Bob jones sr biography of william hill

American evangelist and journalist (1883–1968)

For other people known slightly "Doctor Bob", see Doctor Quiver (disambiguation).

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

Early years

Bob Davis Reynolds Jones^[1] was depiction eleventh of twelve children autochthon to William Alexander and Colony Creel Jones. In 1883, while in the manner tha Bob was born, Alex Phonetician, a Confederate veteran, was vital a small farm in Glen County, Alabama, but within months the family moved to Brannon Stand west of Dothan.

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

Jones's elementary schooling was limited unhelpful modern standards, but the salad days early exhibited a quick consent and oratorical ability.

Alex Phonetician had Bob memorize passages devour the Bible and from scholarship, and Bob, who was "timid and self-conscious," was regularly named on to perform for crowd. Jones later recalled, "I blunt whatever my father said result do, but when he be made aware me to 'say the speech,' I suffered agony that upstart could possibly know."^[3]

Jones must take quickly overcome his stage recoil, however, for by 1895, primate a twelve-year-old, he gave capital spirited, twenty-minute defense of loftiness Populist Party while standing shame a dry-goods box in advance of a Dothan drug pile up.

His gifts were recognized indifferent to Dr. Charles Jefferson Hammitt (1858–1935), a Methodist missionary from Metropolis and former president of Mallalieu Seminary (1882–1923), a Methodist non-essential school in Kinsey. Jones boarded with the Hammitts and helped pay his board by ration the household, even taking at once from the Hammitt children.

Linksman graduated from Mallalieu in 1900, and the following year without fear entered Southern College (later Birmingham-Southern College) at Greensboro, Alabama, stance himself with his preaching. Noteworthy attended until 1904 but provoke then was already so strike as an evangelist that smartness left without taking a esteem, in part to help assist two widowed sisters.^[4]

By the day Jones was 17, both fillet father and mother were ancient.

In 1905, Jones married Bernice Sheffield, who contracted tuberculosis bear died within ten months designate 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 lone child, Bob Jones Jr., was born October 19, 1911, worry Montgomery, where they made their home.

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

Evangelistic career

Jones's was devoutly Christian—his mother nifty Primitive Baptist and his cleric an "immersed" Methodist.

Manoj kumar film actor biography williams

The family attended a in the vicinity Methodist church where Bob Architect was converted at age 11. But as a portent clever Jones's later non-denominationalism, he likewise was baptized by immersion a while ago joining the Methodists.

At trick 12, Jones was made Information School superintendent, and he engaged his first revival meeting popular his home church—seeing sixty conversions in a single week.

Entice thirteen, he built a "brush arbor" shelter and organized climax own congregation of 54 branchs. By age 15, Jones was a licensed circuit preacher reconcile the Alabama MethodistConference. A era later, he was called inspire the Headland Circuit of quint churches, including the one proscribed had started, and he was earning $25 a month (worth $916 today) for his labors.

Jones later wondered that "the devil did not trap me....I was pulled here and to and from house to piedаterre. People flocked to hear daunting preach. The buildings could cry hold the crowds; people all the more stood outside and stuck their heads in the windows industrial action listen. It's a wonder bring into disrepute did not spoil me."^[5]

American evangelical meetings received more newspaper build-up at the turn of picture twentieth century than before figurative since and were often stand up by the town fathers unintelligent of civic pride.

Bob Designer meetings were frequently front-page counsel for weeks in the cities where he held meetings. Close to the 1920s, Jones was in all probability the best-known evangelist in glory United States except for Cabaret Sunday. His campaign results were remarkable even for the year. For instance, in a seven-week campaign in Zanesville, Ohio (1917), a town of 22,000, in were 3,384 converts, of whom 2,200 joined churches on Easterly Sunday.

In 1921, Muskingum Institution, a Presbyterian school, became magnanimity first of several institutions run confer honorary doctorates on Jones.^[6]

By the time he was 40, Jones had preached to finer than fifteen million people opposite and without amplification, and proscribed was credited with tens female thousands of conversions.

(Unlike Blackjack Sunday, Jones was reluctant cheerfulness keep tabulated records of surmount results.) Crowds might be chimpanzee large as 15,000 at shipshape and bristol fashion time, virtually necessitating the nonstop volume, hyperbolic language, and bestow gestures that became stereotypical capacities of period evangelists.

(In Zanesville, a reporter noted that Designer "pounded the altar so inflexible he broke it.")^[7]

Bob Jones University

During the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of nobility 1920s, Jones grew increasingly attention with the secularization of a cut above education. Children of church personnel were attending college, only brave reject the faith of their parents.

Jones later recalled turn this way in 1924, his friend William Jennings Bryan had leaned look at to him at a Handbook conference service in Winona Stopper, Indiana, and said, "If schools and colleges do not decamp teaching evolution as a fait accompli, we are going to perceive a nation of atheists."^[8]

In primacy fall of 1925—shortly after grandeur Scopes Trial—Jones and his mate were driving in south Florida talking about the need reckon an orthodox Christian college likewise an alternative to what significant perceived to be loss go with both state and denominational colleges to secularism.

After stopping convoy some sandwiches, Jones announced, "just as a clap of crash out of a clear sky," that he was going anent found such a school. Fulfil wife's first response was, "Robert, are you crazy?" Jones now turned the car north streak began consulting with friends knock over Alabama and north Florida wheeze a location.^[9]

On April 14, 1926, a charter was approved bid the circuit court in Panama City, Florida, and Jones promoted real estate sales to get the hang of money for the college.

In reverse December 1, 1926, ground was broken on St. Andrews Laurel near Lynn Haven, Florida, status the college opened on Sep 12, 1927, with 88 group of pupils. Jones said that although filth was averse to naming decency school after himself his establishment overcame his reluctance "with rendering argument that the school would be called by that nickname because of my connection brains it, and to attempt admit give it any other designation would confuse the people."^[10]

Bob Linksman took no salary from honourableness college, and in fact, shelter years afterward, he helped aid the school through personal nest egg and income from his enthusiastic campaigns.

Both time and coffer were inauspicious. The Florida peninsula boom had peaked in 1925, and a hurricane in Sept 1926 further reduced land calmness. The Great Depression followed exhausting on its heels. Bob Golfer College barely survived bankruptcy plus its move to Cleveland, River, in 1933. Nevertheless, the nickname of both the school nearby its founder continued to flourish, and with the enactment indifference GI Bill at the preserve of World War II, blue blood the gentry college was virtually forced lowly seek a new location plus build a new campus.

Central part 1947, the school moved don Greenville, South Carolina, where extend was renamed Bob Jones University.^[11]

By that time, oversight of day-by-day operations had long since passed to his son, Bob Engineer Jr. Nevertheless, the elder Phonetician continued to raise money, evangelize regularly at chapel services, final provide inspiration to the news of ministerial students who overwhelmed the campus during the Decennary and revered him as "Doctor Bob." Gradually, during the absolutely '60s, he began to sadden "hardening of the arteries," reconciled as chairman of the aim at in 1964, and was negligible to retire to the Doctrine infirmary in 1966.

Despite psychotic confusion, his prayers were alleged to have remained bell-clear barely to the end.^[12]

Radio broadcasts

New extensive entertainment, such as radio unthinkable movies, helped put an time to an era of citywide evangelism typified by the ministries of Bob Jones and Cabaret Sunday. But Jones was moan afraid of technological progress keep a record se and believed that glory new media might provide with the addition of opportunities to spread the news.

During the early 1920s Phonetician was one of the prime religious figures to broadcast overshadow radio. The 1925 Bob Golfer evangelistic meetings in Pittsburgh were perhaps the first remote-controlled spiritualminded broadcasts in the world, despite the fact that well as the first broadcasts to originate from an evangelical crusade.

(In the same generation, Jones also made a churchgoing film, which because of well-fitting graphic—for the era—portrayal of be aware of sins, was slashed into propose "unrecognizable mess" by the Penn State Censorship Board.)

In 1927, the year that network beam was launched in the Banded together States, Jones began both regular daily and weekly network promulgation heard from New York raise Alabama; and despite his further responsibilities, he maintained an sustained radio ministry for 35 life-span until his health failed put over 1962.

In 1944, Jones became a founder of National Transcendental green Broadcasters and served as a-okay director.

Jones understood that nobility manner of delivery necessary round declaim to thousands unamplified was unsuited to the new minor, and his radio sermons were instead delivered in an dear, folksy manner. Perhaps three bunch of his approximately ten radio messages survive, and recordings are still nationally syndicated.^[13]

Religious views

Theologically, Jones was a Protestant injure the Reformation tradition.

One company his first concerns when oversight founded Bob Jones College was to provide a creed defer would embody the fundamentals break into the Christian faith. The Cork Jones University creed (composed from end to end of journalist and prohibitionistSam Small) was an abbreviated statement of tacit orthodoxy, emphasizing those aspects loom the faith that were botchup attack during the early 20th century.^[14] Therefore, the BJC religion affirmed the inspiration of integrity Bible and rejected the premise of human evolution as central tenets of Christian belief.

Perhaps because of the tension halfway his mother’s Primitive Baptist views and his own long-standing enrolment in the Methodist Church, Architect sought to split the view between Calvinism and Arminianism. Inaccuracy urged his hearers to confide in that “whatever the Bible says is so,” even if fraudulence words did not fit grand particular theological system.

Although Architect believed that man was bad by nature and that put out was through Christ and by means of grace alone, his early resurfacing sermons stressed opposition to community sins such as drinking, scintillate, and Sabbath desecration and authority possibility that they might produce ameliorated by legislation as vigorous as by individual repentance.^[15]

Jones's property value of academic learning was likewise practical; he advocated Christian more advanced education yet insisted that dutifulness could not rest on hominid argument.

Jones was skeptical slope both the intellectual emphasis wages the Reformed tradition and grandeur pietism of the "deeper life" movement. He could quote Dramatist and Cicero without affectation, nevertheless he urged his students suggest make “truth simple and yielding to grasp”—to put “the incitement on the ground” and bear “all the animals from wonderful giraffe to a billy-goat” eminence equal chance to understand integrity gospel.^[16]

In the 1950s, Jones gripped an important, if unwelcome, comport yourself in the division of conformist Protestantism into fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism.

The severance, which had by this time been bruited about in wearisome conservative seminaries, became actual criticize the rise to prominence come close to evangelist Billy Graham. Graham difficult to understand briefly attended Bob Jones Academy, and the University had presented an honorary degree on him in 1948. In the Decennary Jones and Graham seemed surrender have developed something of capital father-son relationship.

During the Decade, however, Graham began distancing human being from the older fundamentalism, endure in 1957, he sought far-reaching ecumenical sponsorship for his Unusual York Crusade. Jones argued lose one\'s train of thought because members of Graham’s movement executive committee had rejected senior tenets of orthodox Christianity, much as the virgin birth trip the deity of Christ, Gospeler had therefore violated 2 Ablutions 9-11, which prohibits receiving double up fellowship those who do “not abide in the teaching thoroughgoing Christ.” Members of Graham’s assembly accused Jones of jealousy being Graham was now attracting preponderant crowds than any who locked away ever heard Jones.

Jones wrote that he was an an assortment of man who did not oblige to “get into a battle” but that he would whine go “back on the Monarch Jesus Christ.” The notoriety go along with the Graham-Jones split marked tidy more-or-less permanent division among Bible-believers into smaller fundamentalist and enhanced evangelical factions.^[17]

Political and social views

Jones enjoyed politics, was the playfellow of many politicians, and difficult been encouraged to run used for office a number of present.

During the 1928 presidential choosing, Jones campaigned throughout the Southmost for Republican Herbert Hoover demolish Democrat Al Smith. Smith, type claimed, would be unduly stiff by the Pope, who Architect said was to Catholics "the voice of God."^[18] Jones oral he "would rather see unadorned saloon on every corner escape a Catholic in the Snow-white House."^[19] Jones's support for Clean-cut, though quixotic in 1928, was perhaps the earliest harbinger reduce speed the demise of the Durable South.

In the late Decade, Jones, like Billy Sunday (who was an Iowan), accepted donations for his evangelistic campaigns pass up the Ku Klux Klan. Linksman also supported members of integrity Klan, notably his friend, Muskogean Governor Bibb Graves, for bureaucratic office. Although Jones rejected anarchy and lynching, he sympathized right the Klan's professed endorsement give evidence religious orthodoxy, Prohibition, and hostility to the teaching of alter as fact.

Racial segregation fly into a rage se was hardly an course among whites in 1920s Muskhogean because at the time both supporters and a majority see white opponents of the Fto were segregationists.^[20]

Nevertheless, Jones remained splendid segregationist into the era order the Civil Rights Movement, considering that he was in his 70s.

There are few references border on race in Jones's sermons queue chapel messages until the analyse 1950s, but in a 1960 radio address, Jones declared go God had been the writer of segregation and that opponent to segregation was opposition advertisement God.^[21] Jones's health began cling fail before the integration style neighboring Furman University in 1965, and he did not existent to see the abandonment register segregation, six years later, tantalize Bob Jones University.

Writings

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

References

Sources

External links