Robert Reynolds "Bob" Jones Sr. (October 30, 1883 - January 16, 1968) was an American evangelist, pioneer of religious broadcasting and founder and first president of Bob Jones University.
Video Bob Jones Sr.
Initial years
Bob Jones was the son of William Alexander and Georgia Creel Jones and eleven of the twelve children. In 1883, when Bob was born, Alex Jones, a Confederate veteran, was working on a small farm in Dale County, Alabama, but within months the family moved to Brannon Stand in western Dothan. All of Jones's unmarried children help in the farm work there, and Bob Jones often sells house-to-house veggies in Dothan. Jones later recalled, "We may be a little nutritious, but we build some characters."
Jones's primary school is limited by modern standards, but early boys exhibit a fast mind and oratoric ability. Alex Jones has Bob memorizing verses from the Bible and from the literature, and Bob, who is "timid and self-conscious," is regularly called to perform for guests. Jones later recalled, "I did everything my dad said, but when he told me to 'make a speech,' I suffer from what no one knows."
Jones had to quickly overcome his stage fright, yet, in 1895, as a twelve-year-old boy, he gave a twenty-minute, twenty-minute defense of the Populis Party while standing on a dry-goods box in front of Dothan's drug store. His gifts are acknowledged by Dr. Charles Jefferson Hammitt (1858-1935), a Methodist missionary from Philadelphia and former president of Mallalieu Seminary (1882-1923), Methodist secondary school in Kinsey. Jones climbed into Hammitts and helped pay his council by serving housekeeping, even taking orders from Hammitt's children. Jones graduated from Mallalieu in 1900, and the following year he entered Southern College (then Birmingham-Southern College) in Greensboro, Alabama, supporting himself with his preaching. He attended until 1904 but at that time was already so prominent as the evangelist he left without taking a degree, partly to help support two widowed sisters.
When Jones was 17 years old, his father and mother were dead. In 1905, Jones married Bernice Sheffield, who contracted tuberculosis and died within ten months of their marriage. On June 17, 1908, he married Mary Gaston Stollenwerck, whom he met as a choir member during a meeting he had held in Uniontown, Alabama. Their only child, Bob Jones, Jr. born October 19, 1911 in Montgomery, where they made their home. Mary Gaston Jones died on May 12, 1989 in the 101st year - 83 years after the death of her husband's first wife.
Maps Bob Jones Sr.
Evangelical career
The Joneses were a devout Christian - his mother was an ancient Baptist and his father was a "sinking" Methodist. The family attended the nearby Methodist church where Bob Jones converted at the age of 11. But as a sign of Jones then non-denominationalism, he was also baptized with immersion before joining the Methodist.
At the age of 12, Jones was appointed Sunday School superintendent, and he held his first revival meeting at his home church - looking at sixty conversions in a week. At the age of thirteen, he built a shelter "brush arbor" and set his own congregation of 54 members. At the age of 15, Jones was a licensed circuit preacher for the Alabama Methodist Conference. A year later, he was summoned to the Headland Circuit of five churches, including one he started, and he earned $ 25 a month ($ 735 today) for his work. Jones then wonders that "the devil does not trap me.... I am drawn here and there and from house to house people are in droves to hear me preach buildings can not accommodate crowds, people even standing outside and sticking their heads in the window to listen, it's amazing that it does not spoil me. "
American evangelistic meetings receive more newspaper publicity at the turn of the 20th century than ever before or since and are often encouraged by city fathers from public pride. The Bob Jones meetings often make front page news for weeks in the cities where he meets meetings. In the 1920s, Jones was probably the most famous evangelist in the United States except Billy Sunday. The result of his campaign was amazing even for that era. For example, in a seven-week campaign in Zanesville, Ohio (1917), a town of 22,000, there were 3,384 converted men, among whom 2,200 churches joined on Easter Sunday. In 1921, Muskingum College, a Presbyterian school, became the first of several institutions to award honorary doctorates to Jones.
By the age of 40, Jones had preached to over fifteen million people face-to-face and without amplification, and he was credited with tens of thousands of conversions. (Unlike Billy Sunday, Jones is reluctant to keep tabular records of the results.) The crowd may be 15,000 at a time, virtually requiring sustained volume, hyperbolic language, and extraordinary movements that characterize the stereotypes of the evangelists of the period. (In Zanesville, a reporter noted that Jones "hit the altar so hard that he broke it.")
Bob Jones University
During the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s, Jones was increasingly concerned about the secularization of higher education. Church members attend the lectures, only to reject the faith of their parents. Jones later recalled that in 1924, his friend William Jennings Bryan leaned against him at a Bible conference service in Lake Winona, Indiana, and said, "If schools and colleges do not stop teaching evolution as fact, we will become an atheist nation. "
In the fall of 1925 - shortly after Scopes Trial - Jones and his wife were driving in south Florida talking about the need for orthodox Christian colleges as an alternative to what he considers to be losing state colleges and denominations to secularism. After stopping for some sandwiches, Jones announced, "just as thunder thunder from the clear sky," that he would find such a school. Her wife's first response was, "Robert, are you crazy?" Jones immediately turned the car north and began consulting with friends in Alabama and northern Florida about a location.
On April 14, 1926, a charter was approved by a circuit court in Panama City, Florida, and Jones promoted the sale of real estate to raise money for college. On December 1, 1926, land was damaged in St Andrews Bay near Lynn Haven, Florida, and the campus opened on 12 September 1927 with 88 students. Jones said that although he refused to name the school after his friends overcame his aversion "with the argument that schools would be called by that name because of my connection with it, and trying to give me another name would confuse people."
Bob Jones received no salary from college, and in fact, for many years thereafter, he helped support the school through savings and personal income from his evangelistic campaign. Both time and place were not profitable. The Florida land boom had peaked in 1925, and the storm in September 1926 further reduced the value of the land. The Great Depression followed hard on his heels. Bob Jones College barely survived bankruptcy and relocation to Cleveland, Tennessee in 1933. Nevertheless, the school's good reputation and its founders continued to grow, and with the enactment of GI Bill at the end of World War II, the college was almost forced to find new locations and build new campus. In 1947, the school moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where its name was changed to Bob Jones University.
At that time, the oversight of day-to-day operations had long passed to his son, Bob Jones, Jr. Nevertheless, the older Jones continued to raise money, preach regularly at the chapel service, and inspired hundreds of ministerial students who flooded the campus during the 1950s and praised him as "Doctor Bob." Gradually, during the early 60s, he began to suffer "hardening of the arteries," resigned as chairman of the board in 1964, and was forced to retire to the University of Infirmary in 1966. Despite the mental confusion, his prayer was said to have fixed the turn almost to the end.
Radio Broadcast
New mass entertainment, such as radio and film, helped end an all-city evangelism era marked by ministries Bob Jones and Billy Sunday. But Jones is not afraid of technological progress and believes that new media may provide additional opportunities to spread the gospel. During the early 1920s Jones was one of the first religious figures to be broadcast on radio. Evangelism meeting of Bob Jones 1925 in Pittsburgh is probably the world's first controlled long-distance religious broadcast, as well as the first broadcast from an evangelistic campaign. (That same year, Jones also made a religious film, which because of its graphics - for an era - the depiction of certain sins, was trimmed into "unrecognized chaos" by the State Censorship of Pennsylvania.)
In 1927, the year when radio radio was launched in the United States, Jones began a daily and weekly networking program that was heard from New York to Alabama; and despite his other responsibilities, he maintained uninterrupted radio service for 35 years until his health failed in 1962. In 1944, Jones became founder of the National Religious Broadcasters and served as director.
Jones understood that the means of delivery needed to declare up to thousands of unmeasured people did not fit into the new media, and his radio sermons were delivered in an intimate and simple way. Perhaps three thousand of his ten thousand radio messages survive, and recordings are still nationally syndicated.
Religious view
Theologically, Jones was a Protestant in the Reformation tradition. One of his first concerns when he founded Bob Jones College was to give a creed that would embody the foundations of the Christian faith. The Bob Jones University credo (composed by journalist and the prohibition of Sam Small) is a brief statement of traditional orthodoxy, which emphasizes aspects of faith that were attacked during the early 20th century. Therefore, the BJC creed affirms the inspiration of the Bible and rejects the theory of human evolution as a necessary Christian teaching.
Perhaps because of the tension between his mother's Baptist views and his long membership in the Methodist Church, Jones sought to separate the distinction between Calvinism and Arminianism. He urges his listeners to believe that "whatever the Bible says so," even if the words do not fit into a particular theological system. Although Jones believes that humans have been humiliated by nature and that salvation is through Christ and only by grace, his early revival preaching emphasized opposition to social sins such as drinking, dancing and blasphemy and the possibility that they could be fixed by law. as with individual repentance.
Jones's view of academic learning is also practical; he advocated a Christian higher education but insisted that faith can not depend on human arguments. Jones is skeptical of the intellectual emphasis of the Reformed tradition and the pietism of the "deeper life" movement. He can quote Goethe and Cicero without pretense, but he urges his students to make "simple and understandable truths" - to put "fodder on the ground" and give "all animals from giraffes to billy-goat" equal opportunity to understand the gospel.
In the 1950s, Jones played an important, if unacceptable, role in the division of orthodox Protestantism into fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism. Termination, broken down in some conservative seminaries, became evident with the rise of evangelist Billy Graham. Graham attended Bob Jones College, and the University awarded him honors in 1948. In the 1940s Jones and Graham appeared to have developed a father-son relationship. During the 1950s, however, Graham began to distance himself from older fundamentalism, and in 1957, he sought extensive ecumenical support for his New York Crusade. Jones argues that since the members of Graham's executive campaign committee have rejected the main doctrine of orthodox Christianity, such as the virgin birth and the divinity of Christ, Graham has therefore violated 2 John 9-11, which forbids acceptance in their "unlived" communion. in the teaching of Christ. "Graham's organization members accuse Jones of being jealous that Graham is now attracting more people than anyone who has ever heard Jones Jones wrote that he is an old man who does not want to" fight "but he will not" return to the Lord Jesus Christ. " Graham-Jones marks a more or less permanent division among biblical believers into fundamentalist factions and smaller evangelical factions.
Jones enjoys politics, is a friend of many politicians, and has been encouraged to run for office several times. During the 1928 presidential election, Jones campaigned throughout the South for Herbert Hoover Republic against Democrat Al Smith. Smith, he said, would be greatly influenced by the Pope, who Jones said was a Catholic "voice of God." Jones's support for Hoover, though quixotic in 1928, was perhaps the first sign of the death of Solid South.
In the late 1920s, Jones, like Billy Sunday (who is an Iowan), received a donation to his evangelistic campaign from the Ku Klux Klan. Jones also supports Klansmen, especially his friend, Alabama Governor Bibb Graves, for political office. Although Jones rejects lawlessness and the death penalty without trial, he sympathizes with the clan's religious recognition of religious orthodoxy, Prohibition, and opposition to the teaching of evolution as fact. Self-racial segregation was not a problem among whites in the Alabama 1920s because at that time both the supporters and the majority of Klan's white opponents were segregationists.
Nevertheless, Jones remained a segregationist in the era of the Civil Rights Movement, when he was in his 70s. There are several references to the race in the sermon of Jones and the message of the chapel until the late 1950s, but in a 1960 radio address, Jones declared that God is the author of segregation and that opposition to segregation is opposition to God. Jones's health began to fail before the nearby Furman University integration in 1965, and he did not live to see the neglect of segregation, six years later, at Bob Jones University.
Posts
- Bob Jones' Sermons
- Here and Hereafter
- "My friend" (radio message based on Jones's chapel greeting)
- Things I Learned: Axial Talks by Bob Jones Sr. (1945)
- What is Biblical Segregation? (1960)
Note
References
- R. K. Johnson, Bridge Builder: Biography Dr. Bob Jones Sr (God's Creator's Sword, 1969).
- Daniel L. Turner, Stand Without Apology: Bob Jones University History (Bob Jones University Press, 1997)]
- Melton Wright, Fortress of Faith: Bob Jones University Story (Bob Jones University Press, 1984)
External links
- Biography of BJU website
- Bob Jones Sr. gravesite; Search-A-Grave
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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