Myles Werntz on Christian ethics and the moral life
Myles Werntz unpacks why we continue to be plagued in our churches and in our communities by seemingly intractable conflicts, and how the teaching of ethics to young ministers in training may be part of the remedy. Myles is the Director of the Graduate School of Theology at Abilene Christian University.
Watch the video, here.
George Mason:
Welcome to Good God: Conversations That Matter about Faith and Public Life. I'm your host, George Mason. The topic of our episode today is Ethics, Christian ethics in particular, but ethics that go beyond just the Christian church. Also, just thinking about the moral life and why it is that we continue to be plagued by conflicts in our churches and in our communities that seem intractable to us. What is the remedy to this and how is the teaching of ethics to young ministers in training who are pastors of our churches? Part of the solution of that, soon we're going to be having a banquet here in Dallas at Wilshire Baptist Church, called the TB Maston Foundation Dinner, and it focuses on the ethical life.
And this year our organization, Faith Commons, is receiving their biennial award for Christian Ethics. What's interesting about this is that this is the first time the organization has given the award to an organization, not to an individual alone, and the first time to an interfaith organization. So this particular group that's committed to promoting the teaching and nurturing of the moral life and Christian ethics is seeing the importance of doing this work in concert with people of other faiths, that we have reached an existential time in our world where we need one another and we can't be doing our theology in isolation from one another, but we should be finding those ways in which we can seek the common good, not denying our own traditions, but bringing our faith voices together and finding those places of commonality.
So that banquet will be focused upon that, but it's also interesting to think about the men for whom that foundation is named. T.B. Maston taught Christian ethics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth for about 50 years. He was a remarkable presence, a kind gentleman, a man who never strayed far from home. He had a disabled son for whom he cared, with his wife in their home in Fort Worth, and he never much left Fort Worth as a result of that, being the family man he was and keeping his priorities in the way he did. But he was the kind of person who actually exemplified that commitment to a larger social ethic by the practice of those ethics in his own home and in his own decision making about his priorities.
He influenced more than one generation of young pastors and would-be theologians and ethicists. And so this legacy is being carried forward by those who were influenced by him and who continue to hold him in high regard and want his influence to continue. During his lifetime, race relations, racial injustice, segregation, and the prospect of integration were all the focus of social justice and the common good. And he was a courageous teacher who often experienced the slings and arrows of those who thought he was out of his lane in teaching about the social order, because faith was much more privatized in that era. And of course, privatized in such a way as to allow that kind of injustice, socially, to take place. So we hold up the example of T.B. Maston as one that we revere and one that we want to extend into our own generation and in our own time as we face all sorts of ethical issues, including the continuing scourge of racial injustice in our country, racism, but also every other kind of prejudice, patriarchal and misogyny and sexism, and the like, and the rising tide of Christian nationalism against which he would speak quickly and often if he were present with us today.
And so today on Good God, we have invited Dr. Myles Werntz to join us as our guest. Myles previously held the chair in Christian Ethics named for T.B. Maston at the Logsdon School of Theology at Hardin-Simmons University. That school no longer exists, and he is currently the Director of the Baptist Study Center at Abilene Christian University that he started in 2020. And so it's a relatively new venture, but Myles teaches Christian ethics and works to promote a theology that links faith in God with the common good. I'm pleased to present to you my conversation with Myles Werntz. Thanks for joining us.
Welcome Myles to Good God, we're so glad that you have joined us, and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to have this conversation.
Myles Werntz:
Well, George, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
George Mason:
Well, let's begin by saying that you are a professor of theology, but you also are particularly teaching in the field of Christian Ethics.
Myles Werntz:
Right.
George Mason:
That this has been a concentration for you. And I'd like to probe that with you just a little bit, because I think the more I get involved with people of other faith traditions beyond Christian, it's actually kind of an interesting thing that I would be curious about your response to. And that is, how it is that we have to have a separate category of study in the Christian faith for ethics?
Myles Werntz:
Oh, yeah, that's interesting.
George Mason:
Because it seems to be integral to every religion. Isn't your religion, isn't your theology about ethics, ultimately? So I wonder if you have any reflections about that.
Myles Werntz:
Yeah, well, I think there's a couple, maybe a couple of things. So on the one hand, I find frequently that whenever I talk to people about Christian ethics that their first response is, "Well, why do I need to do Christian ethics?, with the assumption that if we just get our theology straight, that ethics will naturally flow out of our theology, that there doesn't need to be any kind of intentional reflection on modes of action or modes of reasoning, that we just need to have the proper confessions of faith and then we'll naturally know what to do or will just take care of itself. Something like that.
So at one level, I think that there does need to be something specific about Christian ethics in that, so if I confess, for example, that life has value, and I come into that from a theological perspective, so that gives me something, but it doesn't answer all of the questions with respect to, well, what are the conditions under which we value life and are these conditions absolute and are there any mitigating circumstances that would work against that? And if so, what are those conditions?
So it gets us down into a lot of weeds that aren't immediately evident if I begin from the place of life something like theological confession of life has value because of God. There's all these kinds of downstream questions that don't get asked. And unless we have a specific space in which to begin to ask those things in a kind of more disciplined way, we assume that maybe we're all on the same page or we're all operating with the same assumptions, and that generally doesn't wind up being true. So I think that there's value in having something specific called Christian ethics, maybe not detached from theology, but something that does carve out a space for us to be able to recognize that when Christians disagree about moral questions, it may not be because they have vastly different theological convictions.
It may be because the way in which they see those theological convictions bearing out on our life and the world differ, or the way in which they see these things is taking purchase within specifically applied ways differ. I'm teaching a bioethics course for undergrads this semester, which has been a real education for me, I think, and that a lot of my students do come from a Christian background, but yet they come to that course on bioethics with vastly different assumptions about how their faith applies or the way in which these theological convictions pertain or don't pertain to the practice of medicine.
George Mason:
Right.
Myles Werntz:
Yeah.
George Mason:
Well, one of the reasons I ask you that question is because you and I are just reflecting about the life and legacy of T.B. Maston, great Christian ethicist, the Baptist ethicist who taught from the early 1920s at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. And we're going to have this awards banquet for his foundation that we'll talk more about later. But reading some of his material that he wrote, it seemed that during his era, he actually had to make a case for the teaching of biblical ethics, of Christian ethics.
Myles Werntz:
Right. Right. Yep.
George Mason:
Now, I've just sort of pondered why that might be the case, and it does seem that for Baptists in the south, at least, southern Baptist in particular, there was a kind of era during which the faith was understood to be about a person's personal experience with God, and there was not much attention given to our life in the world and interacting as Christian citizens and whatnot. And of course, race and desegregation and things like that were a big part of his era that he challenged Baptists about. And you've actually written about this in your book, Moving From Isolation to Community. I think this idea of how we should be doing our faith out of a more communal perspective rather than just an individualist view. But it did get me thinking what was it about that era and the legacy of that era that Baptists have tended to make faith almost entirely an individual matter. And that has complicated the way we've interacted in the world, hasn't it?
Myles Werntz:
Yeah. No, I think that's a great question. The short answer to that, well, there may be a couple of roots to why Baptists have not ever produced ethicists, maybe. One of those I think is, well, let me start with this. Conscience has always been one of the hallmarks of Baptist theology dating back all the way to the 17th century. And that's good, and that's great because it carves out space for Baptists to be able to practice their faith freely. And it also tends to have been appropriated in a more individualist sort of way.
George Mason:
Yes.
Myles Werntz:
So that there ceases to be a common grammar about how we practice the moral life. That the moral life is taken to be something that is individual, that is private, that is a matter of conscience. And so once you begin to talk about the moral life as a matter purely of individual conscience, then there doesn't really seem to be a way for us to talk about it anymore.
George Mason:
Right.
Myles Werntz:
There's no way for us to have a common conversation about what might be moral or how the limits of our practice. So I think that's maybe one reason why Baptists have always struggled with ethics is, ironically, because of our commitments to conscience. The second reason I think, is that because people, because Baptists are the people of the book, people of scripture and scripture becomes the foundational commitment for Baptists. It interestingly seems to limit our moral imagination because we tend to think of ethics in terms of that which is commanded and that which is prohibited. And that's certainly a part of what scripture gives, it gives in terms of commandments and admonitions and exhortations and all the rest. Christian ethics encompasses not just what is commanded or forbidden, but what happens in those spaces where there is something that is neither commanded nor prohibited.
George Mason:
Right. Right.
Myles Werntz:
And so that's where Christian ethics comes in to supply a vocabulary of virtue, of obligation, of this is where the natural law tradition becomes important in terms of thinking about that there might be things that are incumbent upon us, even if they're not specifically commanded, that maybe there's reasons to do these things anyway. But when we take our cues from scripture, I think sometimes we look very quickly to the things that are commanded. And then we quit looking. Realizing that I think that a lot of scripture is predicated on categories of ethics, and there's categories of ethics that are operative within scripture that it doesn't necessarily make explicit. And so Christian ethics has to kind of make those things explicits. But again, if you think that if I just read the Bible, all of my ethics is going to get sorted out, that's partly true, I think. But there's a whole lot more reflection to it than that, that I think needs to happen.
George Mason:
It also comes down to how we read the Bible [inaudible 00:16:22]
We read the Bible because-
Myles Werntz:
That's right.
George Mason:
Private interpretation is a dangerous thing, for whatever profit there is to it. I think one of the great helps in our generation is the renewal of the understanding of the Baptist church in a more congregational and communal way and doing theology that way. We owe a lot of this ... Jim McClendon actually started his three volume series of systematic theology with ethics. I think it's interesting, but it is drawing out of the Anabaptist tradition. The whole idea is that we live together, and who we are is about reading these texts together and about interpreting together in terms of pattern of life that we have. And then we reflect upon those and those reflections become our theological reflections. And so he started at a different place, and I think that starting point is interesting, given that for so much, as you say, the emphasis on individual conscience, which has given us a tradition of dissent, which has a value to it, of course. But nonetheless, it sort of merged with an American ethos of radical individualism that we maybe didn't even realize was taking place over a long period of time. And so this is, I think, been a helpful renewal of Christian ethics in a more communitarian way, would you say?
Myles Werntz:
Yeah, I think that's right. That's a good way of framing it.
George Mason:
Yeah. So here we have T.B. Maston, who, during the course of his life of teaching, influenced an enormous number of people to study Christian ethics, social ethics, to consider the matter of social justice, questions of public life and service and the common good. But probably his most significant contribution was in race elections. It seems that over and over again, during the period of time from the 1920s up until his retirement in the 1970s, I guess it was, he really focused very much on race relations. And this gave birth to the Christian Life Commission, both in Texas and the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission. And yet for all that, we continue to struggle to come to grips with race elections. We've had this great legacy of teaching, and all of our Southern Baptist seminaries did focus on this in their teaching during this period of time. What's so intractable about this challenge of racial justice, Myles, that we can't seem to break through, to shuck the husk of this white supremacist mentality that exists within us?
Myles Werntz:
Well, to borrow a page from what you just mentioned with respect to McClendon's work, most Baptist churches are racially segregated in practice, not in any official sense, but in their lived sense. And so when our moral commitments derive out of our shared life together, if our shared life consists primarily of those from our own ethnicity, that then yields the problem, that race becomes the thing that we never see, and it becomes the intractable problem. The history of denominationalism within Baptist life is inseparable from, I think, these questions of race, both with respect to how different denominations got started and how different denominations are perpetuated. It happens in conjunction with the questions of segregation.
So it seems to me that what Maston is doing when he begins writing about race relations, I believe in the 1930s, I don't have his bibliography in front of me, but I think that that's right. He is way ahead of the curve, particularly for Baptist life, but among a lot of white Christians as well, is way ahead of the curve. So recognizing that part of the problem for Baptists in particular is the fact that our churches are segregated. And so you can't expect that something magically different is going to happen with respect to how churches think about race as a moral question unless their churches are desegregated.
George Mason:
It goes back to Brian Stevenson's felicitous phrase about that there's a proximity to pain that is-
Myles Werntz:
That's right.
George Mason:
Necessary. That if we are not in relationship to one another, we can't find a way forward, that we have to put ourselves in the space of living life together.
Myles Werntz:
That's right.
George Mason:
Really, Martin Luther King, Jr's last book, wasn't it, about how we have to choose between chaos or community. And community means that we have to view one another as crucially important to our own wellbeing. And we're going to remain at odds with one another unless we learn to see the humanity in each other.
Myles Werntz:
That's right.
George Mason:
I think we are bearing out the fruits of that failure, even now politically. And what we're seeing is different narratives about who America is, and it's reflective of our theological tradition, isn't it?
Myles Werntz:
That's right. Unfortunately, I think that's right.
George Mason:
So let's move a little bit to what you're up to these days. So you are, let's see now, you are the director of the Baptist Study Center at Abilene Christian University.
Myles Werntz:
That's right.
George Mason:
And you teach theology in the graduate program there at ACU. And I think our viewers and listeners would be really interested to know that you had been teaching at Logsdon Seminary, Logsdon School of Theology at Hardin-Simmons University, which is now effectively closed down. And this was really an innovation that you were able to create with a Church of Christ college. And I think it's fascinating that we find ourselves in this place. I helped to start the Baptist House of Studies at a Methodist school, Perkin School of Theology at SMU, and here you're doing Baptist work at a Church of Christ. What's happening, Myles, out in this wild world of theological education?
Myles Werntz:
Yeah. Oh, that's a good question. Well, I think that what's happening in places like ACU and Perkins is they're realizing that the future of theological education belongs to ecumenical discourse. There's going to be an ecumenical component to it. So yeah, the story, we could get into the origin story of what it is that I'm doing now. The Baptist Study Center, it's been around since 2020. I work here in the Graduate School of Theology to help provide courses and opportunities for our Baptist students in west Texas and beyond. Work with a lot of area congregations to help just meet practical needs through preaching and education and offering online resources and the rest.
But I think that you're going to find these increasingly common, that theological education is going to take place alongside those that see a vision for what church ministry needs to be doing, what preparation for ministry needs to do it. There's just a richness that comes when folks from different traditions, such as the situations that you and I kind of find ourselves in, there's a real richness to the preparation that happens. Historically, Churches of Christ and Baptist, if you know anything about Church of Christ history, which I did not prior to working here, there was an extremely contentious history there.
George Mason:
Oh yeah. Baptist and the Church of Christ, yeah.
Myles Werntz:
Oh gosh. I read some of these early accounts, as recently as the 1950s and 1960s, and it's really kind of ugly. It's really a lot of back and forth.
George Mason:
We're the true ... No, we ...
Myles Werntz:
Right. Exactly. That's it. So when I started this, I don't think I had a grasp of what a significant move that was for a Church of Christ university in particular to do this. But for me, it just made practical sense that we do better work when we're working together as opposed to working separately.
George Mason:
Right.
Myles Werntz:
But it's been good. It's been really great so far.
George Mason:
In my class at Perkins, I find, and when I help teach in other classes as well, the Methodist students are absolutely fascinated by learning what Baptists think and how we do communion and how we baptize and we do practicums. I taught a class in Baptist and free church theology, and I had five Methodists. And they really wanted to know, and there's a certain degree of what Martin Marty called the Baptistification of American Christianity.
Myles Werntz:
That's right.
George Mason:
That actually seeps into it. It doesn't give us cause to celebrate that we won somehow. But there is a sense in which all congregations and all traditions seem to think that they should have a right of self-determination, rather than a denomination telling them what to do. What we find is that that spirit pervades Methodists and Episcopalians and Presbyterians and all sorts of different folks.
Myles Werntz:
Yeah. So one of the largest populations here among our undergrads is nondenominational, which usually means that it was Baptist at some juncture and then quit being Baptist officially. So if you just kind of scratch beneath the surface, you don't have to scratch too much, just kind of pick beneath the surface, and you'll usually find something Baptist there.
George Mason:
Well at least small B baptist.
Myles Werntz:
At least small B baptist, right.
George Mason:
Which function like Baptist churches. They might have an elder board or something, but the most part are, Yeah. So what are you finding about the nature of students right now? How is it changing and what's your take on where we are right now in the call and nurture and character of those who are coming into this or not coming into?
Myles Werntz:
Yeah. Yeah. I'll take the first question first. I've been doing this since about 2000 and what, 2008. So since 2008, I've noticed an increasing trend towards students working a whole lot more. It would have been fairly common when I started for students to maybe have a part-time position somewhere or be working 15, 20 hours a week, and can kind of make ends meet on that. But increasingly, I find students that are working 20, 30 hours or more, many full time in addition to going to school. That has been the biggest difference, I think. It affects the speed at which they're able to do their classes. It affects the attention to which they're able to give their classes. We have amazing students, they're just all overworked and they're all tired all the time. So I think that's the biggest change that I see. I also see a number of students kind of simultaneously curious, but also concerned about going into congregational ministry.
George Mason:
I think that's-
Myles Werntz:
That a number of them have either had friends that have had rough experiences or have had a rough experience themselves and it's kind of made them a little skittish about wanting to commit to that over the long term. Now, what to do about that I think is a separate conversation, and I do have some thoughts about that. But I do see that as one of the things that theological education has to be, I think just open eyed about, that many of our students are coming in with [inaudible 00:30:29]
George Mason:
I completely agree with you about that. And there are probably lots of reasons for that and the church is largely blame for it. But I also think our mutual friend, Curtis Freeman, theology at Duke often likes to say that the way we teach in our seminaries, divinity schools of theology says an awful lot about what our students are going to carry with them.
Myles Werntz:
That's right.
George Mason:
You can tell a lot about the students who come out of our schools based upon whether those who teach them, actually think that the church is the problem.
Myles Werntz:
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
George Mason:
And I think with our students, I think both you and I have a hopefulness about the life-giving character of the community of the congregation.
Myles Werntz:
That's right.
George Mason:
Despite how challenging it is, nonetheless, the people of God. And we can't run from them, but it's our duty in part to help bring health to the body and to lead them, not just to be afraid that they're going to cause illness in us, you might say.
Myles Werntz:
That's right. That's right. I think that the opportunities and exposure to congregational life, and I think encouraging that and trying to help facilitate that as much as possible goes a long way in terms of alleviating those concerns that our students come with. Not always, but it does go a long way. I don't know how many times students have started with a real reticence to even think about congregational ministry, and then they get a taste of it and they realize, no, this is different than what I thought it was. And there's a real richness here and a real ... They begin to feel their vocation shifting away from something else and toward congregational ministry. And that's always so gratifying to see, because I feel like that's where theological education can really play a role in terms of healing some of those past wounds.
George Mason:
Agreed.
Myles Werntz:
That our students bear and that congregations bear. And so trying to help the next-
George Mason:
As far as the Maston Foundation is concerned, you have worked in the scholarship program as well with them. Tell us more about why that exists and what the Foundation tries to accomplish.
Myles Werntz:
So the T.B. Maston Foundation was established in order to give broader exposure, not just to the work and legacy of T.B. Maston, but also to Christian ethics within Baptist Life. At one juncture in my career, I was the T.B. Maston chair of Christian Ethics. So currently the Foundation supports a lot of educational initiatives. It does a retreat for students. At one point, it did a lot of lectures in Christian ethics throughout universities, mostly here in Texas. But the broad aims of the Foundation are to promote the study and work of the Christian world life. So it's a wonderful Foundation, it's a concern that I have and have had for a number of years, and it's an organization that needs your support.
George Mason:
So I am the president of an organization called Faith Commons, an interfaith organization that works to promote the common good. And in an unprecedented move, the Maston Foundation has for the first time decided to give their award to an organization rather than an individual. And what's more, an interfaith organization, even though it is a Christian ethics group. So I wonder about your reflections on that decision and how you might see it as a gesture toward the importance of moving into more interfaith kinds of relationships.
Myles Werntz:
Yeah, no, I think when you think about problems which are prevalent in society, things as macro as climate change or racism or any number of structural injustices that occur within society, there's nothing that would prohibit Christians from working side by side with any person of good faith. There's just a long legacy of that within Christian reflection. So I think it's appropriate to recognize that our partners for addressing common concerns within the world, they are Christians, but also not just Christians, but Jews and Muslims and people of other faiths as well. And so to celebrate the way in which these practical partnerships can occur, I think that that's appropriate. And I think it gives Christians a different set of partners to think about collaborating and cooperating with. I don't think that it dissolves disagreements or discussions that occur across faith tradition lines, but it does, I think, acknowledge the real value of working together for the common good with whom Christians might disagree on any number of other topics.
George Mason:
Agreed. So to the last question then, a question I'm trying to ask now on Good God episodes to everyone who comes, and that is, what is it, Myles, that you are learning from your faith right now that is helping you to reflect upon and promote the common good in this current climate?
Myles Werntz:
I think the value of long suffering. I'm working on a piece right now that draws together of all people, Augustine and Howard Thurman.
George Mason:
Wow.
Myles Werntz:
So both of them, in different writings, talk about the way in which the eighth beatitude, the blessed are you when you suffer for the sake of, this is my paraphrase, when you suffer unjustly on behalf of the faith. That both of them see that beatitude as really critical for Christians being able to have a public witness. Too often I think Christians default into kind of a culture war mentality that is contentious and contributes to polarization. But the way in which both Augustine, and Howard Thurmond for your audience, if they don't know, he is the unsung hero of the Civil Rights movement. He is kind of the spiritual backbone to a lot of Martin Luther King, Jr's thought, particularly his book, Jesus and the Disinherited. I would [inaudible 00:38:06].
George Mason:
Highly recommend it.
Myles Werntz:
Highly recommend starting there. So that's Thurman. But the way in which both of them point to the value of Christians being able to bear the injustice of others as a way of bearing public witness to faith. And then I think that that plays out in terms of our patience with interlocutors, with our willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to those with whom we disagree, that they be operating, that they too in some way are seeking to put forward a positive good, but maybe in a way that we don't recognize or we see as not necessarily that. But there's great value in kind of [inaudible 00:38:51] with those that we disagree with. And being willing, I think, for Christians at least to suffer that uncomfortableness and to suffer that space.
George Mason:
Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Myles, on Good God. Thank you for your own Christian witness and the way you do it in generosity toward others who may be either of a different take on our faith or of other faiths. We're grateful for all that you do as a scholar and a teacher.
Myles Werntz:
I appreciate that.
George Mason:
Terrific. Take care. Well, I hope you've enjoyed my conversation today on Good God with Myles Werntz. If you would like a transcript of it, you can go to our website at faithcommons.org and click on Good God. And you'll be able to find this program and view it whether on YouTube or in audio version, and read the transcript. And we recommend that you do so and please share it liberally. You can also, of course, always subscribe to Faith Commons, and you can do that on the website as well. And because I mentioned this T.B. Maston Foundation banquet that is upcoming, which is on Thursday night, October 27th at six o'clock at Wilshire Baptist Church, you can get tickets by going to the T.B. Maston Foundation website, but you can also see the video of the presentation that we will be doing, my partner, Rabbi Nancy Casten and I that night at the banquet.
And you might be interested in our understanding of our work and how we consider it to be a part of the legacy of not only our own separate religious traditions, but even this legacy of T.B. Maston. So join us for that banquet if you can, in person. Otherwise, I hope that you will check out that program. You can always find information on that and anything else at faithcommons.org. Thanks again for joining us.