Α Giant Has Fallen: On the Passing of William J. Abraham
Photo by Paul Bulai on Unsplash
Methodism has lost a giant. William J. “Billy” Abraham has entered his eternal rest. It pains me even to type those words. Billy made a tremendous impact on my life, and I am by no means alone in this regard. People around the world are mourning the loss of this great man of God, even as we give thanks for his life, ministry, and the great theological legacy he leaves behind.
I first met Billy in his evangelism course at the Perkins School of Theology. I was probably twenty-three years old. I knew nothing about him except that he was the “conservative” professor at Perkins. Some students avoided him for precisely this reason. While I myself was rapidly adopting the presuppositions and perspectives of late-twentieth-century liberal Protestantism, I was immediately captivated by this wild-eyed Irishman who was so very gleeful in his intellectual pursuits. I began to visit (bug) him in his office on a more and more regular basis, and he frequently made time for me. I now realize how precious and essential this time was to his intellectual work. He was not just making time, but sacrificing it. He saw potential in me that I didn’t know I had. He invested in me, and in turn taught me to invest in others. And slowly, patiently, he taught me to love the faith once and for all entrusted to the saints.
This is one thing you will hear again and again from so many of Billy’s former students. He invested in us. He gave of himself for us. He imparted wisdom not simply as a teacher, but as a mentor. He was patient. He never insisted that anyone agree with him. In fact he could disagree with you profoundly and still love you. Friendship with Billy was not an ideological transaction. It was born out of a holy love made possible through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. Like many others, I have been shaped deeply by this model. I have come to understand that we will not raise up the next generation of Christian leaders simply by imparting information to them. We will do so by giving of ourselves, investing our time, becoming vulnerable to them, and walking alongside them in Christian love.
Somehow, despite all the time he spent sowing into the lives of others, Billy produced a broad and impressive body of academic work. Philosophy was his core discipline, and he could hardly get through a sentence without using the word “epistemology.” Yet his contributions span philosophy of religion, systematic theology, Wesley studies, evangelism, and politics. He had recently completed a four-volume work on divine action with Oxford University Press. Others may disagree, but I believe the work that most defined his intellectual pursuits was Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism. Billy’s project over many years, through many different works, was to show the power, truth, and logic of the historic faith of the Church catholic. With wit, wisdom, and erudition, he argued that those who have gone before us in the faith have left us a great theological heritage. This heritage includes not just Scripture, but creeds, liturgy, sacraments, the writings of great teachers, and other resources that the church has broadly adopted (i.e., they are canonical). These resources depend for their efficacy, however, upon the power and work of the Holy Spirit. We may think of the church as a hospital, and these resources are the sensitive instruments by which we access the healing balm of the Holy Spirit. This vision of the canonical heritage requires a God who acts--not a weak or passive god, unable or unwilling to show up in powerful ways in the lives of his children. No, the God of our faith is intimately involved in history, from creation to new creation. Billy’s concern with divine action was ultimately related to God’s ability to reach into our broken lives and save us from sin and death.
Although he was deeply committed to the orthodox faith and an evangelical vision of Methodism, Billy was also a classical liberal in that he was supremely fair to his intellectual sparring partners. He would often tell me about his team-teaching efforts with professors with whom he had profound disagreements. He loved this kind of thing. He was insatiably curious. Ideas were his playground, and none was off limits. Rather than silencing ideas one might consider offensive, as has become the fashion in our day, Billy believed in getting them all out on the table and subjecting them to reasoned critique. At times in class, he would articulate the positions of his opponents so well that these positions could be mistaken for his own. He placed a high premium on intellectual virtues such as coherence, fairness, honesty, and curiosity. This is not to say that he went easy on his opponents. His critiques could be devastating, and he did not pull punches. Billy was never happier than when he was in a fight, and fight he did, contending day after day, year after year, for the faith of the church.
Billy’s vision of the relationship between God and the church is called Canonical Theism. When I was a graduate student studying New Testament at SMU, he invited me to be part of a working group that would explore the church’s canonical heritage. My advisor, the esteemed biblical scholar Jouette Bassler, was gracious enough to allow me this type of pursuit so long as I continued to make progress on my formal New Testament studies. From the outset I felt I was a bit out of my depth in these theological conversations. The theologians and philosophers in the room kept saying things like, “ontology precedes epistemology,” and I would nod and act like I knew what they were talking about. But eventually I began to get the basic idea. Modern theology has been focused on how we get to our claims about God and what God has done for our salvation through Jesus Christ. Billy’s point was that there is not, and never has been, one single way to arrive at the set of faith claims we identify with Christian orthodoxy. Roman Catholics have their presuppositions about how we do this, as do Protestants, as do the Eastern Orthodox. And yet we all get there. While there are significant differences between these traditions, each embraces an ecumencial consensus embodied in elements of our canonical heritage such as the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and the Definition of Chalcedon. My first publication appeared in the volume that emerged from this conversation: Canonical Theism: A Proposal for Theology and the Church. My contribution to this volume is not especially profound, but it was a start, and that was what I needed.
Around this same time, Billy asked me if I wanted to teach a course with him at Perkins on epistemology and the Bible. Of course I said yes. He was Billy Abraham, and I was an unknown, unpublished graduate student. There were both master’s and PhD students in this course. There were also two professors who decided to sit in. One was a biblical scholar named Virgil Howard. Dr. Howard was a kind soul with a keen mind, deeply committed to a mid-twentieth-century vision of liberal Protestantism, strongly influenced by Rudolf Bultmann. He had studied at Marburg with Werner Kümmel. The other was Dean Drayton, who at that time was president-elect of the Uniting Church of Australia. Dr. Drayton had been trained in theology at the University of Chicago. Again, I was in way over my head, but Billy treated me with respect. He treated me like a peer. I learned a great deal about epistemology and the Bible that semester, but I learned at least as much about teaching and collegiality.
Billy would often lament the lack of catechesis in Methodism. He felt we Methodist types were falling down on the job of handing on the treasures of our faith. Several years ago, I ran into him at a conference and floated the idea of writing a Methodist catechism. He agreed, and we contracted with Abingdon Press. At first, we had simply planned to write a catechism, but the folks at Abingdon wisely suggested we write chapters explaining the catechetical topics one by one. That book became Key United Methodist Beliefs. Neither of us was ever satisfied with that title because we had meant this catechism for the Wesleyan movement more broadly. Nevertheless I will always cherish this project on which we collaborated. It took me about a year to write my sections. I think Billy wrote his in about two weeks. He was so deeply immersed in Christian doctrine--and Wesleyan doctrine in particular--that the work simply flowed forth from his mind to his keyboard. Billy often wrote with prodigious speed, and his capacity to do so increased as he advanced in years.
The last several years of Billy’s life, he was different. The loss of his son Timothy and a bout with cancer changed him. He never said this to me directly, but I believe he became profoundly aware of his own mortality. His focus on his academic work became even more intense. He had things he wanted to say and ideas he wanted to explore, and he knew he had limited time to do so. I believe he accomplished most of what he wanted to, with one marked exception. About a year ago, Billy told me that he was planning to write his memoirs. That he died before he did so is a great loss to generations to come.
Methodism has lost a giant. Like so many others, I have lost a friend, mentor, confidant, and spiritual father. I miss him. The grief of his passing is heavy on my heart. And yet as Christians, we grieve, but not as those without hope.
Goodbye, old friend. Rest well. You have been faithful.
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.