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)

True love can't be "forced"

1. One of the flash cards objections to Calvinism is that true love can't be "forced". Of course, even on its own terms, that's a clueless objection. If everything predestined, then God isn't "forcing" himself on anyone. Force presumes resistance. But if everything is predestined, then there can't be any tension between the plan and the execution. It isn't possible to resist predestination and providence if everything we think and do is the effect of predestination and providence. No doubt freewill theists will find that equally objectionable, but that's a different objection than "forcing" agents to love him. 

2. In their rhetorically knee-jerk way, what they seem to mean by "force" is that we didn't choose to love God in return. So let's consider some comparisons:

i) In this clip, David Platt talks about adopting a young boy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtnGGFqpT80

At that age, the boy didn't choose to be adopted. He never consented to be adopted. At that age, the love was one-sided. It was all from his adoptive parents. 

ii) Sometimes it's a virtue to befriend someone who wants to be left alone. Suppose I'm a high school student. I notice another student who's a brooding, standoffish loner. 

He has no friends, and it's a vicious cycle. He dislikes the other students, so they dislike him in return. They sense each other's antipathy. And that reinforces his social alienation.  

Suppose I make an effort to cultivate him. I reach out to him. He resents my gestures of friendship. But I persist. I "force" myself on him, in hopes of wearing down his resistance. I impose on him because he clearly needs of friend. I try to gain his trust. Break through the barrier. 

Maybe I won't succeed, but even if I fail, he will know that there was one person who cared about him. And maybe that will initiate a thawing process. Perhaps, a few years later, I'll bump into him, and at that point he will be more open. 

iii) I'm no expert an autism, but it's impression that for severe autistics, love has to come from the parental side. Perhaps severe autistics lack the psychological makeup to reciprocate. At the very least, it takes the infinite patience of caring parents to draw them out. That's very lopsided love. They can't enter your world, so you must enter theirs–as best you can. 

iv) I once saw a scene on TV of a drunken partier who climbed out the window onto the ledge of a fourth story apartment, then tried to climb onto the roof. He slipped. He avoided falling to his death by gabbing onto the rails of balconies as he went down. Although he couldn't hold on, it broke the force of the fall, so that while he landed hard, he didn't kill himself or break any bones.

But after he got up, dazed, he tried to climb back up the outside of the apartment. Having narrowly eluded death, he went right back to more insanely dangerous behavior. At that point two guys intervened to pull him down before he got too far up, and hauled him off until he dried out. They physically overpowered him for his own protection. If would be interesting if they showed him the footage, after he was sober.

Is Love Wanting the Best for Someone?

http://calvindude.org/dude/2014/03/25/love-wanting-best-someone/

Perfect freedom

I'm going to comment on some statements by Alexander Pruss:

http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2013/11/moral-and-perfect-freedom.html

Before getting to the specifics, we need to define "love." "Love" can mean at least two different things:

i) Affection

ii) Acting in the best interests of another

It's possible to act on behalf of another despite not having affection for them. Indeed, there's something commendable about doing good to those you dislike. 

With this distinction in mind, one notices that there is a difference in value between God's creating a being that inevitably loves him back and his creating a being that gets to choose whether or not to love him back. Even if a being that inevitably loves him back is no better, God's action of inviting someone into communion with him very much has something very significant to be said for it that God's creating someone who will inevitably be in communion with him doesn't.

Unfortunately Pruss doesn't explain what makes that "very significant." 

The second point is this. There is a value to loving someone by choice. Now when God and St Francis love each other, each loves the other by choice. Francis chooses to love God, while being able not to. But God likewise chooses to love Francis, while being able not to. 

i) Pruss is half right. Ironically, that's the principle underlying double predestination. God is free to "love" some, but not love others. Unconditional election and reprobation. 

ii) Is love a choice? Depends on whether we define "love" as affection or a loving action on behalf of another. Humans can't simply choose who they have affection for. But they can choose how to treat another. 

iii) Apropos (ii), we choose our friends, but we don't choose our relatives. However, we tend to choose friends on the basis of those with whom we have natural rapport. We choose to associate with them, but we don't choose to like them. Rather, because we find some people likable, we want them to be our friends. 

iv) Conversely, it's a Christian virtue to befriend someone you don't like. Be a friend to them because they need a friend, without the expectation that they will be a friend to you. 

v) Libertarian theism is confronted with a dilemma: freewill theists typically wish to say that humans are free to love or withhold love from God, but God isn't free to love or withhold love from humans. 

Pruss's position is more symmetrical, but in that event, why does he oppose Calvinism? 

A certain symmetry and equality in love are particularly valuable. In the Trinity, we have a symmetry: no Person of the Trinity has the freedom to fail to love another. But we automatically start off with God having a choice whether to be in a relationship of love with a creature, namely through his having a choice whether to create the creature. It makes for deeper equality and symmetry if the creature also has a choice about how to respond to God.

No doubt that would make for a deeper equality and symmetry, but what if the relationship between God and sinners is inherently unequal and asymmetrical–like a mother and her newborn baby?

A love relationship that is chosen on one side but not on another is less valuable through the asymmetry. Imagine a woman who chose to have a baby had a drug that would ensure that the child would love her back. She had a choice, to some degree, whether to love the baby. But she refuses the child a choice about whether and how to reciprocate the relationship.

i) Once again, the reflects the systematic equivocation which runs through Pruss's analysis. He keeps blurring two different kinds of love. As a rule, parents and children don't choose to love each other (in the sense of affection). That's built in. Even in marriage, we try to marry someone with whom we're simpatico. 

ii) Pruss's standard is subversive. A fundamental feature of divine love, as well as the Christian ecotype, is loving the other even when reciprocity is absent. Loving someone in spite of their animosity. God's love for sinners is a paradigm case.

Or take a parent who continues to love a very difficult teenager. Or take a grown child who cares for an elderly parent with senile dementia. Not only is the feeble-minded parent unable to love in return, but the feeble-minded parent may be resentful and resistant. The grown child is caring for the parent despite the parent's inability to appreciate the loving intent. 

God’s wrath is his penultimate and not his final word

What follows here is a continuation of a message from the Theology of the Cross series, The Christian’s Most Precious Treasure.

That article provides more background on the opus alienum and opus proprium of God, which are two “perspectives” on why God does the things he does, and why they don’t seem quite “God-like” to us.

It occurs to me as I put this together, as well, that Luther’s “discovery” also speaks to some of those “God is a moral monster” types of comments that Paul and Steve are addressing lately.

God humiliates man, in order that he may justify him; he makes man a sinner, in order that he may make him righteous – and both aspects of this matter are increasingly seen by Luther as works of God. Although Luther initially appears to have believed that man humbled himself, there are clear indications in the later stages of [Luther’s 1513-1515 lectures on the Psalms] that he is moving towards a more theocentric understanding of the various aspects of justification. God induces in man a state of total humiliation – a term which Luther prefers to ‘humility’, on account of the latter’s associations with the monastic virtue of humility – and then he accepts this as the righteousness which he demands of man if he is to be justified. Once Luther has grasped the fact that it is God who takes the initiative in Justification, and that he must be regarded as active rather than passive at every stage of the process, he is increasingly obliged to recognize the problems which are raised by this assertion. It is not man who humbles himself – it is God who humbles him. Even in the earlier stages of [Luther’s 1513-1515 lectures on the Psalms], where Luther allows man a greater role in his own justification, God is still seen as instigating man’s humiliation, even if man himself must cooperate with God if this humiliation is to be properly effected.

How does God humiliate man? Through the experience of the wrath of God, the threat of hell and eternal damnation, through Anfechtung and suffering. It is through experiencing the wrath of God that man is humbled, and forced to concede that he cannot, by himself, stand in the presence of God – and thus he turns to God in his helplessness and hopelessness, and by doing so, is justified. Paradoxically, it is thus through God’s wrath that his mercy is able to operate, in that man would not seek that mercy unless he knew how much he needed it. It is considerations such as this which lead Luther to distinguish two aspects of the work of God in justification. Even at the earliest stages of [Luther’s 1513-1515 lectures on the Psalms], Luther may be found to employ the concepts of the opus alienum [“the work alien to God”] and opus proprium [“the proper work of God”] to deal with this paradox…. While the impenitent taste nothing but the severity of the wrath of God, the penitent recognize the merciful intention which lies behind it, in that they discern that it is intended to move them to repentance, humility and faith, and thus to receive the grace of God. God, having ordained that he will bestow grace upon the sole precondition of humility is obliged to stand by his primordial decision – and thus, if man is to receive grace, he must meet this condition. The intent underlying the opus alienum Dei is to enable man to fulfil this precondition, and thus to receive the grace of the merciful God who is hidden in his strange work. As we showed on the basis of our analysis of the soteriology of [Luther’s 1513-1515 lectures on the Psalms] in the previous chapter, Luther appears to interpret fides Christi as sibi iniustus esse ita coram Deo humilis [“unjust to him to be humble before God”], where fides Christi is the righteousness which God requires of man if he is to be justified.

If man is to recognize his own unrighteousness, and thus be moved to humility he must first be forced to concede his own utter unworthiness, and the futility of his situation, if left to his own devices. The merciful intention of the opus alienum thus becomes clear, although this may only be recognisable to faith…. The Word of God, by passing its severe judgement upon man, makes him a sinner, and thus executes the opus alienum – but in that this moves man to cry out to God for mercy and grace (which are immediately forthcoming!), it indirectly executes the opus proprium.

It is of considerable significance that Luther later illustrates the concepts of the opus alienum and opus proprium in the Heidelberg disputation with specific reference to the justification of the sinner: ‘thus an action which is alien to God’s nature results in an action which belongs to his very nature: God makes a person a sinner, in order to make him righteous.’ The fundamental insight, recognized by faith alone, is that God’s wrath is his penultimate, and not his final, word.

Note: Where you see “[Luther’s 1513-1515 lectures on the Psalms]” in the text, I’ve used this phrase to replace McGrath’s use of “Dictata”, or “Dictata super Psalterium”. Yes, Luther did a super job lecturing through the Psalms, and it helped him to understand a great deal, but sometimes the Latin just gets a bit confusing.

Arminianism and Voluntary Love

Arminians typically criticize Calvinism because the latter makes a mockery of love. As Roger Olson puts it in his Against Calvinism, "it must be factually possible for both [parties] to a possible loving relationship to be able to say 'no' to the other (167). Of course, Olson immediately contradicts himself by taking away the right of God to say "no" to the other, but never mind that. It is striking that the Bible undermines these naive and sentimental Arminian intuitions. For example, the Old and New testaments command that we love God: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5) and loving “thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). More elaborately, we read in Matthew22:36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

I assume these passages relay a general command for all people. Since it is a command from God, then we ought to love God and our neighbor. If we ought to love God, how or why should it be possible for us to say "no"? Indeed, if we ought not murder, do we have a choice to say "no?" Is it optional?

I believe William Hasker uses the analogy of a king giving a woman a love potion to change her heart so that she will love the king, and claims this is analogous to Calvinism. He finds this ugly; I find it beautiful—but that's because I understand how the woman treated the man. He didn't run to the women throwing off their tops and begging to be with him. No, he ran to the hefty, wart-faced prostitute who spit on him every time he passed by and chose to turn her into a beautiful princess and bring about a change in her heart to desire the good and kindly king. But I'm digressing.

Here's the point. How is it an advantage for Arminianism for the king to say to the woman: I command you to love me. In fact, you are morally obligated to love me. (Since not all men can love God apart from grace, I take it that this falsifies ought-implies-can. Prevenient grace doesn't help. God didn't have to pass out prevenient grace to all, yet I presume that all men would still be obligated to love God and neighbor. Prevenient grace does say that all men can love God, but this is accidental. In fact, for Arminians to affirm ought implies can means that they must hold that there would have been no obligations on fallen man if God had not graciously chosen to hand out grace. Ought implies can is supposed to be a necessary truth, and thus true apart from the accidental and non-obligatory fact of prevenient grace.)

This is rather unlike the sappy chick-flick examples of God's love for us and our libertarian free reciprocal love in return that most naive Arminians paint for us. In fact, I can imagine an atheist looking at the above verses and claiming that this God is a moral monster, not unlike Julia Robert's husband in Sleeping With the Enemy.

Of course, God is not like that. He's not like that at all. But let's not pretend he's anything like the Arminian version of a Nicholas Sparks protagonist either. In any event, that God commands all men to love him puts the lie to Arminian claims about the permissibility for us to say "no." God's not giving us a Rossian prima facie duty here.