Hawk does not tag his posts as Hawk, but he’s been writing a quite a bit lately. There are several others who have written for this blog over the years, but the vast majority of these 23,000 blog posts were written by Steve Hays.

Checking the archives (in the right hand column), the earliest blog post here was “Posted by Unknown” on Friday, April 16, 2004. That one reads:

This is an experimental blog with two who’ve never blogged but should and one who just started blogging but struggles to find the time. I’m hoping this will give a public outlet to all of the wisdom and provocative thoughts of my two as of yet blogless friends. Gentleman, after you...

Steve was one of those guys, and since that date, it seems, he genuinely took 1 Thess 4:11 to heart. And he did it in a profoundly appropriate way.

There’s a book title that impressed me a great deal, some time ago. It was “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction”. Those of us who read this blog got to see that concept play out right before our eyes.