The Life Of Steve Hays

You can't say everything that should be said about Steve Hays in a single post, so I won't even try. This is just a beginning. I'll have more to say in the future.

Some of my earliest memories of Steve come from working with him on This Joyful Eastertide. It's an e-book he wrote in response to a book published in 2005 that argued against the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. I contributed to an appendix on Justin Martyr, but most of my work on the book consisted of editing. Almost all of the book, which is nearly 500 pages long, was written by Steve. He probably would have had it out much sooner if the editing, formatting, and such hadn't taken so long. The book is an illustration of so much of what defined Steve and his work. Not many Christians would read such a lengthy multi-author work against Jesus' resurrection written by such prominent skeptics. Fewer would do it so shortly after the book was published. And far fewer would be able and willing to write such a good and lengthy response so soon after the book came out. Because so few do that sort of work or even think much about it, not many people know what it costs to do it, in terms of time, effort, your reputation, and the unpredictability of who will respond to it and when, among other factors involved.

Steve wrote several other e-books, and I contributed to a couple of them. Working in his shadow was something I considered an advantage. I always wanted to write my contributions after his, since I knew he would say most of what needed to be said and would say it better. In the context of those books and in other contexts, he was an older brother you didn't resent, but admired and always wanted to have around.

I met Steve in 2005 and joined the staff of Triablogue in February of 2006. I couldn't calculate how much I've benefited from working with him and reading his material. I couldn't number or fully describe all of the articles and books I've read at his recommendation, all of the information and illustrations and arguments I've gotten from him, how he's shaped my thinking on so many issues. A lot of people are in a lot of debt to him, including many who considered him an enemy.

He was highly active in theology, apologetics, and other significant fields - the most important issues in life - until close to the day of his death. He did far more in those contexts while in poor health than the large majority of Americans, including the large majority of Evangelicals, are willing to do when their health is much better. His last post on Triablogue was written while he was weak and waiting to die in a hospice, about three days before his death. Much of the work he did, including in his last days, was done without public attention and in contexts in which few people would have faulted him for doing something less difficult instead.

To know more about him, you should read his memoir, A Backward Providence. He says a lot there about his childhood and relatives, especially his mother. He took care of her during the last several years of her life, until she died in 2013. He would often mention her in private correspondence.

He doesn't say much about Triablogue in his memoir, but he does mention that it "speaks for itself" (74). It does, and it will. The pace of posting he kept up over the years must have been partly a result of his knowing that he had significant health problems and that he wanted to build up a database while he had the opportunity to do it. People will be benefiting from that work for years to come.

He was active far beyond Triablogue. You can read his memoir for some examples. There were so many occasions when I saw him active on other people's web sites, when he was the only person there arguing for a Christian perspective or did more to advance Christianity than anybody else there or everybody else combined. There were many occasions outside of Triablogue when the Christian side of a dispute prevailed solely or largely because Steve was participating. He was frequently in contact with people from around the world in more private settings as well, such as through email and Facebook Messenger. He often took walks, and he would occasionally mention conversations he had with people in that context. Shortly before his death, he wrote in an email, "Cancer has providential fringe benefits. Because drivers notice me going for walks, and because my cancer is so visible, I get stopped by people who have questions. That's an opportunity to witness. Just this afternoon as I was walking home, a driver in a parking lot struck up a conversation with me. His adolescent son was in the passenger seat. Their wife/mother had died of cancer 5 years before. Father and son are Christian. Gave me an opportunity to have a theological discussion with them about life, death, and heaven."

Since his death, I've seen a lot of people quoting passages from his memoir. He was an unusually good communicator. I think that was partly because he had such wide interests and experiences and read so widely. He had so much to draw from, and he knew what to draw out and how to present it.

The extent to which he was an original thinker and willing to go against the crowd hasn't been appreciated as much as it ought to be. That's not just true of certain topics in fields like theology and apologetics. It's also true of his life more broadly. He lived in a culture that despises so much of the work he did. Even most Evangelicals would have advised him against giving so much of his life to work that was of such an intellectual nature, work they're so uninterested in. He lived a life that not only most non-Christians, but also most of the Christians of our day hold in low regard. If he'd spent his life doing things like telling jokes, landscaping his yard, posting photos of his relatives, and talking about sports, music, movies, cooking, housework, and such, he would have been much more loved and respected in most circles. He had qualities that would have gotten him a lot of money and more respect in fields other than where he chose to live and work. We need to keep in mind that whatever popularity Steve has comes from a tiny minority of the population. You have to give up a lot and go up against a lot to live the way he did.

One way to measure a person's life is by what you miss when he's gone. I miss his knowledge and wisdom on so many issues. I miss his work and his willingness to labor where so few are doing what needs done, doing work that meets with so much apathy and contempt even among Christians. I'll miss the updates to his bibliography. I'll miss being able to add his posts to my collections of Easter and Christmas resources every year. I miss his emails. I miss being able to come here and see new posts from him just about every day. I could go on. It's a tribute to him that the loss is so palpable.

Because of who he was and the nature of the work he did, something that always stood out to me was his presence. Whatever the time of year, whatever events were in the news, whatever the latest controversies were in one context or another, you knew he was either at work or about to be at work on the most important issues in life, researching them or writing about them. He was persistent. You could go to work in the morning and know that he would be at work, in a more important way, while you were gone. (And you'd often get back from work to find that he'd responded to your critics, sent you some useful resources in an email, or done something else to help you while you were away!) When I would bring up Triablogue on my computer in the morning, I'd see posts he'd put up the previous night, discussing God's providence, prayer, or some other issue, often making points I'd never thought of and using illustrations I'd never forget. I can't count how many times I went off to work, went to visit relatives at Christmastime, or some such thing and was encouraged by the thought that Steve was around, persistent in carrying out such important work that so few people are willing to do. Knowing that he was present was such a blessing for so many years. He's no longer there.

"Our beloved brother Charles Stanford has just been taken from us. I seem to be standing as one of a company of disciples, and my brethren are melting away. My brothers, my comrades, my delights are leaving me for the better land….The grief is to us who are left behind. What a gap is left where Hugh Stowell Brown stood! Who is to fill it? What a gap is left where Charles Stanford stood! Who is to fill it?...We stand like men amazed. Why this constant thinning of our ranks while the warfare is so stern? Why this removal of the very best when we so much need the noblest examples? I am bowed down and could best express myself in a flood of tears as I survey the line of graves so newly dug. The Master is gathering the ripest of his fruit, and well does he deserve them. His own dear hand is putting his apples of gold into his baskets of silver, and as we see that it is the Lord, we are bewildered no longer. His word, as it comes before us in the text, calms and quiets our spirits. It dries our tears and calls us to rejoicing as we hear our heavenly Bridegroom praying, 'Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory.' [John 17:24]" (Charles Spurgeon, in Randy Alcorn, ed., We Shall See God [Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2011], 8-9)

Memoirs and memories

1. One objection to the historicity of the Gospels is the argument from silence. Here's an example:

https://www.michaeljkruger.com/gospel-critics-and-the-argument-from-silence/

The argument from silence can be a legitimate and powerful argument. It all depends on whether there's a reasonable expectation that if something happened, we'd have a record of that, or multiple records. There are different explanations for a writer's failure to mention a significant event he knew about, even if it's relevant to his writing. 

2. Paradoxically, a writer might not mention something, not because he's ignorant, or because it didn't happen, but because it did happen and he's knows all about it. For instance, no one knew Dante Rossetti better than his brother Michael. Yet, as I recall, Michael said that being his brother disqualified him from writing an autobiography of Dante. That's not because Michael didn't know enough about his brother, but because he knew too much, and he was protecting Dante's posthumous reputation. Likewise, Warnie Lewis is in invaluable source of information about his brother, but there are lots of sensitive details he left out of the public eye. 

3. Here's another reason a writer might fail to mention something significant. When I was about 40, I wrote a memoir. It was a way to take stock of my life up to that point. Paradoxically, it's quite possible, when writing an autobiography, to inadvertently leave out significant incidents, not because you forgot, but because you remember too much. Our memories are stored in the subconscious. Although we can summon memories to conscious awareness, it's impossible to be conscious of more than a tiny fraction of what we remember. So when you're writing a memoir, it can be difficult to screen out the plethora of memories you don't want to write about in order to focus on the memories you do want to write about. There's no direct way to filter the search parameters so that you just pull up the memories you want to write about. There's a huge amount of mental sifting and sorting required to write an autobiography. It's very easy for significant incidents to slip your mind in the writing process, because human powers of concentration are so limited. 

4. In addition, some memories aren't just a matter of direct recollection, but inferential reconstruction. I'll take an example from my own life. As a boy, I had a dog I was very fond of. I vividly remember the day I got her, and I vividly remember the day I had her euthanized. I have no direct recollection of the date, month, or year for either event. 

Because memory is associative, the trick is to link a memory with another memory that has some datable or broadly datable information. I have a rough idea of when I euthanized my dog, because that was after a trip to Europe. 

I remember that I got my dog on a summer day. My parents drove to a residential neighborhood in Seattle. My dog was in the front yard. As I recall, this was near Cornish. 

And that makes sense because my mother may well have gotten the dog from one of her teaching colleagues. She founded a school for the fine and performing arts on the Eastside, and the teachers she hired would naturally be drawn from Cornish and the UDub. 

But what about the year? I still don't know for sure, but I have a ballpark idea. It took me years to get a bead on that.

Recently, I remembered that even though my grandmother was not a dog person, she appreciated my dog because my dog was very protective. That's back when my grandmother was living in town and came to visit us every so often.

But around the time I started junior high, she moved across the mountains to Yakima. And how do I know when that happened? Because I later read some dated correspondence between my mother and my grandmother that mentioned a time when we went to visit her. That means I must have gotten my dog at least a couple of years before I started junior high. 

Yet it's just a fluke that I have enough random, contextual bits of information to piece it together. That illustrates how hard it can be to nail down the chronology of naturally memorable events we know from firsthand experience. 

5. I'd add that the Internet has made it easier to pin down or flesh out certain details in our recollection. But, of course, biographers and autobiographers didn't have that supplementary source of information for most of human history. 

6. The historicity of the Gospels is frequently defended on the grounds that the writers were deliberately selective. And that's no doubt true to some degree. But for reasons I've just given, eyewitness testimony can be inadvertently selective as well. Silence, per se, carries no presumption that the writer wasn't a firsthand observer. Ironically, he may unintentionally omit significant incidents because recollection is so indiscriminate. 

R.C. Sproul, From Dust To Glory

To add to what Steve Hays has posted, John Piper has a good article on Sproul. He was an unusually good communicator who held such a high view of God and of scripture, and he was willing to fight a lot of battles that needed to be fought. Since Sproul communicated so many important truths so well, you could cite so many examples of how good of a teacher he was and why he'll be missed. Here are a few that stand out in my mind at the moment, and I'll probably think of a lot more later.

On how he'd explain to his mother the difference between a Protestant understanding of justification and the Roman Catholic view.

On imputed righteousness.

Shortly after my father's death in 2012, I watched the conclusion of Sproul's Dust To Glory series with my mother. During the closing minutes, he discusses God's glory in heaven. I initially watched this with my father in mind, but it's applicable to R.C. Sproul as well.

Am I dying?