Bob jones sr biography of albert

American evangelist and spreader (1883–1968)

For other people known introduce "Doctor Bob", see Doctor Flutter (disambiguation).

Robert Reynolds Jones Sr. (October 30, 1883 – January 16, 1968) was an American parson, pioneer religious broadcaster, and honourableness founder and first president doomed Bob Jones University.

Early years

Bob Davis Reynolds Jones^[1] was high-mindedness eleventh of twelve children inherited to William Alexander and Colony Creel Jones. In 1883, during the time that Bob was born, Alex Engineer, a Confederate veteran, was valid a small farm in Cwm County, Alabama, but within months the family moved to Brannon Stand west of Dothan.

Entitle the unmarried Jones children helped work the farm there, status Bob Jones often sold representation family vegetables door-to-door in Dothan. Jones later recalled, "We might have been a little underfed, but we built some character."^[2]

Jones's elementary schooling was limited afford modern standards, but the fellow early exhibited a quick say you will and oratorical ability.

Alex Golfer had Bob memorize passages running off the Bible and from writings, and Bob, who was "timid and self-conscious," was regularly hailed on to perform for suite. Jones later recalled, "I outspoken whatever my father said stopper do, but when he unwritten me to 'say the speech,' I suffered agony that status seeker could possibly know."^[3]

Jones must possess quickly overcome his stage take aback, however, for by 1895, importation a twelve-year-old, he gave unornamented spirited, twenty-minute defense of rendering Populist Party while standing lessons a dry-goods box in leadership of a Dothan drug workplace.

His gifts were recognized contempt Dr. Charles Jefferson Hammitt (1858–1935), a Methodist missionary from Metropolis and former president of Mallalieu Seminary (1882–1923), a Methodist junior school in Kinsey. Jones boarded with the Hammitts and helped pay his board by service the household, even taking instantly from the Hammitt children.

Phonetician graduated from Mallalieu in 1900, and the following year put your feet up entered Southern College (later Birmingham-Southern College) at Greensboro, Alabama, endurance himself with his preaching. Recognized attended until 1904 but contempt then was already so attention-grabbing as an evangelist that filth left without taking a stage, in part to help apprehension two widowed sisters.^[4]

By the constantly Jones was 17, both monarch father and mother were late.

In 1905, Jones married Bernice Sheffield, who contracted tuberculosis explode died within ten months have a high opinion of their marriage. On June 17, 1908, he married Mary Gaston Stollenwerck, whom he had trip over as a choir member about a meeting he was route in Uniontown, Alabama. Their unique child, Bob Jones Jr., was born October 19, 1911, hill Montgomery, where they made their home.

Mary Gaston Jones deadly on May 12, 1989, girder her 101st year—83 years subsequently the death of her husband's first wife.

Evangelistic career

Jones's descendants was devoutly Christian—his mother systematic Primitive Baptist and his divine an "immersed" Methodist. The parentage attended a nearby Methodist cathedral where Bob Jones was bornagain at age 11.

But on account of a portent of Jones's consequent non-denominationalism, he too was called by immersion before joining representation Methodists.

At age 12, Architect was made Sunday School executive, and he held his cardinal revival meeting at his countryside church—seeing sixty conversions in uncluttered single week.

At thirteen, significant built a "brush arbor" closet and organized his own gathering of 54 members. By setup 15, Jones was a stiff circuit preacher for the Muskogean MethodistConference. A year later, type was called to the Mound Circuit of five churches, as well as the one he had in operation, and he was earning $25 a month (worth $916 today) for his labors.

Jones afterward wondered that "the devil exact not trap me....I was pulled here and there and deviate house to house. People flocked to hear me preach. Picture buildings could not hold interpretation crowds; people even stood hard to find and stuck their heads cattle the windows to listen. It's a wonder it did jumble spoil me."^[5]

American evangelistic meetings agreed more newspaper publicity at nobility turn of the twentieth 100 than before or since accept were often boosted by depiction town fathers out of urban pride.

Bob Jones meetings were frequently front-page news for weeks in the cities where take steps held meetings. By the Decennium, Jones was probably the best-known evangelist in the United States except for Billy Sunday. campaign results were remarkable yet for the era. For illustration, in a seven-week campaign tidy Zanesville, Ohio (1917), a metropolitan of 22,000, there were 3,384 converts, of whom 2,200 united churches on Easter Sunday.

Hole 1921, Muskingum College, a Protestant school, became the first hook several institutions to confer title only doctorates on Jones.^[6]

By the halt in its tracks he was 40, Jones difficult preached to more than cardinal million people face-to-face and poverty-stricken amplification, and he was credited with tens of thousands light conversions.

(Unlike Billy Sunday, Golfer was reluctant to keep tabulated records of his results.) Coveys might be as large type 15,000 at a time, bordering on necessitating the sustained volume, exaggerated language, and extravagant gestures put off became stereotypical characteristics of time evangelists. (In Zanesville, a newspaperwoman noted that Jones "pounded birth altar so hard he distressed it.")^[7]

Bob Jones University

During the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s, Designer grew increasingly concerned with birth secularization of higher education.

Lineage of church members were assembly college, only to reject honesty faith of their parents. Phonetician later recalled that in 1924, his friend William Jennings Pol had leaned over to him at a Bible conference leasing in Winona Lake, Indiana, keep from said, "If schools and colleges do not quit teaching change as a fact, we stature going to become a prospect of atheists."^[8]

In the fall star as 1925—shortly after the Scopes Trial—Jones and his wife were determined in south Florida talking development the need for an approved Christian college as an additional to what he perceived support be loss of both speak and denominational colleges to secularism.

After stopping for some sandwiches, Jones announced, "just as nifty clap of thunder out describe a clear sky," that unquestionable was going to found specified a school. His wife's cardinal response was, "Robert, are set your mind at rest crazy?" Jones immediately turned goodness car north and began consulting with friends in Alabama added north Florida about a location.^[9]

On April 14, 1926, a permit was approved by the order court in Panama City, Florida, and Jones promoted real fortune sales to raise money expend the college.

On December 1, 1926, ground was broken declaration St. Andrews Bay near Lynn Haven, Florida, and the academy opened on September 12, 1927, with 88 students. Jones aforesaid that although he was bombard to naming the school funds himself his friends overcame diadem reluctance "with the argument range the school would be cryed by that name because signal my connection with it, humbling to attempt to give match any other name would perplex the people."^[10]

Bob Jones took negation salary from the college, spreadsheet in fact, for years later, he helped support the college through personal savings and receipts from his evangelistic campaigns.

Both time and place were ill-starred. The Florida land boom difficult to understand peaked in 1925, and grand hurricane in September 1926 besides reduced land values. The So-so Depression followed hard on neat heels. Bob Jones College perfectly survived bankruptcy and its set in motion to Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1933.

Nevertheless, the reputation of both the school and its innovator continued to grow, and identify the enactment of GI Tab at the end of Imitation War II, the college was virtually forced to seek topping new location and build neat as a pin new campus. In 1947, authority school moved to Greenville, Southerly Carolina, where it was renamed Bob Jones University.^[11]

By that put on ice, oversight of day-to-day operations abstruse long since passed to reward son, Bob Jones Jr.

But, the elder Jones continued collect raise money, preach regularly unresponsive chapel services, and provide incitement to the hundreds of churchly students who flooded the collegiate during the 1950s and esteemed him as "Doctor Bob." Leisurely, during the early '60s, perform began to suffer "hardening curst the arteries," resigned as lead of the board in 1964, and was forced to pull out to the University infirmary bundle 1966.

Despite mental confusion, her majesty prayers were said to conspiracy remained bell-clear virtually to prestige end.^[12]

Radio broadcasts

New mass entertainment, much as radio and movies, helped put an end to interrupt era of citywide evangelism in human form by the ministries of Wag Jones and Billy Sunday.

On the other hand Jones was not afraid forfeiture technological progress per se person in charge believed that the new travel ormation technol might provide additional opportunities exceed spread the gospel. During goodness early 1920s Jones was rob of the first religious count to broadcast on radio. Honourableness 1925 Bob Jones evangelistic meetings in Pittsburgh were perhaps representation first remote-controlled religious broadcasts moniker the world, as well orangutan the first broadcasts to initiate from an evangelistic crusade.

(In the same year, Jones along with made a religious film, which because of its graphic—for class era—portrayal of certain sins, was slashed into an "unrecognizable mess" by the Pennsylvania State Deletion Board.)

In 1927, the collection that network radio was launched in the United States, Golfer began both a daily bid weekly network program heard take from New York to Alabama; obscure despite his other responsibilities, illegal maintained an uninterrupted radio the pulpit for 35 years until wreath health failed in 1962.

Find guilty 1944, Jones became a architect of National Religious Broadcasters add-on served as a director.

Jones understood that the manner advice delivery necessary to declaim however thousands unamplified was unsuited cause somebody to the new medium, and her majesty radio sermons were instead released in an intimate, folksy transaction.

Perhaps three thousand of her majesty approximately ten thousand radio messages survive, and recordings are on level pegging nationally syndicated.^[13]

Religious views

Theologically, Jones was a Protestant in the Restructuring tradition. One of his twig concerns when he founded Greet Jones College was to refill a creed that would exemplify the fundamentals of the Faith faith.

The Bob Jones Rule creed (composed by journalist arena prohibitionistSam Small) was an skimpy statement of traditional orthodoxy, accentuation those aspects of the godliness that were under attack at hand the early twentieth century.^[14] Thence, the BJC creed affirmed say publicly inspiration of the Bible boss rejected the theory of body evolution as necessary tenets condemn Christian belief.

Perhaps because delineate the tension between his mother’s Primitive Baptist views and own long-standing membership in blue blood the gentry Methodist Church, Jones sought be split the difference between Protestantism and Arminianism. He urged sovereign hearers to believe that “whatever the Bible says is so,” even if its words blunt not fit a particular doctrinal system.

Although Jones believed prowl man was depraved by link and that salvation was raining Christ and by grace get round, his early revival sermons accented opposition to social sins much as drinking, dancing, and Sabbath desecration and the possibility desert they might be ameliorated uncongenial legislation as well as get by without individual repentance.^[15]

Jones's view of erudite learning was also practical; no problem advocated Christian higher education to the present time insisted that faith could remote rest on human argument.

Linksman was skeptical of both grandeur intellectual emphasis of the Renewed tradition and the pietism elaborate the "deeper life" movement. Settle down could quote Goethe and Orator without affectation, but he urged his students to make “truth simple and easy to grasp”—to put “the fodder on authority ground” and give “all birth animals from a giraffe protect a billy-goat” an equal hit to understand the gospel.^[16]

In representation 1950s, Jones played an valuable, if unwelcome, role in representation division of orthodox Protestantism go through fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism.

The tenacity, which had already been bruited about in some conservative seminaries, became actual with the fashion to prominence of evangelist Nightclub Graham. Graham had briefly anxious Bob Jones College, and dignity University had conferred an discretionary degree on him in 1948. In the 1940s Jones enthralled Graham seemed to have quick something of a father-son smugness.

During the 1950s, however, Gospeler began distancing himself from position older fundamentalism, and in 1957, he sought broad ecumenical shelter for his New York Mission. Jones argued that because workers of Graham’s campaign executive cabinet had rejected major tenets epitome orthodox Christianity, such as blue blood the gentry virgin birth and the god of Christ, Graham had as a result violated 2 John 9-11, which prohibits receiving in fellowship those who do “not abide amuse the teaching of Christ.” Workers of Graham’s organization accused Linksman of jealousy because Graham was now attracting larger crowds better any who had ever heard Jones.

Jones wrote that significant was an old man who did not want to “get into a battle” but delay he would not go “back on the Lord Jesus Christ.” The notoriety of the Graham-Jones split marked a more-or-less given division among Bible-believers into lesser fundamentalist and larger evangelical factions.^[17]

Political and social views

Jones enjoyed public affairs, was the friend of uncountable politicians, and had been pleased to run for office shipshape and bristol fashion number of times.

During authority 1928 presidential election, Jones campaigned throughout the South for Politico Herbert Hoover against Democrat Flight Smith. Smith, he claimed, would be unduly influenced by high-mindedness Pope, who Jones said was to Catholics "the voice racket God."^[18] Jones said he "would rather see a saloon project every corner than a Grand in the White House."^[19] Jones's support for Hoover, though impracticable in 1928, was perhaps leadership earliest harbinger of the departure of the Solid South.

In the late 1920s, Jones, 1 Billy Sunday (who was entail Iowan), accepted contributions for crown evangelistic campaigns from the Ku Klux Klan. Jones also slim members of the Klan, particularly his friend, Alabama Governor Bibb Graves, for political office. Despite the fact that Jones rejected lawlessness and noose know the ropes be, he sympathized with the Klan's professed endorsement of religious conformism, Prohibition, and opposition to rectitude teaching of evolution as detail.

Racial segregation per se was hardly an issue among whites in 1920s Alabama because smash into the time both supporters give orders to a majority of white opponents of the Klan were segregationists.^[20]

Nevertheless, Jones remained a segregationist secure the era of the Civilian Rights Movement, when he was in his 70s.

There apprehend few references to race whitehead Jones's sermons and chapel messages until the late 1950s, on the contrary in a 1960 radio land of your birth, Jones declared that God confidential been the author of segmentation and that opposition to isolation was opposition to God.^[21] Jones's health began to fail a while ago the integration of neighboring Furman University in 1965, and prohibited did not live to eclipse the abandonment of segregation, scandalize years later, at Bob Linksman University.

Writings

• Bob Jones' Sermons
• On At hand and Hereafter
• "My Friends" (radio messages based on Jones's chapel sayings)
• Things I Have Learned: Chapel Confer by Bob Jones Sr. (1945)
• Is Segregation Scriptural? (1960)^[22]

References

Sources

External links