Bob Jones Jr.


Robert Reynolds Jones Jr. was the second president and chancellor of Bob Jones University. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Jones was the son of Bob Jones Sr., the university's founder. He served as president from 1947 to 1971 and then as chancellor until his death.

Education

Educated by tutors and at Starke University School in Montgomery, Jones was a voracious reader who tackled everything from Tom Swift and Tarzan to Walter Scott and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. When he was ten years old, his father gave him 50 missionary biographies for Christmas, which the boy finished by February.
After graduating from Bob Jones College in 1931, when he was nineteen, Jones earned a master's degree in history at the University of Pittsburgh and did further graduate work at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Northwestern University. Jones was often called "Dr. Bob Jr." during his lifetime, although he disliked the "Jr." and his doctorates were honorary, the first conferred by Asbury College in 1934, when he was only twenty-three.

Early career

As a young man Jones became an accomplished Shakespearean actor and studied at Stratford-upon-Avon. He considered turning professional and even received an offer from Hollywood—thereby causing some anxious moments for his evangelist father. Jones Jr. did create a one-man show he called "Curtain Calls", in which he portrayed seven or eight Shakespearean characters accompanied by classical music, scheduling performances four weeks a year from 1933 to 1945.
Jones believed that his primary calling was helping his father administer Bob Jones College. Administration per se seems to have held little interest for him; at least his autobiography contains virtually no mention of his college presidency.
Nevertheless, Jones seems to have directed the school more autocratically after 1953, when the assistant of Bob Jones Sr., Theodore Mercer, was fired, allegedly for trying to lead a faculty rebellion against the Joneses.

Fundamentalist leader

Both Jones's position and his intellectual gifts made him a natural leader of separatist fundamentalism. Although he participated in the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 and was elected vice president in 1950, Jones left the organization in the following year because of its interest in cultivating a more moderate—to Jones, "compromising"—stance with those who denied biblical orthodoxy. By 1959, Jones had formally broken with Billy Graham, who had accepted the sponsorship of liberal Protestants and Roman Catholics for his 1957 New York City crusade. Later Jones criticized other fundamentalists who were insufficiently separatistic, such as evangelist John R. Rice and Jerry Falwell, whose Moral Majority had embraced Catholics and Mormons.
Meanwhile, Jones became a close friend of militant anti-Catholic Ulster Protestant leader Ian Paisley. In 1982, when U. S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig refused to grant a travel visa for Paisley to speak at the University's annual Bible Conference, Jones used strong language from the imprecatory Psalms to denounce Haig, urging God to "destroy him utterly." The flap was widely reported in the media, and Jones was "swamped with vituperative mail" until Haig made a serious blunder less than three months later and was forced to leave office, effectively ending his political career.
For thirteen years Jones edited Faith for the Family, an issues-oriented fundamentalist periodical that he originated and then eventually discontinued because of its cost. He wrote poetry in traditional forms, including Prologue, a blank-verse drama on the life of John Huss, as well as several hymn texts that are known to a wider fundamentalist community beyond the BJU campus.

Art connoisseur

Jones was an early connoisseur of European art; he bought his first Russian icon at age thirteen. He began collecting seriously after World War II on a shoe-string budget authorized by the University Board of Directors. Jones first concentrated on the Italian Baroque, a style then out of favor and relatively inexpensive in the years immediately following the war. Fifty years after the opening of the gallery, the BJU collection included more than 400 European paintings from the 14th to through the 19th centuries, period furniture, a notable collection of Russian icons, and a hodge-podge of Holy Land antiquities. The Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery, which will indefinitely reflect the personal taste of its creator, is especially strong in Baroque paintings and includes notable works by Rubens, Tintoretto, Veronese, Cranach, Gerard David, Murillo, Mattia Preti, Ribera, van Dyck, and Doré. The museum is the largest collection of religious art in the Western Hemisphere and remained Jones' hobby for the remainder of his life.

Personal life

Jones could be a demanding superior with strong, hyperbolically expressed, views about matters political and religious. But he also could display a childlike humility, especially on his many visits to foreign missionaries. Intimates found him witty and even impish. Although Jones enjoyed playing villains in Shakespeare plays and religious films—he founded the BJU cinema department in 1950—he genuinely enjoyed a life of ideas and the fine arts. A curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art was genuinely surprised when Jones failed to reflect his preconception as "a kind of backwoods evangelical" who would "thump the Bible" at him. "There was a gentleness and a kinship there," he recalled. "And even if he knew you thought differently than he did, that was OK; you could still be his friend."
In 1938, he married Fannie May Holmes. They had three children, including Bob Jones III, who succeeded him as president of BJU. Bob Jones Jr. published two religious novels, several books of sermons, and an autobiography.
Jones died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 86; he is buried near his parents on the campus of Bob Jones University.

Religious and political views