Timothy Paul Jones

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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]

Contents

Early Life and Education

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

Family ministry

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] Jones pioneered a model of family ministry known as “family-equipping ministry,” which prioritizes family discipleship while maintaining age-organized programs; this model was described 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, commenting 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

After a crisis of faith during his first year of college, Jones became interested in apologetics. [13] While completing his first 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 New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman. Apologetics writings by Jones have typically emphasized the historical reliability of the New Testament Gospels in contrast to later texts written by sects with little interest in the actual events of Jesus’s life. 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]

Beginning with his book Why Should I Trust the Bible?, Jones's apologetics approach shifted from evidential apologetics to verificational presuppositionalism, influenced by Francis Schaeffer. [17] His faculty address "Brothers and Sisters, We Are All Apologists Now" revealed another dimension in his approach, in which the countercultural moral life of the church is central in the defense of the Christian faith. [18] The Baptist Press article reporting on this address quoted Jones as stating, "Pursuing the Christian way of life will inevitably require a defense of this way of being in the world – not merely for apologists, but for all of us." [18] This approach to apologetics, grounded in a retrieval of second-century sources, [1] has become known as "ecclesial apologetics." [19] According to Jones, care for the vulnerable and socially marginalized is a central component of ecclesial apologetics. [20] Jones's coauthored book In Church as It Is in Heaven: Cultivating a Multiethnic Kingdom Culture encouraged churches to practice ecclesial apologetics through unified communities that demonstrate multiethnic, multisocioeconomic, and multigenerational diversity. [21] Publishers Weekly featured this book as a work that faces "the challenge of creating multiethnic congregations." [22]

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 .

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References

  1. 1 2 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
  2. ↑ Colson, Charles. (2008). Challenging the New Atheists. The Christian Post. https://www.christianpost.com/article/20081013/challenging-the-new-atheists.htm
  3. ↑ 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/
  4. ↑ Jones, Timothy Paul (2007). Hullabaloo: Discovering Glory in Everyday Life. Colorado Springs, CO: Cook Communications Ministries. ISBN 978-0-7814-4483-5
  5. 1 2 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
  6. ↑ Jones, Timothy Paul (2012). Christian History Made Easy: Leader Guide. Torrance, CA: Rose Publishing Inc. p. 5. ISBN 978-1-59636-527-8
  7. ↑ 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
  8. ↑ Sojourn Church. (n.d.). Sojourn Church Midtown staff. https://sojournchurch.com/about
  9. ↑ 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.
  10. ↑ Jones, Timothy Paul. (2009). Perspectives on Family Ministry. Nashville: B&H.
  11. ↑ Jones, Timothy Paul. (2011). Family Ministry Field Guide. Indianapolis: Wesleyan.
  12. ↑ 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/
  13. 1 2 Jones, Timothy Paul. (2007). Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus." Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic.
  14. ↑ Jones, Timothy Paul. (2008). Conspiracies and the Cross. Lake Mary, FL: Frontline.
  15. ↑ Bell, Caleb. (2013). Scholars piece together a 'new' New Testament. https://religionnews.com/2013/03/28/scholars-piece-together-a-new-new-testament/
  16. ↑ Associated Press. Blessed are the conservative in Bible translation. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34270487/
  17. ↑ Jones, Timothy Paul. (2020). Why Should I Trust the Bible? Ross-Shire: Christian Focus.
  18. 1 2 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/
  19. ↑ Jones, Timothy Paul, ed. (2025). Understanding Christian Apologetics: Five Methods for Defending the Faith. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Academic.
  20. ↑ Jones, Timothy Paul. (2022). Care for the parentless and poor as ecclesial apologetic, in Rich in Good Deeds: A Biblical Response to Poverty by the Church and by Society, edited by Rob Plummer. Dallas, TX: Fontes Press.
  21. ↑ Williams, Jamaal E., and Timothy Paul Jones. (2023). The Lord's supper is a multiethnic love feast. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2023/06/jamaal-williams-timothy-paul-jones-lords-supper-multiethnic/
  22. ↑ Grossman, Cathy Lynn. (2023). New books find voices of faith in fraught times. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/92351-new-books-find-voices-of-faith-in-fraught-times.html
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