Few twentieth century theologians managed to explain the greatness of God to audiences as diverse as Robert Charles Sproul. Pastor, professor, and communicator, he spent his life convinced that the church had forgotten what it means to say that God is holy.
Born on February 13, 1939, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Sproul grew up in a working class family. In 1957, in his first year of college, he was converted to Christianity after a classmate showed him a verse from Ecclesiastes that he never forgot.
He graduated from Westminster College in 1961 and completed his Master of Divinity (MDiv) at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1964. He then studied under theologian G. C. Berkouwer at the Free University of Amsterdam, where in 1969 he earned the doctorandus degree, equivalent to a master’s degree, but did not complete his doctoral dissertation. Decades later, in 2001, he received a PhD from Whitefield Theological Seminary, an institution without formal accreditation, which raised questions, still discussed today, about the use of the title doctor associated with his name. In 1960 he married Vesta Voorhis, his childhood sweetheart, with whom he lived for 57 years.
Ordained as a pastor in 1965, he taught at several seminaries before founding, in 1971, the Ligonier Valley Study Center, in a rural valley of Pennsylvania that gave the ministry its name. In 1984 the organization moved to Orlando, Florida, from where it began reaching listeners through radio and publications.
In 1978 he helped draft the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a document that brought together evangelical leaders in defense of the reliability of Scripture. Seven years later he published The Holiness of God, a book that became one of the most widely read works of popular Reformed theology.
Sproul also faced trials and failings of his own. He struggled for nearly forty years with a cigarette addiction, something he himself described as nearly destructive to his spiritual life. In some theological illustrations from the 1980s, he used language that drew strong criticism for the harshness of the image chosen, and he acknowledged the problem, abandoning that way of teaching in the years that followed.
In his final years, he served as copastor of Saint Andrew’s Chapel, in Sanford, and as chancellor of Reformation Bible College, a college he had helped found to train new pastors. He died on December 14, 2017, at age 78, from respiratory complications.
His legacy remains in the thousands of recorded sermons, the books translated into several languages, and the simple reminder he repeated: the church only understands grace when it first understands the holiness of God.