John Frame on Steve Hays

Posted on Behalf of Dr John Frame

I think I met Steve in the early 90s. When you teach theology, people come out of the blue and ask you questions. And that's what happened, in a way, with Steve. Typically, such correspondents want to ask about predestination or the millennium— the conventional topics of the day. But Steve's question was very different.

He asked something like "can a Reformed Christian be a Malebrancheian Occasionalist?"

When people try to understand causality, they think in terms of David Hume, and determinism, and freedom.

Malebranche was a philosophical predecessor to David Hume. Steve had been reading a history of philosophy, and Malebranche was kind of like a theistic Humean, except that he lived prior to Hume. His Occasionalism held that God is the only causal agent, and that creatures provide the "occasion" for divine action.

Steve's question threw me for a loop. I had never considered this question. I tried to persuade Steve that God did create the world with a real causal structure. That God causes things in such a way that the world does produce genuine causes.

According to my very fallible memory, after our brief correspondence, Steve joined us at WSCal as a student. He took some classes for about a year, and then he went back north.

Maybe a year later, I got a note from a former student and WSCal alumnus in the Northwest. He had become a pastor.

He wrote to me, "is it possible that there's such a thing as a theological prodigy?" He wrote about this fellow he knew, and, given the details, I knew it had to be Steve Hays.

Steve came back to WSCal in the late 1990s, and he took most of my classes. We became good friends.

On one occasion, my wife had Steve to dinner, and he seemed to trail me around the house, asking question after question, and writing my answers in a notebook.

Unfortunately, that was the time when things became sticky for me at WSCal. What had been a wonderful, congenial and collegial faculty in the eighties had become faction-ridden, and it seemed that everybody was at each other's throats. Steve was an encouragement to me, but he didn't take sides in the controversies. Looking back on the experience, Steve later described himself as neither confessional enough, nor Klinean enough, for the culture there. "I'd prefer to stay closer to the Scriptures," he said.

In 1999 I got my family together and moved to Orlando, Florida. Teaching at RTS [Reformed Theological Seminary] was the greatest 17 years of my life.

Around that same time, Steve and his mother decided to move east, to Charleston SC. Steve was close to his parents, and his father had died in 1999. [Steve's memoir notes "My father had died a month shy of my fortieth birthday".]

RTS also had a campus in Charlotte, NC, and Steve became associated there.

Together we became involved in producing a distance education program. I taught a number of courses, in theology, philosophy, ethics, and apologetics. Steve worked as my teaching assistant, as well as having worked on his own project.

Unfortunately, Steve became disassociated with RTS. I think he was in an online discussion that became a little too heated. I'm not sure what it was, but something happened, and he began blogging at Triablogue.

I've followed Steve over the years. In fact, Triablogue is the only blog that I've read consistently. When I went to my office each morning and turned on the computer, Triablogue was part of my regular routine.

Over the years, Steve has been helpful to me in a number of ways, such as in discussions with some of the neo-Thomists in recent years. For a while, it looked as if the whole Reformed world was about to go neo-Thomist. Paul Helm, Richard Muller, and many other Reformed thinkers joined the movement.

I recognized, and still do, that there are many good things in the work of Thomas Aquinas. But Thomas mixed up his good biblical theology with a lot of pagan philosophy from Plato, and especially Aristotle. I am a student of Cornelius Van Til, and like Van Til I have always been critical of Thomas's compromises with Greek Philosophy.

I wrote some brief essays such as "Two Models of Divine Transcendence: Pure Being vs. Divine Lordship," to indicate my view of things.

I realize that Thomas was trying to reconcile some Christian theologies with ideas from some of the great philosophies. It would be unthinkable for a Christian thinker living in his time not to do that. But "pure being" is not in the Bible. The biblical God is not Aristotle's "prime mover", although some try very hard to make that identification. God is YHWH, who makes covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Some time over the course of those early years, Steve became a very sophisticated philosopher. I've been at some of the leading seminaries and universities in the country, and I was amazed at how much philosophical reading Steve did. He was aware of philosophical conversations that I'd never heard of.

He had personal correspondence with many philosophers, as well as theologians, and he learned quickly how these professional thinkers discussed issues. Steve avoided stereotyped lists of talking points (alas, the common content of evangelical theology) and instead developed careful, cogent chains of argument, nuanced and qualified.

He tended to develop his arguments as I also do, with numbered lists of points. He'd develop one point, then another, indicating that he wanted to focus on this issue, rather than that. Whatever it was that Steve wrote, you always could tell that he knew what he was talking about.

I was interested that in our numbered-list approach, and in our way of approaching problems, Steve and I were very similar. I think he learned from me, but the reverse was also true.

In sum, I regarded Steve as a kindred spirit. He wasn't always on my side, but he was a Godly man, devoted to his family, seeking to think God's thoughts after Him.

He wasn't afraid to step outside of boundaries. So while he was always thoroughly Reformed in his thinking, he didn't use buzz words. He didn't always make conventional arguments. He wasn't afraid to delve into unpopular topics.

Look at the issue of cessationism. With me, the sufficiency of Scripture was always most important. Yes, natural revelation is helpful, and we learn that from Romans 1. We also know that God has spoken to people through dreams and visions. But Scripture is a sufficient source for doctrine.

So some Reformed thinkers have argued that at the death of the last apostle, God absolutely stopped speaking authoritatively to human beings. To many Reformed thinkers, the Charismatic tradition is entirely anathema.

My position was that yes, the canon of inspired Scripture is closed. That is to say, Scripture alone is God's "covenant document" (Kline) to rule his church. But Scripture never says that God's revelation will stop with the death of the last apostle. God communicates any way he chooses.

Natural revelation, for example, continues. We may legitimately make various distinctions within the concept of revelation, but in ordinary life we need not only to hear Scripture, but also to work in a godly way to APPLY Scripture to other forms of experience in which God makes himself known. So there is a bit of looseness here that we cannot avoid, a looseness hard for many Reformed thinkers to tolerate.

Steve, though a highly principled Calvinist, was willing to embrace that looseness. He did not feel bound by Reformed tradition to avoid anything that sounded Charismatic. Indeed, he maintained an independence from tradition that seemed to me to express sola Scriptura in the best possible sense.

Other Triabloggers write about paranormal phenomena, such as the Enfield poltergeist. [JB note: Steve has often told me that "naturalism" is the greatest enemy that we face.] I think God can work in unusual ways.

So over the years, even after our collaboration at RTS was over, Steve and I continued to be good friends. We were also part of a group that began at Westminster back in the 1990s. Philip Marshall, Greg Welty, later James Anderson, and I all stayed in touch, and every once in a while Steve would write to the whole group about philosophical and theological ideas that he was in touch with. We'd all get together by email and go over the issues.

I thought the world of Steve, and I will miss him very much. I look forward to resuming our conversations in glory (with so many more resources at our disposal!) Until then, I will still be reading Triablogue, where Steve's influence lives on, and where a number of godly thinkers remain to take up his torch.