Robert Charles Sproul ( SPROHL; February 13, 1939 – December 14, 2017) was an American Reformed theologian, Christian apologist, and Presbyterian pastor. Being the founder and first chairman of Ligonier Ministries, Sproul could be heard daily on the Renewing Your Mind radio broadcast internationally.
Working as a staunch defender of Protestantism, Sproul saw emerging modern technologies as an opportunity to disseminate teaching on Reformed theology. Faced with an increase in ecumenical activity between evangelical and Catholic figures in the 1990s, Sproul engaged in polemics to defend the evangelical doctrine of justification by faith alone. He has been described as "the greatest and most influential proponent of the recovery of Reformed theology in the last century."
Contents
Education and personal life
Sproul was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as the second child of Robert Cecil Sproul, an accountant and future veteran of World War II, and his wife, Mayre Ann Sproul (née Yardis). Sproul was baptized as a boy at Mount Washington Methodist Church. His family later joined Pleasant Hills Community Church, a congregation of the United Presbyterian Church. He was an avid supporter of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Pirates as a youth, and at the age of 15, he had to drop out from high school athletics in order to support his family.
Having become a Christian in 1957, Sproul met with his childhood minister to share his conversion. During the meeting, the minister stated, "If you believe in the resurrection of Christ, you're a damn fool!" stunning Sproul, left wrestling with "feelings of betrayal."
Proceeding with study, he obtained degrees from Westminster College, Pennsylvania (BA, 1961), Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1964), the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Drs., 1969), and Whitefield Theological Seminary (PhD, 2001). He taught at numerous colleges and seminaries, including Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando and in Jackson, Mississippi, and Knox Theological Seminary in Ft. Lauderdale.
One of Sproul's mentors was John H. Gerstner, being one of his professors at Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary. The two of them, along with Arthur Lindsley, another of Gerstner's students, co-authored the book Classical Apologetics in 1984. Sproul's ministry, Ligonier Ministries, made recordings of Gerstner teaching various courses on theology and the Bible. John M. Frame records that Gerstner was Sproul's "main intellectual influence."
Sproul recalls encountering theological opposition inside a liberal environment during his early studies:
When I was a seminary student ... I was selected to preach the senior sermon before the whole student body, the whole faculty, and also the presbytery who met there that day. And I preached that day on sin, and I made reference to some of the definitions of sin that we had learned at seminary: that sin, you know, was existential, inauthentic existence, or sin was some kind of neurosis ... And I said, you know, we may be neurotic, and we may be doing everything that we know how to destroy what authenticity of existence we may have, but ... the meaning of sin, as [Scripture and] our own confession says, is that it's "any want of conformity to, or transgression of, the law of God." ... Well, the student body that was largely liberal ... congratulated me, and they were very positive. I go make my way to the back of the church, and the dean of the institution comes up to me, and he's irate. [He physically threw me up against a wall and accused me of distorting the Bible.] ... So I went straight upstairs to Dr. Gerstner's office, who was my mentor, and I said, Dr. Gerstner, did I distort the truth of God? [I was so upset, I was shaking.] And he looked at me, and he said, ... "Every Christian in heaven from Paul to B. B. Warfield is rejoicing at the sermon that you preached in this house today." ... I was so relieved to hear his evaluation.
Career
Under Sproul's direction, Ligonier Ministries produced the Ligonier Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which would eventually grow into the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Along with Norman Geisler, Sproul was one of the chief architects of the statement.
Ligonier Ministries hosts several theological conferences each year, including the main conference in Orlando, FL, at which Sproul was one of the primary speakers. Sproul served as co-pastor at Saint Andrew's Chapel, a congregation in Sanford, Florida. He was ordained as an elder in the United Presbyterian Church in the USA in 1965, but left that denomination around 1975 and joined the Presbyterian Church in America. He was also a Council member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Being a staunch critic of the Catholic Church and Catholic theology, Sproul denounced the 1994 ecumenical document Evangelicals and Catholics Together.
Sproul was an advocate of Reformed theology in his many print, audio, and video publications, and advocated the Thomistic (classical) approaches to Christian apologetics, less common among Reformed apologists, most of whom prefer presuppositionalism. A dominant theme in his Renewing Your Mind lessons is the holiness and sovereignty of God. Sproul taught that headcovering should be practiced in churches as the ordinance is "rooted and grounded in creation".
Sproul was a critic of postmodern philosophy. He considered postmodern thinking as a seduction to the church. This seduction originated towards the end of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and produced "the most narcissistic generation in the history of the human race." Sproul saw churches responding to that cultural change by "adopting the use of sound bites, entertainment, and that sort of thing" in replacement of using biblical teaching directly. Further, he found that this infiltration of postmodernity led to a "revival of ancient Gnosticism" with a "wide spread rejection of rationality" within the Christian church. He believed that many churches, as a result of this rejection, now teach that "biblical revelation is only intelligible by intuition or by a particularly sensitive poetic imagination". Sproul stated that this "intrusion of irrationality coming from existential philosophy, neo-orthodox theology, and the resurgence of mysticism set forth in neo-Gnosticism" stood in opposition to the "coherence and intelligibility of God’s divine work".
Teaching
In Sproul's 1983 teaching series Developing Christian Character, he discusses the issue of assurance of salvation, considering topics of human psychology, attempts at self-justification, and Martin Luther's torment in rigorously applying God's law to himself, prior to discovering the doctrine of justification by faith alone:
The first time I lost my innocence as a young boy—in a sexual encounter—I was 12 years old. And I'll never forget what happened to me. I came home, and I vomited. I was not a Christian, [yet] torn apart by remorse for my sin. But I knew the pain of guilt. Even as a stranger to Christ, I knew what I had done was wrong, and I did not like myself. But you know what? By the time I was 15, I had a callous on my soul. And it didn't bother me anymore. Because somewhere between 12 and 15, I took my standards, and my ideals, and I adjusted them down to where I was. And I'm not the only person that's ever done that. We all do it. Luther was too smart—he saw through it. He saw that you're kidding yourself. God is holy, and he demands holiness from his creatures. And if a person really thinks that they've achieved that holiness, they are in the worst of all kinds of forms of self-delusion.
In 1996, Sproul gave a lecture on irresistible grace, titled Divine Sovereignty and Man’s Helplessness. During a Q & A session, he misattributes to Jonathan Edwards an analogy regarding the "holy rape of the soul," claiming that "some people are violently offended by that language—I think it's the most graphic and descriptive term I can think of, to how I was redeemed," taking into consideration theological themes surrounding total depravity and being in a state of spiritual death prior to conversion. With regard to the terminology "rape", a key topic in debate between Arminian and Reformed theologians is the hermeneutic employed to understand the meaning and strength of the verb "draws" (Greek helkysē) in John 6:44, where Jesus states, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day." Sproul first uses the analogy in his 1984 novel Johnny Come Home, where Scooter, the main character, designed to be a "composite of John Guest, Jim Boice, and [himself]," converts to Christianity in "a docile submission to the holy rape of the soul." Sproul also uses the analogy in his 1989 teaching series A Shattered Image, where discussing the Pelagian controversy, Sproul states that "the only way you will ever choose Christ is if God melts your heart, if God softens that stone cold recalcitrant heart, if God the Holy Spirit rapes your soul and puts in you a desire for Christ." By 2002, Sproul had abandoned the analogy for a revised perspective:
Health and death
Sproul struggled with a 40-year smoking addiction. In a personal interview, Sproul recounts the difficulty of stopping:
It almost destroyed my soul. I mean, I never prayed about anything so much about what I did as much as I did about that. I'm the one who proved the adage that it's easier to quit smoking because I did it a thousand times. I hated it ... but it was an addiction, a physiological addiction and I just couldn't kick it. ... earlier on when I was teaching, when I was in the church, and with certain colleges, it wasn't all that big of a deal. If you would go to conferences at Westminster Seminary, and everyone would have a smoking break—Van Til and Murray, and everybody ... 'cuz everybody smoked, especially those Dutch guys. It wasn't a big deal then as it is now ... but then there came a time where I was careful not to blatantly smoke in public because people just couldn't handle that. I remember once, the last cigarette that [a prominent Christian leader] ever smoked, he borrowed from me. One time, he was smoking and somebody came and he didn't want him to see him, so he handed the cigarette to his associate ... his associate put it in his pocket and it started to burn up his pants!
On April 18, 2015, Sproul suffered a stroke and was admitted to a hospital. Five days later, on April 23, Sproul went home from the hospital, suffering no ill effects. He was, however, diagnosed with a diabetic condition "that [would] be addressed through diet and regular medical attention."
Sproul was living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and was hospitalized on December 2, 2017, because of difficulty breathing, the result of an apparent infection, an “exacerbation of his emphysema due to the flu” (“not pneumonia”). After a twelve-day period of intermittent fever, and sedation and ventilator-assisted breathing, with effort given to restore his respiratory function, Sproul died on December 14, 2017 (at age 78).
Publications
Some of Sproul's best-known books are The Holiness of God, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith, and What Is Reformed Theology? He is also well known for Chosen by God, a book about predestination and the sovereignty of God.
Through Ligonier Ministries and the Renewing Your Mind radio program and conferences, Sproul generated numerous audio and video lectures on the subjects of history of philosophy, theology, Bible study, apologetics, intelligent design, and Christian living. In addition, Sproul wrote more than 100 books and many articles for evangelical publications. He signed the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which affirmed the traditional view of Biblical inerrancy, and he wrote a commentary on that document titled Explaining Inerrancy. He also served as the general editor of the Reformation Study Bible (ISBN 0-87552-643-8), which has appeared in several editions and was also known as the New Geneva Study Bible. In addition, Sproul was executive editor of Tabletalk magazine.
The following publication lists are primarily derived from R. C. Sproul: A Life by Stephen J. Nichols.
Published books
The Symbol: An Exposition of the Apostles' Creed (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1973; republished as Basic Training: Plain Talk on the Key Truths of the Faith, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982; republished as Renewing Your Mind: Basic Christian Beliefs You Need to Know, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998; republished as What We Believe: Understanding and Confessing the Apostles' Creed, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2015; adaption of Basic Training teaching series published as The Race of Faith, Sanford, FL: Reformation Trust, 2016)
The Psychology of Atheism (Bloomington, MN: Bethany Fellowship, 1974, 1988; Orlando, FL: Ligonier, 1997; republished as If There's a God, Why Are There Atheists?: Why Atheists Believe in Unbelief, Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2018)
Discovering the Intimate Marriage (Bloomington, MN: Bethany Fellowship, 1975; Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 1986; republished as The Intimate Marriage: A Practical Guide to Building a Great Marriage, Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2003)
God's Inerrant Word: An International Symposium on the Trustworthiness of Scripture (Bloomington, MN: Bethany Fellowship, 1975; Irvine, CA: New Reformation Publications, 2018)
Soli Deo Gloria: Essays in Reformed Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1976)
Knowing Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1978; expanded edition published in Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016)
Objections Answered (Glendale, CA: Gospel Light-Regal, 1978) / Reason to Believe: A Response to Common Objections to Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1978, 1993, 2016)
Explaining Inerrancy: A Commentary (Chicago, IL: ICBI, 1980; republished as Explaining Inerrancy, Orlando, FL: Ligonier, 1996; republished as Explaining Biblical Inerrancy: The Chicago Statements on Biblical Inerrancy, Hermeneutics, and Application with Official ICBI Commentary, Arlington, TX: Bastion, 2013)
Crucial Questions series
Who Is Jesus? (Reformation Trust, 2009; Ligonier, 2019)
Can I Trust the Bible? (Reformation Trust, 2009; Ligonier, 2019)
How Should I Live in This World? (Reformation Trust, 2009; Ligonier, 2019)
Can I Know God's Will? (Reformation Trust, 2009; Ligonier, 2019)
Does Prayer Change Things? (Reformation Trust, 2009; Ligonier, 2019)
Can I Be Sure I'm Saved? (Reformation Trust, 2010; Ligonier, 2019)
What Does It Mean to Be Born Again? (Reformation Trust, 2010; Ligonier, 2019)
What Is Faith? (Reformation Trust, 2010; Ligonier, 2019)
What Is Baptism? (Reformation Trust, 2011; Ligonier, 2019)
What Is the Trinity? (Reformation Trust, 2011; Ligonier, 2019)
What Can I Do with My Guilt? (Reformation Trust, 2011; Ligonier, 2019)
Can I Have Joy in My Life? (Reformation Trust, 2012; Ligonier, 2019)
Who Is the Holy Spirit? (Reformation Trust, 2012; Ligonier, 2019)
Does God Control Everything? (Reformation Trust, 2012; Ligonier, 2019)
What is the Church? (Reformation Trust, 2013; Ligonier, 2019)
St. Andrew's Expositional Commentary series
John (Crossway, 2009; republished as John: An Expositional Commentary, Reformation Trust, 2019)
Romans (Crossway, 2009; republished as Romans: An Expositional Commentary, Reformation Trust, 2019)
Acts (Crossway, 2010; republished as Acts: An Expositional Commentary, Reformation Trust, 2019)
Mark (Crossway, 2011; republished as Mark: An Expositional Commentary, Reformation Trust, 2019)
1–2 Peter (Crossway, 2011; republished as 1–2 Peter: An Expositional Commentary, Reformation Trust, 2019)
Matthew (Crossway, 2013; republished as Matthew: An Expositional Commentary, Reformation Trust, 2019)
Tabletalk Magazine compilations
Before the Face of God (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, Book 4, Baker, 1992–1996)
Doubt and Assurance (Baker, 1993)
Right Now Counts Forever (Reformation Trust, 2021)