A Legacy of Faith: On the One-Year Anniversary of the Death of William J. Abraham

Photo by Emmanuel Phaeton on Unsplash

By the time this essay reaches your computer screen, it will have been just over one year since William J. “Billy” Abraham died (October 7, 2021). His passing left many feeling there is a great void left in Methodism, one that no single figure can fill. His expansive interests and expertise included Methodism, Christian theology, analytic philosophy, preaching, evangelism, catechesis, politics, and Jewish-Christian dialogue, among other subjects. The last year has given us time to reflect on the significance of his life and work. For those who wish to honor his legacy, I offer these four commitments we might take up in the years ahead. 

A Commitment to Christian Tradition 

One of Billy’s major contributions to theological discourse is called Canonical Theism. The idea behind Canonical Theism is that the church has given us an abundance of resources to lead us into salvation. For example, we have historic liturgies, teachers recognized for great theological insight, ecumenical creeds (such as the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian), practices of prayer, and, of course, Scripture. As Protestants, we have divested ourselves of many of these resources over time to our detriment. There are historic reasons, and at times very sound theological reasons, that we did so, but we would benefit from a thoughtful retrieval of key elements of the tradition. 

Behind the desire to recover these elements of the Christian tradition is the belief that they are soteriologically valuable. In other words, they are resources that lead us into the very life of God. 2 Pet 1:3-8 reads, 

His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature. For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love. For if these things are yours and are increasing among you, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The lure of sin is strong, and its effects are powerful. Thus since Pentecost God has equipped the church with resources that facilitate our becoming participants of the divine nature. 

Tradition cannot simply become a lifeless recital of dusty shibboleths. As a friend of mine likes to say, we want fire, not ashes. We don’t want to be stuck in the past, but neither do we want to find ourselves guilty of “presentism,” a myopic focus on the popular ideas of our cultural moment. There is great wisdom in the Christain tradition, some of which challenges today’s conventional wisdom. To the extent that we forget the wisdom of those who have gone before us, we impoverish the life of faith. 

A Commitment to Methodism 

Billy came to faith as a Methodist. He would always say that the Methodists were the people who brought the “orphan money” to his house after his father died. Though he went through a period of atheism as a young man, he came back to faith through Methodism and worked as a Methodist pastor both in Northern Ireland and in the United States. As a scholar, he dedicated his professional life to the renewal of Methodism. 

While he remained dedicated to Methodism throughout his life, Billy was also careful not to overstate its significance. He once called Methodism a “hiccup of the Holy Spirit.” I think he meant by this that God poured out the Spirit on the people called Methodist as a way of sparking renewal, enlivening Christian mission, and promoting holiness. Yet Methodism is just one manifestation of God’s work within the depth and breadth of the Church universal. We can learn from other traditions, both past and present. Likewise Methodism should be open to the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit moving forward so that we can confront the challenges of new generations. In other words, we need to change when God wishes to change us. 

“Milquetoast Methodism,” he felt, was simply too weak to deal with the challenges of modernity. This is one reason why he so opposed the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral.” He argued that, at least in its 1972 iteration, the Quadrilateral violated the first Restrictive Rule. That was really the least of its problems, though. He felt that its proponents were “doing philosophy without a license” and ultimately promoting a brand of doctrinal pluralism inconsistent with the truth of the gospel. Christianity, whether Methodist or of some other stripe, has a basic content. He called this content the “canonical tradition.” Thomas Oden called it the “consensual tradition.” Many have simply identified it as doctrinal orthodoxy. Regardless of the language we use for it, this tradition teaches us who God is, what God has done for our salvation, and how we can respond in faith. It is thus soteriologically valuable, and we treat it lightly at our own peril. 

The newly formed Global Methodist Church owes a great deal to Billy. It embodies many of his ideas. He insisted that its first job would always be to preach the gospel, understood in continuity with the consensual tradition that has persisted across the ages. Yet he also felt that the coming revival would not look exactly like the last revival. New music, practices, and intellectual currents would emerge. While it would be a mistake to dispense with constitutive elements of Methodism through which God worked in the past, we should take care to discern what God is doing in the present and where God wants us to go in the future. 

Billy was particularly involved in the development of the first section of the GMC’s Doctrines and Discipline, which deals with Christian doctrine. The fact that the GMC has not eviscerated its doctrinal standards by the use of the Quadrilateral speaks to his influence, as does the presence of the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon as “foundational documents.” Critics will suggest that we have become anti-theological, even anti-intellectual, by removing the Quadrilateral. Such criticism misconstrues how the Quadrilateral has actually functioned in the life of the church. I have never seen any theological problem actually resolved by appeal to the Quadrilateral. It gives the appearance of intellectual sophistication and rigorous theological inquiry while holding any decisive doctrinal commitments at bay. God protect us from ever devolving into doctrinal relativism, rank pragmatism, or anti-intellectualism. 

A Commitment to Intellectual Virtue 

Billy was trained as an analytic philosopher, and that training stayed with him throughout his life as a scholar. He believed in the value of sound arguments. He thrived on debate. He loved for people to challenge his ideas as long as they did so in a spirit of virtuous discourse intended to make intellectual progress. When other academics would offer vigorous refutations of his ideas, it was grist for his mill. 

I once asked Billy, mostly in jest, if his plan was to change theological education by deploying an army of graduate students trained in his ideas. He told me that was against everything he believed in as an academic. He did not want to produce theological clones of himself. He wanted people who could think through the most difficult theological and ethical problems and generate proposals that were informed, coherent, and rationally persuasive. He believed in corrigibility–the willingness to receive correction–and understood that there were limits to his own knowledge and capacities of reason. 

Although I never heard him use the term, Billy had a strong aversion to “Bulverism,” which is also called the genetic fallacy. It entails a rebuttal of opposing positions by simply categorizing one’s opponent in a particular way that is thought to undermine his or her credibility. “Jane is a progressive. That’s why she is making this argument.” “Jim is just a fundamentalist. We don’t need to listen to him.” These kinds of refutations don’t take arguments seriously. They dismiss arguments on the basis of broad characterizations of the people making them. Such an approach to argument is intellectually both lazy and vicious. It prevents intellectual progress. 

A Commitment to Public Engagement 

Closely related to Billy’s concern for intellectual virtue was a concern for public engagement. He believed in getting ideas out into the open for public consumption. Toward the end of his life he was beginning to make more use of technology (such as YouTube) for purposes of public discourse. If ideas matter, as he believed they did, we should not confine them to seminary classrooms and graduate seminars. Rather, we should make them available and accessible to all who might have an interest in them. 

Perhaps because of his Northern Irish provenance, Billy was also deeply interested in politics. His theological commitments informed his ethical commitments, which in turn shaped his political commitments. A lecture he was scheduled to deliver, but never had the opportunity, was a theological defense of the United States. I don’t know what he was planning to argue, though I’m sure it would have been both wise and provocative. Perhaps some industrious graduate student will someday discover the bones of this lecture among his notes. 

Today, the world of public engagement is often anti-intellectual. Bulverism is the rule, not the exception. Social media has not elevated our discourse, but facilitated its debasement. One way in which those who wish to continue Billy’s legacy may do so is by engaging publicly in responsible and intellectually sophisticated ways. We need to continue self-consciously in the work of scholarship in service to the church, which, in turn, serves the common good. What happens in academic journals is important, but equally important is to speak in ways that are meaningful far beyond the confines of academic guilds. 

Scholars, I’m talking to you now. Monographs and scholarly articles can serve the church, but we also need work aimed at non-specialists. Scholars may edify the church by providing resources for all who wish to grow in the life of faith. There is an abundance of theologically unhealthy content floating around the internet and populating the shelves of bookstores. We cannot prevent the propagation of this kind of material, but we can provide work that is theologically sound, rooted in the best elements of our tradition, and accessible to all who are interested.

There are many ways we can honor our friend and teacher. Truett has established a chair in his name. Perkins has an upcoming lecture in his honor. At United, we are working to establish a scholarship in his name and are in conversation about participating in an ongoing lecture series. The most sincere way we can honor him, though, is by preserving these four commitments in our work: to Christian tradition, Methodism, intellectual virtue, and public engagement. For those who take up these commitments, his legacy may become part of our legacy as well.

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.