Recently deceased Methodist theologian Billy Abraham contributed mightily to the theological renewal of Methodism. But he also uniquely revived a thoughtful Methodist political theology rooted in a Wesleyan Christian Realism.
Abraham in 2007 identified “at least five major trajectories of political theology within United Methodism:”
- The “aggressive, anti-American pacifism of Stanley Hauerwas and his many students.”
- The “stolid Christian realism of Joseph Allen, Robin Lovin, and Rebecca Miles.”
- The “lively, diversified liberation theology of James Cone, Rebecca Chopp, Ted Jennings, Joerg Rieger, and Harold Recinos.”
- The “muddled, left-of-center politics of the Social Principles and the Book of Resolutions.”
- The “amorphous, middle-of-the road, transformationist theology of Albert Outler as updated by Bishop Scott Jones and Randy Maddox.”
Abraham was a Christian Realist partly due to his origins. A native of Northern Ireland, Abraham was intimately familiar with the costs of social disorder and terrorism, which informed his commitment to government as God’s ordained instrument for justice, order and protecting the innocent. “If terrorists come knocking down my door, I want to have soldiers and a helicopter nearby,” he wrote in his 2013 book Shaking Hands with the Devil: The Intersection of Terrorism and Theology, which he also discussed at IRD’s 2013 Annual Diane Knippers Lecture.
Abraham rejected pacifism. “By rejecting all use of lethal force, we are bereft of crucial resources in protecting innocent people from deadly attack,” he wrote. “It requires a very special kind of intellectual malfunction and self-deception to sustain pacifism over time.” He especially challenged famous Duke Divinity School pacifist Stanley Hauerwas, a former Methodist, whose “reductionist and simplistic descriptions of war are so obviously false that they undercut his claim to possess an exclusively privileged access to the truth about war through the church.” And Abraham responded to Christian pacifist claims to Scripture by noting that the “truth is often more visible through common grace than through special grace; there are weeds as well as tares in the truth claims of any church.”
The Christian pacifist claim is “a minority report,” Abraham said, taking “isolated elements in the teaching of Jesus, say, in the Beatitudes, that are meant to apply between persons, and extended them to apply between state and state, or between states and their citizens. They fail to see that the anger of God in judgment is the anger of love without hate.” He elaborated:
They sin the sin of refusing the God-given vocation to exercise the office of arrest and judgment. They cannot see that love in public relations “takes the form of mutual respect, of law, justice, liberty, and even help—especially to the weak.” As a consequence of these mistakes Christian pacifists are bereft of positive illumination when it comes to the right ordering of our political life together. In reality they either opt out of political life altogether, or they fall back upon the platitudes of pragmatic pacifism, or they buy into negative stereotypes of the state and nation that correlate conveniently with their theological commitments.
Abraham noted “there are few, if any, robustly pacifist networks of political policy available as live options” because pacifist proposals “represent political lalaland,” leaving pacifists as “freeloaders within the current social and political arrangements.”
Commending the Just War tradition, Abraham noted:
Love is not just a matter of refraining from violence but of doing all we can to help our neighbors. It is one thing to refuse to engage in violence when we ourselves are attacked; it is another to refuse to use violence to protect other people who are unjustly attacked. Standing aside and letting others kill innocent civilians is refusing to take responsibility for helping other people. So we should be prepared to do all we can, up to and including using lethal force to stop terrorists from killing innocent people.
Abraham argued against a “maximalist” mechanical view of Just War principles as overly idealistic and implausibly restrictive, preferring a minimalist understanding that stressed circumstances and human judgment, recognizing human agents are always flawed and should avoid “claiming divine sanction, or [making] any direct appeal to divine revelation.” Instead, the goal of force should be “protecting the innocent, of restraining evil, and of doing so in a manner that may indeed be morally permissible but is likely to be shot through with tragedy, moral dissonance, and even a bad conscience.”
Christian statecraft, as Abraham understood it, understands “the world is shot through with evil and sin; people deliberately and systematically reject the full resources of grace in their private and public lives; the default position in human life is war not peace (it is conflict not harmony).”
Abraham wrote he wanted soldiers on hand when terrorists knock. He also wanted a “robust church in the neighborhood that has a saint or two in its midst and that is able to form effective politicians to work in the public domain.” He was skeptical of the institutional church’s calling to political specifics:
There are moments when respected church leaders can step into the political arena and, for shorter or longer periods, provide temporary political leadership. Or they can do things that cannot be done by those who are part of the conventional political process. They can represent crucial interests or break dysfunctional processes precisely because they stand outside the contested power blocks of interest in society and politics. If they outstay their welcome, they tend to become a pretentious nuisance, reduced to becoming talking heads that are ineffective and mostly do more harm than good. There are few sights more pathetic than church leaders putting their political underwear on display in public. What is at issue here is a crucial division of labor within the life of the church. The regular work of pastors, preachers, priests, deacons, and bishops should be directed to the welfare of the church and its ministries. This is the work for which they have been trained and for which they are ordained. They misread their vocation when they set themselves up as political activists and proxy-agents of the state. When they engage in pavement politics they are often the dupes of their own self-importance.
Abraham insisted the “really significant work of the church in politics lies in the hands of Christians who are deeply involved in the political process all the way from voting to holding the highest offices of government.” But “the first task of the church is to be itself, that is, a body that is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” He noted: “At its best, the church bears witness to a World that stands above our political realities; and that World calls us to a judgment that puts all our temporal interests in their proper place in the life of eternity.”
And Abraham warned that Christianity, while urging that the “state should respect human rights, serve the common good, uphold justice, use lethal force only in justified circumstances, avoid partisan self-interest,” it offers no specific, canonically binding political ideology:
The church can help its members come to terms with the options by fostering the cultivation of political education in its schools and universities, but it would be wrong to make any political philosophy canonically binding. Divine revelation provides no blueprint for the ordering of political life; the church’s members have honorably embraced a host of political insights, philosophies, practices, and policies. In this respect Christianity is radically different from both radical and mainstream forms of Islam.
Abraham as a Christian Realist believed in democracy:
We do not need to canonize representative democracy as a doctrine of the church, but we can explore why we committed to democracy because we are Christians. How we might articulate that commitment is an open question. Hence we can imagine a minimalist case in which it is argued that democracy is the worst form of government except any other. The primary theological warrant in this case would be an appeal to original sin: given their propensity to evil, folk are not to be trusted for too long with too much power, and democracy is a good mechanism to ensure this end. Alternatively, we might deploy a maximalist case in which it is argued that democracy is a fitting expression of the Christian faith in a pluralist world. Thus we might argue that everyone deserves respect and a vote because they are made in the image of God; freedom of conscience before God means that, even when people make bad choices, such freedom is good in itself, independently of what freedom contributes to social welfare, to the enlivening of the life of the intellect, and the like. Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous aphorism nicely combines both premises. “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
Not long before he died, Abraham pledged to write a book-length theological defense of the United States and its democracy, including civil religion. One of his students needs now to write that book and to elaborate on Abraham’s Methodist version of Christian Realism.
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