Biography
Robert Charles Sproul was born on February 13, 1939, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He grew up in a modest home during the years of the Depression and war. He was an athletic boy who loved sports, and he played football in school and in college. As a young man he did not think much about God. He went to church out of habit and cared more about the game than about the Bible.
He went to Westminster College in Pennsylvania, and there God began to deal with him. A Christian friend, whom he respected, asked him questions that he could not answer. Sproul began to read Scripture seriously. After a period of searching and a growing conviction that the claims of Christ were true, he gave himself to the Lord. He soon felt the call to teach and to preach, and after college he went on to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and then to study at the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where he studied under some of the leading Reformed scholars of his time.
He was ordained in the United Presbyterian Church and began to teach theology and philosophy in colleges. He taught at Gordon College, at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and elsewhere. In 1971 he and his wife Vesta started the Ligonier Valley Study Center in the Pennsylvania hills near Stahlstown. The center began small, with a few students and some taped lectures. It grew into a place where hundreds came to study the Bible and to find answers to their questions. Through the 1970s and 1980s the work spread. In 1984 Ligonier Ministries moved to Orlando, Florida, and became an international teaching ministry that produced books, recorded series, conferences and radio broadcasts.
His chief theme was the holiness of God. In 1985 he wrote The Holiness of God, a book that came out of years of study and prayer. In it he argued that the church of his day had lost sight of the greatness and the purity of God, and that many believers lived without awe. He wrote of Isaiah in the temple, crushed by the sight of the Lord on His throne, and he called readers to tremble before the One who is infinitely above us. The book was widely read and has led many to repent and to worship. Sproul also wrote many other books, including Chosen by God, The Mystery of the Holy Spirit, Everyone's a Theologian and The Prayer of the Lord. He wrote clearly and boldly, and he treated hard doctrine as something ordinary believers could grasp and love.
He taught the Reformed faith and defended it with learning and conviction. He stood for the full inspiration and authority of Scripture and helped to draft the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in 1978. He spoke against the shallow and man-centered trends in the church, and he pressed for sound teaching and for a deep reverence for God. In his later years he served as pastor of St. Andrew's Chapel in Sanford, Florida, where he preached to a congregation of ordinary families. He also taught in seminaries and founded Reformation Bible College in 2011.
He was not without his difficulties. He faced long periods of health trouble, with a serious lung illness in his last years, and he carried the burden of a large organization. He had firm opinions, and he sometimes wrote and spoke with sharpness against positions he thought were wrong. He was also known as a warm man who laughed easily, loved his family and enjoyed a good game of golf and a strong cup of coffee. Those who knew him spoke of how he was both a mighty defender of the truth and a gentle friend.
In December 2017, after a hospital stay for respiratory failure, he died on December 14 at the age of seventy-eight. Thousands of people around the world mourned his death. He left behind a large body of teaching that continues to reach millions. His voice is still heard in recorded lectures and in the pages of his books.
Sproul's life points to one great truth that he preached for more than fifty years. The beginning of wisdom is to see God as He is, holy and high, and the end of that sight is worship. He wanted his hearers to know that the God of the Bible is not small, and that those who see Him rightly will live differently.