Bob Jones III

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Robert Reynolds Jones III (b. August 8, 1939), third president of Bob Jones University. The son of Bob Jones, Jr., and the grandson of Bob Jones, Sr., the university's founder, Jones III served as president of BJU from 1971 to 2005.

Born in Cleveland, Tennessee, Jones moved with his family to Greenville, South Carolina in 1947 when Bob Jones College built a new campus and became Bob Jones University [1] Because his father was a connoisseur of the arts, Jones III early visited Europe and the Holy Land on his father’s summer tours. As a teenager he was given minor roles in campus Shakespeare performances and a major role in the film version of his father’s novel Wine of Morning. Likewise, as the son and grandson of well-known fundamentalists, Jones III met many politicians and notable preachers in his youth.

At fifteen, his father rusticated him to a summer camp sponsored by Ernest Reveal, a BJU board member and the founder of the Evansville Rescue Mission, where Jones preached and otherwise participated in the camp's evangelistic ministry to lower-class children from the Evansville area. Jones credited this experience with having had a significant impact on his later career.

Jones completed his bachelor of arts (1959) and master of arts (1961) in speech from Bob Jones University and took additional courses in speech and drama at Northwestern University and New York University. Later he was presented with honorary degrees by two small Bible colleges and a seminary.

Although less intellectually gifted than his father, Jones III did excel academically. Unlike him, though, Jones III also developed an interest in athletics--basketball as a young man, and later skiing, hunting and other outdoor sports. He enjoyed flying and even considered a military career.

Nevertheless, by the end of his undergraduate years, Jones believed that he had been called to “help perpetuate the ideals and standards” of the school that his grandfather had founded. He served as a teaching assistant in the speech department and then as a dormitory supervisor. Between 1961 and 1971, his father provided a growing administrative role in the University, including preaching for campus services. He also accepted an increasing number of off-campus speaking invitations.

Again, unlike his father, Jones III became genuinely interested in the mechanics of university administration, although his training for his college presidency was, like his father's, informal at best. To help with business judgments, Jones eventually appointed a personal friend and former businessman, Bob Wood, as vice president. Highly competitive and a 'Type A' personality, Jones regularly worked sixteen hours a day during his presidency.^[1] Although kind and generous to subordinates, Jones III could also be impatient, impulsive, and dogmatic in his judgments.

Jones inherited the presidency of Bob Jones University as its enrollment continued to climb but also as the school began to face the opposition of the federal government to its racial policies. During the early 1980s, Jones was frequently interviewed by the media, and he presented the position of the University--as a matter of First Amendment rights--to the best of his considerable ability. Nevertheless, Jones had difficulty finding a route of escape from the positions on race that had been adopted by his predecessors during the period of segregation in the early twentieth-century South and which he himself had endorsed in his youth.

Jones is married to Beneth Peters Jones, an author and seminar speaker, whom he had gotten to know when she played Roxane to his Christian in a campus performance of Cyrano de Bergerac. They have three children. His younger son, Stephen Jones, replaced him as president of BJU in May of 2005 when Jones III took the title chancellor.

Jones III remains chairman of the International Testimony to an Infallible Bible and chairman of the board of directors of the Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery. He continues a demanding travel and speaking schedule.

[edit] Religious, Political, and Social Views

• Bob Jones III once declared that BJU had banned interracial dating because "God has separated people for His own purpose," but during his presidency, BJU abandoned its long-standing rule over which the university had lost its federal tax-exempt status in 1983. Jones announced the policy change during an interview on Larry King Live on March 3, 2000. ^[2]

• In 1982, when asked by TV talk show host Phil Donahue, "Does anybody get to heaven if he's not born again?" Jones replied, "Absolutely not. Jesus told Nicodemus, a religious man, 'You must be born again.'...The Lord Jesus said, 'I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me.'"^[3]

• Jones once "denounced Ronald Reagan as 'a traitor to God's people' for choosing as his vice president George H.W. Bush, whom Jones called "a devil." But some years later, he personally thanked the elder Bush for being a good president. ^[4]

• Jones has referred to Catholicism as "the religion of the anti-Christ and a Satanic system" and called Mormonism and Catholicism "cults which call themselves Christian."^[5]

• Shortly after George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, Bob Jones III sent a congratulatory letter to the president declaring that he had "been given a mandate. ... Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ."^[6]

[edit] References

Daniel L. Turner, Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC: BJU Press, 1997)

[edit] External links

• Recorded sermons of Bob Jones III
• Transcript of Larry King Live interview of March 3, 2000, CNN.com