Timothy Paul Jones
Timothy Paul Jones (born January 16, 1973) is an American evangelical scholar of apologetics and family ministry. He serves as the C. Edwin Gheens Professor of Christian Family Ministry at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has advocated for the contemporary retrieval of ancient models of Christian apologetics.[1] Charles Colson identified Jones as one of the “names you need to know” when confronting the New Atheists.[2] R. Albert Mohler described Jones as a model “of what it means to be a Christian scholar.”[3]
Early Life and Education
[edit]Born in Mansfield, Missouri to the family of a rural pastor, Jones graduated from Manhattan Christian College (B.A., Biblical Studies) in 1993.[4][5] He continued his studies at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, earning the M.Div. in 1996.[6] He completed his doctoral studies at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he received the Ph.D.[7]
Jones served churches in Missouri and Oklahoma as pastor, associate pastor, and student minister.[5] He was appointed as a faculty member at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2007. While a faculty member at Southern Seminary, Jones became a preaching pastor at Sojourn Church Midtown, the home of Sojourn Music.[8]
Theological and social positions
[edit]Family ministry
[edit]Jones has criticized the practice of family-integrated church in which congregations eliminate all age-organized ministries. His academic paper “Catechism Classes and Other Surprising Precedents for Age-Organized Ministry” examined sixteenth-century practices of age-organized discipleship and pointed out multiple fallacies in the historical claims made by proponents of family-integrated ministry.[9] In 2009, Jones identified a model of family ministry that he entitled “family-equipping ministry”; this model was articulated in detail in his books Perspectives on Family Ministry and Family Ministry Field Guide.[10][11] In an article in Christianity Today, Jones emphasized the church's responsibility to function as a family for single-parent households, stating that, “in the New Testament, the people of God are formed into a new, covenant family, adopted from every tribe and language and people group. This doesn’t do away with the family formed in the covenant between a man and woman, but it re-situates it in the context of a greater family, where we’re called to become a family for one another."[12]
Apologetics
[edit]After a crisis of faith during his first year of college, Jones became interested in apologetics.[13] While completing his Ph.D., he wrote two evidential apologetics texts, Misquoting Truth and Conspiracies and the Cross, for which Dinesh D’Souza wrote the foreword.[13][14] Misquoting Truth was the first book-length response to Misquoting Jesus, a bestselling introduction to New Testament textual criticism authored by Bart D. Ehrman. Jones has emphasized the historical reliability of the New Testament Gospels in comparison with later sectarian texts. When Jesus Seminar member Hal Taussig published A New New Testament, with ten texts added to the New Testament, Jones commented to Religion News Service that “treating these ten texts as historical context for the New Testament would be like studying ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’ to understand the historical context of the Thirteenth Amendment,” emphasizing that none of the added texts could be reliably traced to eyewitnesses of Jesus’s life.[15] Jones has been equally critical of politically conservative attempts to rework the Bible. Responding to the Conservative Bible Project, spearheaded by Andrew Schlafly and Conservapedia, Jones told the Associated Press, “This is not making scripture understandable to people today, it's reworking scripture to support a particular political or social agenda.”[16]
Jones has promoted the practice of apologetics to address the issue of church relevance today. He draws from church history in explaining how apologetics addressed cultural hostility to the church in the past and how it can also be applied today.[17] He maintained that faith has been considered immoral or harmful in the past but Christianity flourished due to the contribution of apologetics.[17] Modern churches, for Jones, can also learn from these experiences to survive a secular and post-Christian culture. Here, he emphasized the importance of the concept of resurrection. He explained that, “when the resurrection is not central in apologetics, the practice of apologetics can turn into a bad game of theological trivia”.[17]
As a scholar, Jones also examined modern theological texts. An example is his critique of the work, A New New Testament, the work of a group of scholars and religious leaders that added ten new texts to the New Testament in an attempt to provide more context to the Christian canon.[18] According to Jones, the new texts did not add anything of note because they came from a different time period and represent a fundamentally different world view.[18]
Jones had published more than twenty books including the Christian Booksellers Association bestseller, The Da Vinci Codebreaker (Bethany House, 2006) and Misquoting Truth (IVP Academic, 2007) the first book-length scholarly response to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. The foreword of his 2007 book Conspiracies and the Cross was penned by Dinesh D'Souza. Recently, he has written on ethnic diversity in the church in the book In Church as It Is in Heaven, which has been featured in Publishers Weekly.
References
[edit]- ^ Hearn, Travis. (2023). We’re all apologists now, Jones says in annual faculty address at Southern Seminary. The Christian Index. https://christianindex.org/stories/were-all-apologists-now-jones-says-in-annual-faculty-address-at-southern-seminary,44366
- ^ Colson, Charles. (2008). Challenging the New Atheists. The Christian Post. https://www.christianpost.com/article/20081013/challenging-the-new-atheists.htm
- ^ Southern Seminary. (2012). SBTS trustees adopt comprehensive master plan, add faculty. SBTS News. https://www.sbts.edu/news/sbts-trustees-adopt-comprehensive-master-plan-add-faculty/
- ^ Jones, Timothy Paul (2007). Hullabaloo: Discovering Glory in Everyday Life. Colorado Springs, CO: Cook Communications Ministries. ISBN 978-0-7814-4483-5
- ^ a b Jones, Timothy Paul. (2003). An analysis of the relationship between Fowlerian stage-development and self-assessed maturity in Christian faithfulness among evangelical Christians. Dissertation. https://repository.sbts.edu/bitstream/handle/10392/243/3120603.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
- ^ Jones, Timothy Paul (2012). Christian History Made Easy: Leader Guide. Torrance, CA: Rose Publishing Inc. p. 5. ISBN 978-1-59636-527-8
- ^ The Gospel Coalition. (n.d.). Moral evil and the problem of evil. Video lecture series. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/course/moral-truth-and-the-problem-of-evil/#course-introduction
- ^ Sojourn Church. (n.d.). Sojourn Church Midtown staff. https://sojournchurch.com/about
- ^ Jones, Timothy Paul. (2022). “Catechism Classes and Other Surprising Precedents for Age-Organized Ministry” in Navigating Student Ministry, edited by Tim McKnight. Nashville: B&H.
- ^ Jones, Timothy Paul. (2009). Perspectives on Family Ministry. Nashville: B&H.
- ^ Jones, Timothy Paul. (2011). Family Ministry Field Guide. Indianapolis: Wesleyan.
- ^ Mari, Ruth Moon. (2019). Why the church needs single parents, and single parents need the church. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2019/04/single-parenting-divorce-why-church-needs-single-parents/
- ^ a b Jones, Timothy Paul. (2007). Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus." Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic.
- ^ Jones, Timothy Paul. (2008). Conspiracies and the Cross. Lake Mary, FL: Frontline.
- ^ Bell, Caleb. (2013). Scholars piece together a 'new' New Testament. https://religionnews.com/2013/03/28/scholars-piece-together-a-new-new-testament/
- ^ Associated Press. Blessed are the conservative in Bible translation. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34270487/
- ^ a b c Cockes, Timothy. (2023). Every believer’s an apologist, professional apologists say. https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/every-believers-an-apologist-professional-apologists-say/
- ^ a b Bell, Caleb. (2013). Scholars piece together a ‘new’ New Testament. https://religionnews.com/2013/03/28/scholars-piece-together-a-new-new-testament/