Responses to "Bob Jones University's Plunge into New Reformed Calvinism"

Following are a couple of the responses to the report in last week’s Friday Church News Notes:

RESPONSE # 1 - “I am a 1977 BJU grad. I am EXTREMELY upset I am forced to realize that BJU is now a New Evangelical school, having become so without a peep from Dr. Bob Jones the third, as far as I know. Two or three years ago I checked out the website of a man who was scheduled to preach in Bible Conference. On the link for his church's youth group, one can hear hard rock music. Not wimpy ‘soft rock’ but HARD rock. No pastor treating his church kids to hard rock should even be allowed close to the BJU pulpit, much less preach from it. I complained to President Petitt, who responded with a ‘I see nothing wrong with it’ response. No surprise, since he is actually in the video. Please note on the school’s website, the link for ‘Approved Greenville Churches’ lists not only Second Presbyterian Church (PCA) but also the Southern Baptist Church directly across the street from the school, White Oak Baptist, pastored by Dr. Lonnie Polson, a member of the BJU faculty and Dept. Head. I predict after the death of 80-year-old Bob Jones III, they will change the name of the school.”

​RESPONSE # 2 - “Bob Jones has been hemorrhaging students over the past 20 years. They have basically lost their independent Baptist constituency. IBC pastors are nervous not only about their position on the Bible, but also their growing affinity to reformed/covenant theology. Northland went down a similar route. (They were known as the BJ of the Midwest in their heyday.) So now BJ is reaching out to their Presbyterian friends to try and rebuild the school. I doubt if that will work. The Presbyterians have their own network of colleges. But when colleges lose constituencies, their enrollment drops. When that happens, their finances drop. When that happens, they begin to make desperate moves to stay afloat. We are witnessing that at Bob Jones as we speak. I watched the same thing at Northland and Pillsbury, not to mention Tennessee Temple University, Clearwater, and Calvary Seminary. Other places like Central Seminary and Detroit Seminary are barely hanging on and are now more evangelical than fundamentalist. (Incidentally all of these places have been a part of the Bob Jones Network, not to mention groups like the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship. But the common thread in all these places has been the embrace of scholarship--one of the tenets of New Evangelicalism--which has led them to embrace critical-text Bibles and then flirting with reformed theology and CCM. They either all have failed or are in the process of failing including the FBF. Of course, true focus on evangelism fades inversely as elitist scholarship attitudes increase. How sad!”

(Friday Church News Notes, December 6, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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