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TITLE: "THE SCOPE OF THE COVENANTS"
"With a Review of Keeping the Lock in Wedlock"
***** Please see pictures for Table of Contents and Introduction *****
PUBLISHER: James D. Bales
DATE PUBLISHED: 1982
BINDING: Softcover
PAGES: 467
CONDITION: LIKE NEW. NO marks.
NOTES: Please email me with any questions you may have about this books condition or contents before buying.
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James
David Bales (1915–1995)
AKA: J.
D. Bales
From
1944 to 1980, James David Bales was a professor of Bible and theology at Harding
University (formerly Harding College) in Searcy (White
County). Both in public and in print, Bales earned a national
reputation as a fearsome debater of theological issues and political
ideologies, becoming especially well known for his anti-communism stance.
J.
D. Bales was born on November 5, 1915, in Tacoma, Washington, the fifth of
eight children. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Albany, Georgia.
Bales was eleven when a train struck and killed his parents. Bales went to live
with his paternal grandparents in Fitzgerald, Georgia, until 1930 when he
enrolled in the Georgia Military Academy (now Woodward Academy) in College
Park, Georgia, where he joined the wrestling team. Then, in 1932, he went to
Georgia Tech High School, where he graduated in 1933. Bales next came to
Arkansas to attend the small Church of Christ–associated Harding College, where
he established a wrestling team and joined the debating team, winning the state
championship in 1936. He graduated with a BA in 1937 and received a master’s
degree at George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1938. While
pursuing his master’s degree, Bales took a course under Professor Michael John
Demiashkevich, a White Russian refugee who ignited Bales’s interest in
communism. Bales then went west to work on a doctorate in theological studies
at the University of California at Berkeley.
In
July 1940, while working on his doctorate, Bales married Mary Smart; they had
six children. After finishing his PhD in 1944, he returned to Harding to teach
Bible classes, quickly developing a reputation for his sharp wit and dry,
self-effacing humor. When Harding’s president, George S.
Benson, created the National Education Program (NEP) to
promote American values such as religious freedom and the free enterprise
system, Bales became the NEP’s chief researcher and pamphleteer, writing
numerous articles warning the nation about the dangers of communism. The most
significant danger, in Bales’s view, was the communist aim of destroying
religious faith. Bales felt that communists, whom he viewed as the world’s
largest atheistic power, were at their insidious best in their efforts to
undermine belief in God. Constantly reading national periodicals, reviews,
books, and articles in order to absorb current political and philosophical
trends, he was ready to fire off daily letters and articles to newspapers and
magazines defending, answering, and challenging any such attacks.
Bales
wrote and published more than seventy books and many more articles for
religious periodicals, among them: Atheism’s Faith and Fruits (1951), Communism,
Its Faith and Fallacies, an Exposition and Criticism (1962), Understanding
Communism: A Study Manual (1962), Two Worlds—Christianity and
Communism (1965), Americanism Under Fire (1965),
and Evolution and the Scientific Method (1976). He also wrote
numerous books on theological issues, cults, and controversies within the Churches of
Christ. While Bales’s style was at times unabashedly
confrontational, bold, aggressive, and often tinged with biting sarcasm when he
felt he had the facts on his side, he was also committed to fair play and
giving his opponent an honest hearing.
Bales
was thrifty and sharp with his money. In 1958, the government of Taiwan invited
him to speak, providing him with an open, first-class plane ticket. Bales
decided he could use this ticket to go almost anywhere and scheduled some
ninety speaking engagements in the Philippines, Korea, Japan, India, and at the
World’s Fair in Brussels, Belgium. Unfortunately, during this world tour he
contracted an amoebic infection which affected his health for years.
Bales,
who could not pass up a bargain, often told how not long after his marriage, he
happened into a Toronto, Canada, bookstore just to browse and ended up buying
out the store’s entire stock of 6,500 books when the owner offered them to him
at five cents a copy. Bales shipped the books to Searcy, where he sold some and
kept some. At one time, Bales owned more than 10,000 volumes.
Even
though he was often criticized for doing so, Bales participated in some forty
public debates with leaders representing atheism, communism, Buddhism,
evolution, and numerous Christian denominations and sects. His most famous debate was
in Little Rock
(Pulaski County) in 1966 against eminent astronomer Carl
Sagan with Ernan McMullin, R. C. Lewontin, and Thomas K. Shotwell. Jack Wood
Sears, professor of biology and genetics at Harding, was Bales’s debate
partner.
Throughout
his tenure at Harding, Bales was famous for his wit, humor, and numerous
stories about his adventures. He once admitted to giving a list of six
items for a listing answer in class and then asking for seven answers on the
test. When students were irate over the test, he said he would not count that
extra answer but had enjoyed reading the fascinating responses students had
offered under pressure to fill the extra space. On another occasion, he gave a
100-question true/false test with every answer
being false. “Just wanted to test your resolve,” he told the groaning
class after he returned their tests.
After
his retirement in the spring of 1981, Bales continued to write, lecture, and
preach. He was a member of the White County Civil War Roundtable, to which he
often brought antique guns and other relics. At the end of his life, he said he
felt as if he “had fought the good fight and had defended the faith.”
Bales
died on August 16, 1995, and his ashes rest in the Oak Grove Cemetery in
Searcy, next to his wife, Mary.
by Dennis Gulledge, April 3, 2017
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