The Life of R.C. Sproul

Ecclesiastes 11:3b.  Now this not a sermon.  This is a talk.  Tomorrow we’ll have sermons.  But I thought we should start with a text, and I’m starting with a text that probably most of you will be scratching your heads about as to why I’m starting with this text, but it may become clear as we move along.

Ecclesiastes 11:3b:  And if a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it will be.

Now if I were to ask you what is the connection of this verse to the life of R.C. Sproul, what would you say?  You don’t have to say it out loud; we are after all Presbyterians, so we don’t do that.  But what do you think it might be?  What if I were to tell you this is actually the verse that God used in the conversion of R. C. Sproul?  This verse.

Now I’ll explain why when we get there in the story, but I think it illustrates so many things that I love about R.C.  I think one is that it illustrates God’s sovereignty over our lives, a surprising sovereignty over our lives, that God moves in ways we would never expect, and God surprises us in His sovereign act.

It also represents, when you think about this verse, what we all ultimately are and why I think R.C.’s teaching was so helpful, because he immediately saw himself as a tree.  Dead.  Lying there and unable to do anything about it.  It was from that posture, followed by an evening of intense prayer, that God brought R.C. to Himself.

But that’s 1957.  We’ve got to back up to 1939.  So what I want to do with you, everybody knows R.C. through the books or through the teaching series or through the radio, “Renewing Your Mind.”  How many of you first heard on those things we used to listen to in the car called radios?  Do you remember those?  You turned the dial.  You saw R.C., the accomplished teacher.  You saw the finished product.  What I was really interested in the biography was sort of digging into the foundation and digging into what led into R.C., because when he stood up, quite honestly, he made it look absolutely effortless.

But what you knew was that there was a tremendous amount of study, decades of study, to the foundation to all of that teaching.

So we’re going to divide R.C.’s life up into three chunks of time.  There’s his birth, 1939, up until he goes off to college, 1957, so ’39 to ’57.  Then there’s 1957 to 1970.  I always thought the movie title, make sure I get this right, Tailor Tinker Soldier Spy was just a cool title.  When I came to this moment in R.C.’s life in the biography, I mimicked that and I entitled it “Student Professor Pastor Teacher.”  This is the area where R.C. has his feet under the desk and he’s surrounded by the books and he’s just doing the study, and then ’71 when he founds Ligonier to 2017 and his death.

So let’s go back to ’39 to ’57.  You really only need to know three words to summarize this whole period.  The three things that describe R.C. in these early years.  Number one – Pittsburgh.  Now you’ve got to be from Pittsburgh to appreciate that.  As R.C. would say, you can take the man out of Pittsburgh but you can never Pittsburgh out of the man.

I heard a story once of a lady who was telling me about how her husband and she had come into hearing R. C. Sproul.  She had married when she wasn’t a Christian and became a Christian.  They moved and she thought this would be a good occasion to take her husband to church with her in a new town and they went to a local Presbyterian church and they got there in time for Sunday school.  They went into the Sunday school class and someone wheeled out a cart with a television and a VCR and the popped in a video cassette tape and it was an R. C. Sproul teaching series.  The guy is listening and at the end he said to his wife, “He’s from Pittsburgh.”  They were in the deep south and he missed the Pittsburgh accent and he said, “We’re coming back to this church next week.” 

I don’t think he listened to a word R.C. said but he just loved the accent.  And he’d go back week after week, and after about six weeks, he came to Christ.  So he came to Christ through R.C.’s Pittsburgh accent.  There you go.

You know Pittsburgh.  It’s a steel city.  It’s a touch city and they put all that steel in their bridges and they show it.  There’s literally steel in the spine of the Pittsburghers.  Who wants to mess with the Steelers?  They play for inches and they fight for those inches, they make their teams fight for those inches.

That was R.C.’s upbringing.  It was Pittsburgh. 

It was also sports.  It was all sports.  Hockey was his favorite, but he was the worst at it.  It was baseball that he was the most proficient at, and it was likely baseball that got him a college scholarship.  Sports were very much a part of his life as a kind.  Going to Pirates games.  When he was little and in elementary school, his parents would let him play hooky from school, hand him a dime and a quarter, and he would use the dime to get on the train and he would use the quarter to pay to go see the Pirates opening day.  He was there when Roberto Clemente hit his first home run.  He loved sports.

The other thing that defines R.C. in his early years is the word “Vesta.”  He lived in the little community of Pleasant Hills, a bedroom community of Pittsburgh.  When he was about ending his first grade year, it was recess and they were running around the school building, and he bumped into a girl who was running the opposite direction.  She was new in town and she was in the second grade and her name was Vesta.  Vesta doesn’t even remember it.  She doesn’t even really remember him at all, that first year.  He says at that moment he knew this was going to be the girl that he would marry.  They dated on-again, off-again.  It had to do with which car he had versus which cars the other boys had as to who Vesta was dating through their high school years.

But eventually this first and second grader when they met would, of course, marry and would become R.C. and Vesta.  In fact, there are people who say their kind thought R.C.’s name was R.C. and Vesta because they always referred to R.C. as R.C. and Vesta and he thought that was his actual name and it was a very odd name.

But he leaves Pleasant Hills in 1957 and he goes to college and he’s not converted.  He’s there on a sports scholarship.  He’s going to go out with his buddies and they’re going to go across the river over into Ohio to Youngstown where the bars didn’t care about ID’s.  As he was going out of the dorm, he realized he didn’t have any cigarettes, so he went back into his college dorm, this tells you what the 50s were like, went back into his college dorm to get a pack of cigarettes out of the cigarette machine, a pack of Lucky’s.  He puts the money in, gets his pack of cigarettes, and he looks over and there’s two seniors, the captain and another standout football player on the football team, and they motion R.C. over to the table and they say, “Hey, we’re doing a Bible study.”  They said, “Look at this verse.”  Ecclesiastes 11:3.  And they read this verse to him and R.C. just feels gripped by something.  He forgets all about his friend, doesn’t even go out to bother to tell him he’s not going to Youngstown that night.  He just back to his room in the dorm.

He says he prays until the middle of the night until he finally feels this peace of God overwhelming him and he realizes who Christ is as his Savior, his need as a sinner and Christ as his Savior, and he comes to Christ.

By this time R.C. and Vesta are no longer on-again, off-again, they’re on-again.  So he pumps the coins into the payphone and makes a call to her college over in Ohio and says, “Whatever you have to do, however you can get here, get here this weekend.  There’s something I want to talk to you about.” 

She comes and she’s the first person that R.C. witnesses to.  He says he has no idea what he said to her, but the Lord used it and I find this very interesting.  When Vesta expresses her conversion, she looks at R.C. and says, “I believe in the Holy Spirit.”  I think it was her way, growing up in a church that was a liberal church, same church R.C. went to, a Presbyterian church but UP church in those days.  The pastor of that church had rewritten, didn’t think the Westminster Catechism was proper to catechize the kids with, so he wrote his own Catechism.  The first question of the Catechism, who is the greatest Christian who ever lived?  And the answer is Albert Schweitzer.  That’s not the right answer to who was the greatest Christian.  Very smart guy, Albert Schweitzer, but in one sense an enemy of the Gospel, not a friend of the Gospel.

So she’s realizing, no, this is actually, this is actually true. 

So we start off these years of student, professor, pastor, teacher with his conversion.  That’s in 1957.

He went to college as a history major.  As soon as he’s converted, he goes to the registrar’s office and he switches over to religion.  He’s at an historically Presbyterian college, Westminster College, an hour north of Pittsburgh.  What R.C. doesn’t realize is that the whole Bible department is full of liberals.  So he’s in all these religion classes now with liberals.  This will take us back but this is the era where Billy Graham was just coming on the stage, Charlotte’s very own.

R.C. would sit in the back of his classes while the professors are up there lecturing, reading Billy Graham sermons.  He’d get these little prints of them from a campus ministry and he would just read through these sermons.  The only class that kept him from failing that first year was athletics.  Because he was there on a sports scholarship, he got an automatic A in gym every semester, and that A was just enough to hold him on as a student at Westminster.

Then he had to take an Intro to Philosophy class with a professor named Thomas Gregory.  Thomas Gregory begins the class with a discussion of why is there something rather than nothing and introduces an idea that was introduced by a great classical thinker, Augustine, of creation ex nihilo.  That something had to come from something and it can’t come from nothing and ultimately this traces back to God.

R.C. was there.  He had his Billy Graham sermon.  He was already reading through the first page, but by the second page he stopped.  He realizes, he realizes that there’s something here that he has to pay attention to he’s never heard before. 

Well, now he goes down to the registrar again and this time he switches his major from religion and he talks the registrar into starting a new major at the college, hadn’t existed before.  Philosophy.  He was the first philosophy major after talking the registrar into starting a philosophy major at Westminster College.

Thomas Gregory got a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania but his Master’s degree was from Westminster Theological Seminary and he was the only conservative faculty member at Westminster College.  He was a lifeline for R.C.

The other thing that happened while he was there in that first year at Westminster was he read through the Bible for the first time.  We’re going to talk about this tomorrow when we talk about the holiness of God, but he remembers that when he read through that Bible, he had an overwhelming conclusion.  Remember, he had been in church all his life, but the Bible was not preached.  The overwhelming conclusion was this – this is a God who plays for keeps.

That idea lodged right in the center of R.C. and it was there from his conversion to the day he died of who God is.

In the winter of ’58 R.C. had what he called his second conversion.  He writes about it so dramatically in The Holiness of God.  He felt compelled, he said, driven to get up out of bed and make his way to the chapel.  He could feel his feet crunch as he walked on the snow from his dorm across the campus to the chapel.  Just as he got to the chapel, he says the short hand and the long hand on the clock were both perfectly vertical and began chiming out midnight. 

He goes through the oaken doors under the gothic arch and through the narthex and down the nave and right up to the altar of the church.  He realizes that this is a holy God, as he’ll come to say from Isaiah 6, a thrice holy God.  He calls it his second conversion, knowing God who is.

Then one last bit from college, between his junior year and his senior year, he marries.  Vesta had graduated.  He met with her parents and they said, “Why bother waiting?  Go ahead.  Get married.”  So they got married.  Then his senior year, and we’ll talk about this tomorrow, he wrote his bachelor’s thesis because again he talked the registrar into having a thesis requirement for philosophy majors, and his bachelor’s thesis was “The Existential Implications of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,” his favorite novel.

In the novel, you know, there’s Ahab and the whiteness of the whale chapter captured R.C.’s attention.  It’s his favorite chapter in the book.  The whiteness of the whale, the whale Moby Dick, is a metaphor for God.  Ahab thinks that by charting the whale and circumscribing the whale he could control the whale and ultimately have power over the whale and take the whale.

But not only does it undo Ahab, it undoes the entire crew except for Ishmael, who survives.  R.C. as a college senior writes the line that I think becomes really the thesis of his entire ministry and the thesis of The Holiness of God book when he says Ahab represents the shallowness of mankind’s view of God, of religion, that we can somehow, and this was liberalism, tame or domesticate God.  And R.C., I think, spent the rest of his life unpacking that idea and developing that idea.  So we’ll get into that tomorrow.

Well, after college comes seminary.  He goes to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.  He goes there because he was impressed by the president.  The president would often speak in chapel and he thought the president was brilliant and he wanted to be influenced by him.  Decides to go to PTS, gets down there, over the summer he finds out the president leaves and goes and takes another job.  Now he’s stuck with Gerstner, who growled, didn’t talk, he growled.  And believe it or not, when R.C. went to PTS, he was not a Calvinist.  After his first class with Gerstner, he was a Calvinist.

R.C. said that he tried to go to toe to toe with Gerstner and when they were all done, R.C. was just a pile of thread on the floor that Gerstner had totally undone him and he was a Calvinist.

Makes his way through seminary.  Gerstner was a lifeline.  Pittsburgh was liberal.  This was back in the 50s.  It was liberal.  He had a class on Romans, sorry, he had a class on Pauline epistles and the class was actually taught by Karl Barth’s son and the class begin with, “Well, we’ll start with Romans but there’s really nothing here, so let’s just go ahead and go right onto the Corinthian epistles.”  That was the extent of how Romans was taught.

But Gerstner was a lifeline for him.  You could write a whole book about the experience he had in his senior year as an intern pastor.  It was a town called Lyndora in Butler, which is famous now, Butler, Pennsylvania.  Lyndora is a community connected to Butler.  Butler in the 50s was dominated by a massive steel factory.  They made big steel wheels for locomotives and then they made Jeeps.  The original Jeep was made there.  These were mostly Hungarian, Eastern European immigrants, hard-shell steel mill workers. 

R.C. got a call at midnight from one of his parishioners.  She often maybe had a lot to drink.  She was at odds with her daughter.  Her daughter was running around with a young man she didn’t want to have anything to do with.  She was mad and she told R.C., “You better get over here because if you’re not here when she gets home, I don’t know what I’m going to do to her.” 

He knocks on her door and she answers the door with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other hand.  R.C. says to her, whatever her name was, “You don’t want to shoot me tonight.  Let’s put down that gun.”  R.C. would go back and tell his professors about his stories and they didn’t believe him.  They just didn’t believe these things were actually happening to him.

He comes to the end of his studies and he starts interviewing at churches and he has a lot of good interviews.  He goes to the church and the interview goes well and then the church calls him and says, “I’m sorry.  We’re not interested in you.”  And this happened five or six times.  You know Pittsburgh is the epicenter of Presbyterians.  There are Presbyterian churches all over Pittsburgh, Ohio River Valley, all over there.  He’s interviewing with all these churches and it turns out Gerstner is calling all of these sessions and telling them not to hire him because Gerstner thinks he should go get his Ph.D.

So R.C. finally concedes, goes to Gerstner, “If I’m going to get a Ph.D., I’m going to study under the best.  Where’s the best?  Where should I go?”  And Gerstner said, “Free University, Gerritt C. Berkouwer.  That’s who you must study under.”  And R.C. said, “No.  You misunderstood me.  I said where is the best place to go for English language theological education.”  And Gerstner said, “Berkouwer, Free University.”  And literally that summer R.C. and Vesta get on a passenger ship, cross the Atlantic, and go to the Netherlands.

He didn’t know Dutch.  He didn’t know Latin; he had a smattering of it.  Didn’t know French, didn’t know German.  And the way the European system is, you attend lectures but you basically have these reading assignments, you have these massive groups of books that you need to read, and then you sort of show that you’re qualified in them and then you move on to another set of books and then eventually you’re qualified and ready to write your dissertation and then your doctorate.

So he has his first meeting with Berkouwer and they discuss things and Berkouwer says, “Okay, here’s where you’re going to begin,” and he writes out a list of 30 books and pushes the list across to R.C.  Not a single English title on the entire list.  Half of the books are in German and half of them are in Dutch, and then there’s some Latin classic texts on there that he wanted R.C. to read, and there’s some French books.

Well, as Berkouwer could tell by R.C.’s face, the blood had totally run out of it.  He was flushed sitting there in front of Berkouwer.  So Berkouwer could tell something was wrong and he asked him, “Is this okay?  Is this list?” and R.C. said, “All I could tell him was I don’t know French.”  He didn’t have the heart to tell him I don’t know Dutch and I don’t know German either for that matter.  So Berkouwer says, “Oh, no problem.”  He takes the list back, crosses off the French books, adds two more Dutch books, a few more German books, and gives him the list.

So I was tooling around in R.C.’s library and I came across one of Berkouwer’s Dutch books on the person of Christ, in Dutch.  Now they’re all translated, Berkouwer’s studies in Dogmatics, but then they weren’t.  Looking at the first page, and there’s all these underlined words and some margin comments, but at the bottom of the page it says “12 hours.”  So I said to R.C., “What’s the 12 hours?” and he said, “That’s how long it took me to read that one page.”  He said he got a Dutch/English dictionary and he got index cards and every single word he would look it up in the dictionary, write the word down, write the English definition, word by word.  It took him 12 hours to read the first page.

And he did that to get through all those books on that list.  It was feet under the desk, planted in the chair, books in front of him, hours upon hours upon hours upon hours of study.

Well, Vesta had their first child with a very difficult pregnancy while they were in the States.  She was pregnant now with their second child and the doctor she met with in The Netherlands thought it would be safer for her to go back to the United States, so they returned to the United States.  They had their second child and all was fine.  But at that point R.C. needed some money and so he now becomes a professor.  Spends a year teaching at Westminster College, one of the faculty had to leave and he stepped in for a year appointment.  Then he went up to Gordon College when it was just Gordon College, for two years.

Then he went to Philadelphia.  This is ’68-69.  Conwell Theological Seminary.  We know now Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, but at the time it was Conwell Theological Seminary on the campus of Temple University, an historically Baptist seminary.  R.C. was there as a professor philosophical theology.  He didn’t really enjoy it.  His seminarians had young families, they had jobs, and most of them were pastors.  They were very busy.  They just sort of wanted to keep their head down and get through their studies and get out.

He missed the undergrads, who loved to hang out with professors and ask questions.  They were moldable.  These students that he had, they weren’t as into it.

Well, three things happened outside of teaching.  One is he meets Jim Boice.  That year was Jim Boice’s first year at Tenth Presbyterian Church.  A mutual friend introduced them to each other and he said to R.C., “I want to take you to this church.  I want you to meet this guy.  I think you’re going to like him and I know you’ll like him because he’s from Pittsburgh.”  And he meets Jim Boice and that’s a friendship that lasts right up until Jim’s death and R.C. preached at Boice’s funeral service.

Just as an aside, there’s a lovely letter.  R.C. would write in the country club in the locker room.  He kept a couple lockers full of books and he would just sit there in the corner and write.  But they redesigned the locker room so he was not able to write in it, so he would get up early and go to Steak ‘n Shake.  It’s 24 hours and he’d be in there at 4:30 most mornings writing.  He’d say he’d be in there writing when all the people who had been out partying are coming in.  They were there for two very different purposes.

Often he would just use placemats and turn Steak ‘n Shake placemats over and write on them.  The letter he wrote to Jim Boice when he found out Jim had cancer, the draft of it was written on the back of a Steak ‘n Shake menu.  I just remember R.C. is joking with him at the end.  He says, “And don’t worry about your church, Jim, it was always Barnhouse’s church anyway.”  Which is actually a line that Jim Boice’s mother said to him, and then he says, “I love you, Jim.”  You can just see the lifelong foxhole friendship in those words. 

He meets Jim Boice.  He’s also teaching at Oreland Presbyterian Church an adult Sunday school class on Christology.  The class is a bunch of Philadelphia professionals, lawyers, doctors, accountants, business types.  And unlike the seminarians who sort of there, take it, go, these folks ate it up.  R.C. says it was like a vision – lay theological instruction.  It was clear as could be to him that this was his calling.  It was in a Sunday school classroom in Oreland, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where Ligonier Ministries was born. 

So it was Jim Boice, Ligonier is born, and he also, right in the backyard of Westminster Seminary, and because of his time in The Netherlands, would go over to Van Til’s house, Cornelius Van Til’s house, and Van Til’s wife would make them chocolate chip cookies and they would sit on the porch and talk.  And of course Van Til is known for presuppositional apologetics and R.C. is known for critiquing that and presenting classical apologetics.  He always had the highest respect for Van Til as a person especially.

So it was one year, but it was quite a year.

He goes to Cincinnati, pastors a church, and in 1970 he gets invited to Saranac Lake to give a lecture series to Young Life workers.  Young Life had just purchased a property there on Saranac Lake and turned it into a camp.  He had heard a sermon by John Guest on the holiness of God, Isaiah 6.  He preached at a chapel at Gordon and he thought maybe I could turn this into a five-part series.

I remember talking to him about it and he said it was a six-part series and Vesta said no, I was there, it was a five-part series.  So in the biography I always went with Vesta’s recollection over R.C.’s.

There was a lady there, Dora Hillman.  She was a benefactor to Young Life.  Her husband, J. Hartwell Hillman, was a billionaire in Pittsburgh.  This was the 1950s.  Incredibly wealthy.  She was so impressed by R.C. she wanted to meet with him one night after a session and she sat down with him and she said, “If you could do anything in life, what would it be?” and he said, “I’d love to start a study center in Pittsburgh.”

Well, she went home and that fall a 52-acre farm went up for sale that was near her property.  He worked in Pittsburgh but all the Kaufmanns and the Mellons, they all lived over in the Ligonier Valley.  You know, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, famous house built for the Kaufmann family, they’re all out there.  Her house was out there, big farm, Hill Top Farm, they called it.

She bought this farm and had a house built on it, single story.  Knocked out the open floor so the living room, kitchen, family room, dining room, all one big room.  Mailed R.C. and Vesta the keys and said, “You have your study center.”  That was the Ligonier Valley Study Center.  They moved in the summer of 1971.

R.C. would go on to found three institutions.  He founded Ligonier Ministries 197, 1984 moved to Orlando, global ministry now.  We’re active in 20 of the world’s top languages.  We have websites in 16 of them with hopes to get into all 20 in the next two years.  His global ministry started in 1971, literally in the middle of nowhere, 50 miles outside of Pittsburgh.

He founded a church, St. Andrew’s Chapel, in 1997.  He said, “The only thing I regret is that I didn’t do it earlier.”  He loved preaching every Sunday.  He preached right up to the week he went into the hospital.  He preached that Sunday, his last sermon was on Hebrews chapter 2, “How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?”  In there he says the illustration of the castle d’If, which he says is from my second favorite novel.  First is Moby Dick, second is The Count of Monte Cristo.  So if there’s one thing you know about R.C., he likes really big novels.  It was a brilliant sermon.  It was a passionate plea to not neglect so great a salvation.  That Wednesday he got sick and by Saturday he went into the hospital and he never came out.  He died in the hospital.  So he was preaching up until he died.  I was there; I remember the sermon.

Then the other institution he founded is Reformation Bible College, which he founded in 2011.  I love the name, of course.  For R.C. the Reformation wasn’t just about the theology, it was about the boldness of the Reformers.

So those are his three institutions.

Over the course of his life I think he made three significant contributions.  One was to the doctrine of inerrancy.  This he knew because he knew at the heart of liberalism was it rejected the Bible.  At the heart of liberalism was it rejected the authority of God’s Word.  Instead of having Christians under the authority of God’s Word, Christians sat over God’s Word to determine what in it was valid.

In 1974 the very first Ligonier conference was on the doctrine of inerrancy.  He had J. I. Packer there; it’s where they first met.  Harold Lindsell published his book, The Battle for the Bible in ’76 and he wrote Lindsell and he said we should have a conference on inerrancy and come together and have a congress rather on inerrancy and come together.  At the time Lindsell was the editor of Christianity Today and R.C. suggested that Lindsell do it from his post at Christianity Today and Lindsell said no, you don’t want me doing it.  You should do it.

And out of that came the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy and in 1978 that produced the Chicago statement. This is an intense statement on the inerrancy of Scripture.  It’s long.  It was discussed and signed at the Chicago Hilton just by the airport in Chicago by over 500 evangelicals.  Can you imagine?  Leaders, theologians, from all different denominations, pastors, scholars.  Could you imagine getting 500 evangelicals I a room today, locking them up and having them agree on a 20-some page document?  I actually think the Chicago statement was a miracle when you look at it from that perspective.

But here’s what the Chicago statement did.  It put steel in the spine of an entire generation of ministers.  It led eventually to the Southern Baptists taking back the Southern Baptist Convention.  It was a significant document dominating the second half of American evangelicalism.  Right at the center of it was R.C.

I think his second contribution is The Holiness of God and I’m going to save that because that’s tomorrow’s Sunday school, so you have to come back for that one.

Then his third one came in 1994 and he didn’t want it.  It was certainly a fight he didn’t want.  But it was evangelicals and Catholics together.  It was a document that some of his good friends were significant players in the writing.  One of them was Packer.  Another was Bill Bright.  And there were others.

And the document said we’ve had this co-belligerency, evangelicals and Catholics together, and we can actually set aside our nuances of the doctrine of justification.  And of course the Reformed position and the Reformation position and the Protestant position is to think of imputation when it comes to Christ’s righteousness and the Catholic view is to think of infusion when it comes to Christ’s righteousness.

The document sort of pushes those issues as not really mattering.  Well, of course for R.C., this issue matters.  So he and Jim Boice who was with him at the inerrancy and D. James Kennedy and even a young Michael Horton, John MacArthur, find themselves challenging their fellow evangelicals over the centrality and essential place of the doctrine of justification. 

I think it reveals something, and it would be interesting, Kevin, to see if you have a take on this, I actually think R.C. might be the one, you know, all of us now think of the Reformation through the construct of the Solae, and I’ve tried to trace the roots of that.  Of course, the Reformers did not think of themselves through the construct of the 5 Solae.  I think in many ways the architect of helping us think about that as the construct, which is so helpful to get at what matters not only in the Reformation but really what it matters to be a Christian, the 5 Solae.  It really is at the center of __.  I think R.C. played a role in actually giving the Church that as a construct, but he certainly played a role in taking a stand for the doctrine of justification.

He was right that ECT would lead to problematic thinking.  One thing that bore this out was a decade later in 2007 when Federal Vision became an issue within the PCA and R.C. went to the General Assembly that year and he said, “I never thought I would see it in my lifetime.”  That the denomination, and you know he left one denomination that had already deserted the Gospel to come into the PCA, and he stood there on the floor and, I wasn’t there, I don’t know if you were there, Kevin, but what I understand was everybody’s lined up at the microphones to speak and they saw R.C. and they all just started sitting down.  He finds himself at the mic and no one else is there and he just says, “I never thought I’d see this in my day.  Why are we even having this discussion?”    That was all it took and Federal Vision was out of the PCA. 

So that stand for these two really central doctrines, inerrancy and there’s your Sola Scriptura, and justification and there’s your Sola fide, as well as the contribution to who God is and there’s your Sola Deo Gloria.  

As I sort of take a step back and think about R.C., think about his institutions and his contributions, I just want to say a word about the person.  This conference idea of being faithful, I think there’s a model of theological precision and fidelity that’s there.  We heard it in the video.  As I’m listening to the video, I’m thinking I should rewrite my entire talk, but I didn’t.

But precision is there.  But there’s something about R.C. that I think helps us think of what it means to be faithful, not in only what we believe, but how we go about expressing those beliefs and how we just quite frankly live, and live out our faith and live out our beliefs.

I think the one thing about R.C. is he had a genuine care for people.  I say this often about him, I think when I listen to him or you listen to him, you feel like he’s talking directly to you.  It’s almost because he is, because he just cares so deeply about people.  I remember talking to Vesta about it and she said, “R.C. believed that he had something to learn from every single person he ever met or came into contact with.” 

Back in the 70s he was involved in a movement called the personal dignity movement.  It was a time of great strife in Pittsburgh between the workers and the management and the beginnings of unions and R.C. would go into these union halls and go into the management offices of these steel mills and steel companies and present these sessions on the dignity of the worker and what it means to have respect for fellow human beings.  How to treat each other with that respect and a genuine concern for people.  I think it was at the heart of R.C.

I think he had a curious mind.  He’d learn from everything.  I’d go over to his house for a biography session and I’d walk in the door.  You’d always get a quiz.  You had no idea what it was.  He goes, “What colony lost the most people in the Revolutionary War?”  “Pennsylvania.”  “No.”  “Massachusetts.”  “No.”  “New Jersey.”  “No.”  “Oh, of course, Virginia.”  “No.”

I’d name them all.  I’d finally give up, and not quite all of them, and he goes, “South Carolina.”  He had just been reading a biography of the Swamp Fox and he goes on to just spew all of this trivia about South Carolina and the Revolutionary War and the Swamp Fox.  Curious mind.  Wherever he could find.  Reminds me of Augustine’s mind.

Then I think his sense of humor.  I remember when R.C. passed and he knew he would not be at conferences anymore and some of the T4G conferences or Shepherd’s conferences, or our conference, and I remember someone saying, I think it was Al Moeller, saying something to the effect of the thing we’re all going to miss about R.C. is now we’ll no longer laugh at speaker dinners because we won’t have R.C. there to tell us jokes.

And just that sense of humor.  I think there’s something to that.  You know, again, being bold, being precise, standing for our theology, but also recognizing what it means to be a human being and what it means to relate and minister and care for and even disciple fellow human beings.

So as we think about his books and his lecture series and his institutions, I think it’s also something to think about, R.C. the man and how we as Christians, and maybe this is the fine point on it, how we as Christians ultimately are not called to have a theology, we are ultimately called to live our theology.  That was the life of R.C. Sproul. 

Our Father and our God, we thank You for faithful examples.  We thank You for examples in the pages of Scripture and we thank You for examples in the pages of church history.  We thank You not for their lives and their accomplishments, but for how they so clearly pointed us beyond themselves and to the clarity and certainty of Your Word and to the beauty of Your Son.  So we pray, we thank You and we have gratitude for these examples, but we pray for us that we would be faithful disciples in this time and in this place where You have put us.  We pray these things in Christ’s name.  Amen.