Reflections on T. B. Maston
By Joel Gregory Ft. Worth, TX

Note: This email statement from Joel Gregory came in response to the news story that Southwestern Seminary was halting its doctoral program in Christian ethics and a subsequent letter from this editor quoting a report that an administrator wanted “to get away from the legacy of T. B. Maston and be more biblical.”

     After reading the Baptist Standard story and the letter, I have thought about augmenting that letter with some things I know personally from having pastored T. B. Maston for five years.

     Dr. Maston was in the hospital hovering between life and death, having suffered a heart problem. I flew back from the BGCT to see him at HarrisHospital. By his bedside were papers, one of which had sentence after sentence of closely written, cramped script. I asked him what he was writing. He told me that he was re-reading the gospels again and writing down something he learned about Jesus from each verse! There they were—hundreds of sentences, one for each verse. This is the man who is not biblical.

     Further, twice a week Dr. and Mrs. Maston or he alone would make the rounds of the very poor homes of older local residents around Seminary Hill. There were people he had gone to see every week for decades, helping impoverished widows and ill people with their needs, when he himself was in his eighties and needed to be driven. I wonder how many of the current inerrant stewards of the heritage at Southwestern have found themselves in the little frame homes of old poor people on the perimeter of the wealthy campus, caring for their basic human needs?

     All of this as he continued to take care of a 60-year old Tom Mac Maston who suffered cerebral palsy. Dr. Maston told me that never in Tom Mac’s life had he, Dr. Maston, been up less than six times a night to turn him

     The tragic ignorance of the current administration and faculty at Southwestern goes beyond the normal prejudice of ignorant fundamentalists. The cringing stupidity of claiming that a biblical giant did not believe the Bible demonstrates the pygmy stature of the current Lilliputians who have ambled into an institution that they did nothing to build and do not understand at all.

     When the crown sits uneasily on the king’s head, he must find bogus enemies to detract from his own vapid non-entity. T. B. Maston, Yale Ph.D. and venerated founder of Southern Baptist ethical studies, will stand tall in history when the entire crowd of theological dwarfs now leading Southwestern, whose power politics landed them in a place, the heritage of which they cannot even grasp, have vanished into the trivial footnotes of the institution’s history as a tragic anomaly to its earlier, greater existence.

     That any of them would make such a remark about T.B. Maston only underscores the tragic depth of the hijacking of a once great seminary. The institution that produced a William Hendricks, John Newport, Bill Pinson, William Estep, Curtis Vaughan and a great cloud of others deserved a better destiny.

Updated Friday, September 26, 2003