A Time to Grieve and a Time to Move Forward

Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

Some things take time. Often it simply takes what it takes to work through difficult times of grief and loss. In many ways, I am still reeling from the sudden and unexpected death of William “Billy” J. Abraham on October 7, 2021. Billy may have been the greatest mind of his generation. He made significant contributions in at least four different academic disciplines (analytic philosophy, systematic theology, Wesleyan studies, and evangelism). He was also the mentor of a generation of students, particularly through his work at SMU’s PhD program in Religious Studies. Billy was the holder of the Albert Cook Outler Chair in Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, for decades and taught there previous to occupying the Outler Chair.

While Billy happily worked with students and faculty across the theological spectrum, he was particularly significant for theologically conservative students who felt a calling to the academy but were unsure if their faith convictions could be brought with them. He was certainly someone I often looked to for advice and counsel as I applied to PhD programs, academic positions, and throughout my time teaching.

In recent weeks, I have been able to turn to a project that honors Billy’s scholarly legacy. I have been asked to write the chapter on Billy’s contribution to the field of Wesleyan Studies. This has been a blessing, as it has provided space for grief but also the opportunity to begin reengaging Billy’s work, this time as a standing and fixed contribution that can only be considered in the way that all who have gone before us can. Pieces of writing can be considered and questioned. But the questions must be answered by others. The author can no longer respond to objections or questions of his own material. 

It is not new for me to engage authors in this way. John Wesley is an obvious example. But this is the first time I’ve had to make this transition from a person who had been a live subject, whose work I discussed in person at length, to one with whom that is no longer possible.

To say that this transition is bittersweet feels cheap, too easy, and cliché. But it is bittersweet and that is the best I can do to describe how I feel at the moment.

This has been particularly interesting in reading through Billy’s introduction to the edition of John Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions. This edition was published less than a year before Billy’s death. We talked about the project on a number of occasions. He was close to exultant that he had found a way to get the original forty-four sermons in print. (This is a story for another day.) But as best as I can remember, I did not ever have a vigorous academic conversation about the content of his arguments in the pieces he wrote to introduce the sermons. They are marvelous and a great example of Billy’s writing in service to the church.

I highly recommend reading the “General Introduction” for a glimpse of the debt Billy felt to Methodism and the ways he spent his entire academic life working on Methodism. The most important thing Billy does in that essay is offer an elegant way of reading Wesley’s forty-four Sermons as a core piece of Methodism’s doctrinal standards. 

I will simply offer a teaser here to encourage you to read it for yourself: Billy argued that this particular body of sermons was intentionally chosen by Wesley because they were a handbook of spiritual formation that gave careful guidance on how to become a Christian, how to be a Christian, and how to deal with the obstacles and challenges that inevitably arise along the journey of Christian discipleship. I highly encourage you to take Billy’s prescription. Read these sermons with Wesley as your spiritual guide on the journey of Christian faith.

Here I wanted to offer one extended quote that for me really captures who Billy was for the church and also points to how much he will be missed. This comes toward the end of his “General Introduction” to the three volumes of sermons he edited:

One feature of my work especially with students and laity is that these sermons demolish the effort to sum up Wesley in this or that set of slogans. One set of slogans focuses on the psychology of Christian experience. Thus, there have been significant efforts to chart the timeline involved in, say, initial and entire sanctification. There is warrant for this effort in the Wesley corpus but not in these sermons. I have been astonished afresh at how little attention Wesley gives to this topic. Where he does, he hammers home the fact that sanctification is a process and that the details must be left to God. As the later sermons show all too clearly, Wesley is at pains to emphasize the cost of following Christ as represented by self-denial, cross-bearing, dealing forthrightly with conflict, and sorting out the use of money.

The other set of slogans hinges on the effort to work off various complementary conjunctions: personal faith and social justice, evangelism and social action, faith and works, faith and reason, and so on. Much too has been made of the effort to sum up Wesley in terms of a vision of grace divided into convincing, justifying, and sanctifying grace. Worst of all we have had the heady summary of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience as the heart of Wesley’s method for doing theology. There are insights buried in these slogans, but it is time they were thrown in the dustbin. Read in the light of the sweep of material presented in these sermons they are a travesty. They cannot begin to do justice to the central claims advanced here nor with the nooks and crannies of Wesley’s fertile mind displayed here.

While I propose that these sermons be read with an openness to the Holy Spirit and with a spirit of exegetical generosity, this does not mean that they are either the last word or even a complete word on the spiritual life. They emphatically are not. They need to be pondered in our hearts and in our minds. Wesley himself invites this in his fine Preface. He wants us to think the issues through for ourselves and make both adjustments and corrections. Moreover, in time they need to be supplemented by insights from other great mentors of the spiritual life. Minimally, they should be brought into conversation with the Eastern Orthodox tradition because Wesley clearly drew on material that shows up in that world. Equally, they need to be supplemented by developments in the Pentecostal and Charismatic world because in a real way this world stems in part from sources within Wesley. In reality, we should harvest whatever fruit is out there beyond Wesley and Methodism (Sermons on Several Occasions, xiii-xiv).

In three paragraphs, he has thrown enough on the table to keep church and academy occupied for the rest of our lives. He has also said things that would tweak just about everyone I can think of who has done significant writing in the field of Wesley Studies. (Billy would have been the first to acknowledge this and would have made some mention of his Irishness with a twinkle in his eye, a smile on his face, and that characteristic grunt he made when he was particularly enjoying verbal jousting.) This is not the place for me to address where I disagree with what he has written above, but I am definitely included!

These paragraphs are characteristic of Billy at his best because they do two things. First, he is intentionally pulling the reader into the argument. He wants you to have a strong reaction to what he has said because if you do you will be engaged in ideas that matter. One way of thinking about Billy’s contribution to Methodism is to say that he was trying to press the church to more substantive conversation about God. And so, in the paragraphs above he works to clear the decks of distractions like the quadrilateral in order to focus our attention on specific aspects of the lived Christian faith like, “the cost of following Christ as represented by self-denial, cross-bearing, dealing forthrightly with conflict, and sorting out the use of money.”

At the same time, Billy wants us to continue the task that Wesley handed on to those coming after him. Wesley did not give us stone tablets with complete (perfect and finished) revelation on them. Wesley is a trustworthy guide. He is rightly given honor in this regard. But the work of the church must continue. The conversation, even arguments, most continue. We have been given “the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people” (Jude 3), and it is our task to own it, embrace it, steward it, and pass it on to the next generation. 

These are hard times for many people across the board in the Wesleyan world (and beyond). The United Methodist Church chose the route of ugly and bitter divorce. Many are grieving the loss of relationships, churches, and more from the fracturing of the UMC to the collapse of United Methodist polity. The temptation to despair and quit can be strong in times like these. 

I think Billy would exhort us now, as he did many times during his life, not to lose our nerve. Press on. Trust the Holy Spirit. Relax.

I was privileged to hear Billy speak in several different contexts in the last months of his life. And he said one thing multiple times that seemed new and uncharacteristic to me just before his death. He started quoting a phrase he recalled from Albert Outler: “Before we can experience a Third Great Awakening, we have to recognize that the Second Great Awakening has ended.” Billy has written about that in various ways in other contexts. But in the summer and fall of 2021, he said it with a different emphasis. I found myself thinking: “Billy thinks revival is coming.”

Indeed, revival has come to Asbury University in recent weeks. No one knows what will happen next. But the experience of the students at Asbury and many others who have traveled to experience the move of God in Wilmore, Kentucky, seems to echo the accounts of John Wesley’s last words, “The best of all is, God is with us.”

Kevin M. Watson is the author of Perfect Love and The Class Meeting. He writes at kevinmwatson.com.