Inaugural Ethics Lecture at Truett Seminary

On Tuesday, Dr. Jonathan Tran delivered the inaugural Ethics Lecture, sponsored by the TBMaston Foundation, at Truett Seminary on the Baylor campus in Waco.

Dr. Tran's subject was ambitious: The Audacity of Hope and the Violence of Peace: Obama, War, and Christianity. Though he discussed the war policies of both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, neither president was his intended target. Bush, he said, gave us the "reasons for war," whereas Obama gave us the "theology of war." But he went on to say that neither Bush nor Obama had much choice in the matter. They were merely playing out the script that the American people have written for them. We love peace, he said, but we have decided the only way we can have peace is to wage war. Thus, we confuse our love for war with our love for peace.

We will publish Dr. Tran's lecture in the next edition of the Foundation's e-Newsletter in a few weeks and then on tbmaston.org. There will be plenty of Christians who disagree with him, but that's okay. The purpose of the lecturer . . . the prophet, if you will . . . is to challenge his listeners to look within, reexamine their closely-held beliefs and principles, and seek God's discernment. Dr. Tran did that.

My dad often told the story of sitting, as a doctoral student one day in the early 1950s, in T. B. Maston's office.

At that time, churches in the South by-and-large were segregated. Jim Crow laws still held sway. KKK rallies, cross-burnings, and lynchings were common. And most white Christians either took part in the hateful treatment of African-Americans or stood by passively, either accepting it or at least letting it happen without objection. But T. B. Maston was regularly challenging them to love and respect African-Americans as equals.

Dr. Maston pointed to the bulging bottom drawer of a nearby file cabinet. "See that bottom drawer?" Dr. Maston asked Daddy. "It's filled with hate mail."

Prophets aren't perfect, and they aren't always right. But their purpose is to point people to God and to Christ, and that will always make us uncomfortable, because the closer we get to Christ, the more we see how inadequate we are. But it's the first step in becoming faithful.