page_title: Bob Jones Sr.
section_title: Religious views
hierarchical_section_title: Bob Jones Sr. / Religious views
caption_attribution_description: English: From 1948 to his final illness, the home of Bob Jones, Sr. (1883-1968) on the campus of Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina, USA. The house was joined to the larger official residence of the BJU president (at the time, Bob Jones Jr.) to the right of the photo.
context_page_description: Robert Reynolds Jones Sr. was an American evangelist, pioneer religious broadcaster, and the founder and first president of Bob Jones University.
context_section_description: Theologically, Jones was a Protestant in the Reformation tradition. One of his first concerns when he founded Bob Jones College was to provide a creed that would embody the fundamentals of the Christian faith. The Bob Jones University creed (composed by journalist and prohibitionist Sam Small) was an abbreviated statement of traditional orthodoxy, emphasizing those aspects of the faith that were under attack during the early twentieth century.  Therefore, the BJC creed affirmed the inspiration of the Bible and rejected the theory of human evolution as necessary tenets of Christian belief.
  Perhaps because of the tension between his mother’s Primitive Baptist views and his own long-standing membership in the Methodist Church, Jones sought to split the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism. He urged his hearers to believe that “whatever the Bible says is so,” even if its words did not fit a particular theological system. 
  Although Jones believed that man was depraved by nature and that salvation was through Christ and by grace alone, his early revival sermons stressed opposition to social sins such as drinking, dancing, and Sabbath desecration and the possibility that they might be ameliorated by legislation as well as by individual repentance.
  Jones's view of academic learning was also practical; he advocated Christian higher education yet insisted that faith could not rest on human argument. Jones was skeptical of both the intellectual emphasis of the Reformed tradition and the pietism of the "deeper life" movement. He could quote Goethe and Cicero without affectation, but he urged his students to make “truth simple and easy to grasp”—to put “the fodder on the ground” and give “all the animals from a giraffe to a billy-goat” an equal chance to understand the gospel.
  In the 1950s, Jones played an important, if unwelcome, role in the division of orthodox Protestantism into fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism. The severance, which had already been bruited about in some conservative seminaries, became actual with the rise to prominence of evangelist Billy Graham. Graham had briefly attended Bob Jones College, and the University had conferred an honorary degree on him in 1948. In the 1940s Jones and Graham seemed to have developed something of a father-son relationship. During the 1950s, however, Graham began distancing himself from the older fundamentalism, and in 1957, he sought broad ecumenical sponsorship for his New York Crusade. Jones argued that because members of Graham’s campaign executive committee had rejected major tenets of orthodox Christianity, such as the virgin birth and the deity of Christ, Graham had therefore violated 2 John 9-11, which prohibits receiving in fellowship those who do “not abide in the teaching of Christ.” Members of Graham’s organization accused Jones of jealousy because Graham was now attracting larger crowds than any who had ever heard Jones. Jones wrote that he was an old man who did not want to “get into a battle” but that he would not go “back on the Lord Jesus Christ.”  The notoriety of the Graham-Jones split marked a more-or-less permanent division among Bible-believers into smaller fundamentalist and larger evangelical factions.
caption: Home of Bob Jones Sr. from 1948 until his final illness. The two-bedroom house was joined to the larger official residence of the BJU president (at the time Bob Jones, Jr.) to the right of the photo.  The exterior has been little altered since Jones's death.
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