On Reading Billy Abraham

Methodist Theologian, Philosopher, and Lover of Jesus

Billy Abraham, philosopher and Methodist theologian

I’ve been reading the writing of the late Methodist theologian Billy Abraham (in preparation for the Firebrand theological seminar on his work I’m doing later this week at United Theological Seminary, what I have been referring to as my nerd camp with my wife). Abraham is not someone I was very familiar with until recently, and I am sad that I never got to meet him. Through what I can tell from his lectures that are viewable on Youtube, you can tell he was charming (the Irish accent helped here), funny, erudite, intellectually courageous, but also deeply in love with Jesus. I particularly liked his talk on suffering here.

All that being said, Abraham is a tough figure to read. He was trained as an analytic philosopher, and at times he writes like one—and if you are unfamiliar, this is not exactly a compliment. Even so, his thought is definitely worth working through. He is someone clearly fascinated with the questions of epistemology, how we know what we know, and yet he put forward an entire project (what he calls “canonical theism”) which states very clearly that the church should not have a settled, canonical epistemology:

Thesis XXV:

No single epistemological vision should be offered or sanctioned as canonical in the Church. 

Isn’t that interesting? He felt, quite strongly, that it is the church’s insistence of epistemological uniformity that has caused so many problems and divisions in the church. He has no time for United Methodism’s Wesleyan quadrilateral, its epistemological method of combining scripture, tradition, reason, and experience to arrive at truth. According to Abraham, this method creates more questions than it answers; he says cheekily that only God would be able to use it, and of course God has no need for it. He also rejects a more wooden biblical literalism. Saying “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it,” for Abraham settles nothing, because the Bible is too big and vast to meaningfully settle the disputes that the text itself creates. Roman Catholicism’s answer in the infallibility of the pope is also a no-go for Abraham, because it still doesn’t solve the problem of how we know what we know as Christians (and admittedly, I didn’t really understand his point about this).

Put more simply, Abraham says that the church puts the food and the drink on the table, but nowhere are we told how the sausage gets made. The church provides the substance (of salvation, revelation, truth, etc.) but not the process (a well-defined methodology at arriving at this truth). We don’t all get to the beliefs and practice of the church in the same way (Protestants, Evangelicals, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, charismatics, etc., all have very different understandings of the place of scripture, tradition, and the authority of the church)—and yet, so many from this broad spectrum arrive at a life in Christ that conforms to the beliefs of the Nicene Creed as well as a moral, communal, Spirit-led life rooted in the teachings of Jesus.

I think this is actually a pretty key insight for what evangelization and church renewal will look like going forward, at least in the context of the American church. We cannot pretend to offer what the church has never offered. We are not in the business of providing people with certainty about the claims of the gospel with an unquestionable, scientific method; yet we are also not in the business of throwing away our intellect as soon as we hit the church door.

Rather, we are in God’s business, the saving and curing of souls, and one of the primary ways that God does this is through the means of grace (reading the scriptures, the sacraments, prayer, fasting, confession, laying on of hands, etc.). We trust in these means of grace first as an agent of salvation, and then as needs be we bolster our faith and the faith of our brothers and sisters with intellectual honesty, courage, and wit as fitting of a people who strive to have not only the heart, but also the mind of Christ (see Phil. 2:5). Abraham’s emphasis here is that we should expect Christians to disagree about methods of arriving at truth—some will have a higher view of scripture than others, some a higher view of liturgical traditions, some a higher view of the bishop of Rome—but much more important than any of that is arriving at the truth of the gospel at all.

I’m still working through what I think of all of Abraham’s proposals; I still can’t quite make sense of his view of scripture (David Watson wrote a really helpful article here on how to make sense of it). I think that canonical theism as a project is laudable, and yet I am struggling to see how it would manage the inevitable theological conflicts that appear in the life of the church. Who determines the limits of canon in his system if it is expanded beyond the scriptures, and what do we do with those places where the canonical tradition seems to contradict with itself?

My questions aside, Abraham’s work as a whole is very challenging to me as a pastor, especially in my role as one who is overseeing people being initiated into the kingdom of God. I have to admit that that kind of language to me sounds very grand, but of course, it is grand. How to retrieve the deep wells of the canonical tradition and invite the Spirit to breathe new life into them is a challenging prospect, but it’s also one that makes me excited. I’m grateful to this giant of intellect for not only his deep insight into the challenges of our times, but his encouragement that God can and will use people like me and you to face them with courage, with heart, and with joy.

If you are looking for just one book to read by Billy Abraham, I think I would recommend Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation, which gives a broad view of most of Abraham’s essential ideas.