Chris Larson: Well, “Light and Heat: A Passion
for the Holiness of God” is the conference theme this weekend, and it’s something that
we come back to because it defines so much of Ligonier Ministries. Take us back. What
first got you interested in the subject? R.C. Sproul: I would say that my interest
in the holiness of God, Chris, goes back over 50 years, about 54 years actually, to the
first two weeks of my Christian experience. I had grown up in a church that was quite
a liberal church, and there was not much Bible teaching. Our interest in the church was chiefly
social. That’s where Vesta and I learned how to dance – in the church basement, and
how I praise God for that. But when I was converted, suddenly in my freshman year of
college I opened the Bible for the first time in my life, and it was like a novel. I read
through the whole Bible in the first two weeks of my Christian experience. And my first interest
in the holiness of God came out of that two weeks. My virgin reading of the Old Testament
particularly exposed me to a God, of whom I really had never heard. At that time in
my life, I had never heard, for example, of Abraham or of Isaac or of Jacob. If you asked
me who wrote the Gospels, I probably would have said, “Matthew, Mark, Luther, and John,”
something like that. And so my virgin reading of the Old Testament was not a surprise. It
was a shock. I couldn’t… I couldn’t believe what I was reading about the revelation
of the nature and the character of God, and yet as I was reading this unveiling of the
God of the Old Testament, I didn’t struggle with it at all like many people do who want
to expurgate the references to Yahweh and reconstruct a God more politically correct
and more according to our liking where His love triumphs other everything – as one
recent pastor has written, instead of understanding with his view sin triumphs over everything.
But as I was reading about this God, though there was so much I didn’t understand, it
came across very clearly that this is the God who is, and that this is the God who had
just forgiven me of my sins through Jesus. And I vividly recall walking the halls of
my freshman dormitory at 3 o’clock in the morning. The place was totally silent. The
halls were made out of tile, and so my feet on the floor would echo through the halls.
And I just paced up and down like a caged lion in that hall wrestling like Jacob at
Peniel with this God, not that I was wrestling against submitting to Him, but realizing that,
hey, if I’m going to be a Christian, I have to be a Christian all the way because obviously
this God of the Old Testament is a God who plays for keeps. And that was just the beginning,
Chris, of that. But that initial impact of God’s revelation that I had in the beginning
days of my conversion left an indelible mark on my soul and on my mind that is with me
to this day. But I have to then go forward a year to the
next chapter of my developing understanding of God. Since after my conversion, I decided
to major in Bible, and in my freshman year I had a course in Old Testament, and a course
in New Testament by a professor who was not in the Bible department. He was the head of
the philosophy department, but because they had a student overload and because he had
a degree in theology as well as one in philosophy, I had been assigned to his section and also
through the lottery of the faculty, he was assigned as my faculty advisor, which was
one of the greatest gifts God ever gave to me. But I had to choose a course from the
social studies section of the curriculum, and you know, that meant psychology, sociology,
or philosophy. And I didn’t know anything about any of those things, but because my
professor was the head of the philosophy department, I opted for Introduction to Philosophy. And
I got in the class, and I’ll never forget, the first reading assignment we had was a
segment of David Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and I didn’t have a
whole lot of human understanding of what David Hume was talking about. I mean, I had never
heard the word empiricism, and I didn’t know what a sense perception was from a loaf
of bread. I mean, I was just completely lost in that first assignment, and not only lost
but abysmally bored by it, and as it went on, it got worse with John Stewart Mill and
others. And so I would go to class, and in those days, I used to send away to the Billy
Graham organization. He published these little pamphlets, which were transcripts of his sermons.
And so I would go to my philosophy class, and I would sit in the back row, and I would
open up my notebook, and I would fold inside the notebook a Billy Graham sermon because
I wanted to have something edifying during that time, and listening to the lectures of
philosophy did not seem very edifying to me. But shortly into the course the professor
came to Saint Augustine, and Augustine’s view of creation. And as the lecture started
to develop, I couldn’t help but overhear some of the things he was saying, and I put
down the Billy Graham sermon, and I started to listen, and the professor explained Augustine’s
view of God creating through the divine imperative or the divine fiat by bringing the universe
into existence by the power of His voice saying, “Let there be,” and there was. And it was… it was almost a second conversion.
Don’t… Don’t get sunk in this bad theology. There only is one regeneration and one conversion,
but it was like – this is just an analogy – it was like my initial conversion had
been a conversion to Jesus, to the second Person of the Trinity, and I understood vaguely
at least that what Jesus had done was to save me from the wrath of His Father and to reconcile
me to His Father. And so I know God the Father was… that this was a Trinitarian business
that I was involved in as a Christian. But I really had never understood the depths of,
and I still don’t understand the depths of the character and nature of God the Father.
But in that lecture where Augustine was focusing on the power of God in His being, it was…
it was a watershed moment in my life because now it was like my mind was captured by a
vision of God that had been lacking in my early days as a Christian. And being an impulsive
person and so moved by that, that I left that class and went downstairs to the Registrar’s
desk and changed my major to philosophy. And I still took every course in Bible that I
could take, but I had to go… I mean, my whole pursuit of philosophy was driven – and
I was a driven man at that point – was driven by a hunger and thirst to be able to know
God more deeply and understand Him more clearly in my mind. Chris Larson: We’re glad you changed your
major. R.C. Sproul: Well, not everybody is glad. Chris Larson: How did that inform your early
ministry then once you moved from college to seminary? R.C. Sproul: Well, when I went to seminary,
these ideas that initiated with Augustine were… were extremely deepened by my seminary
experience because in seminary I had the opportunity – well, even before seminary in philosophy,
and also I studied Aquinas and Anselm, Athanasius, you know, and the giants of the Christian
faith throughout the ages, a little bit of Calvin. But in seminary, I got immersed in
Calvin and Luther and particularly Jonathan Edwards because my professor there was an
expert on Edwards, Dr. Gerstner. And one time I read an introductory essay to Athanasius’
De Incarnatione, written by C.S. Lewis, and that essay appeared later in his book with
a series of essays called God in the Dock. And in that he talked about how though these
different giants of church history had distinctive views in their theology, there are things
that are in Aquinas that aren’t in the other guys, and things unique to Augustine, and
things unique to Athanasius and Anselm and Luther and Calvin. They all had their unique
imprint that you could distinguish one from the other. But Lewis observed that there was
at the same time a certain sameness at critical points where they all came together, and one
of those critical points was that all of these giants of the church were intoxicated by the
majesty of God. Their thinking was controlled by God’s self-disclosure in Scripture, and
I’m talking about God the Father here. And you know, I used to teach in the seminary.
I used to teach what’s called theology proper, and I know there are lots of theologians that
teach improper theology, but what theology proper means is focusing on the doctrine of
God, the Father. And actually in the subdivisions of systematic theology, though I love Christology
and I love soteriology, nothing was more meaningful to me than the segments on the study of theology
proper. And I would always start off my lectures on theology proper with the incomprehensibility
of God, and at the same time I would say something paradoxical which made some of my students
think that I was drifting towards neo-orthodoxy, but there was enough wood in the ocean to
stop that drift from ever going anywhere. So I would say to them, you know, when we
look at Reformed theology and you look at the historic Reformed confessions, it’s
very clear that there’s nothing particularly unique about our confession of the nature
and character of God from what you would find in Lutheran confessions, Episcopalian confessions,
Methodist confessions, even Roman Catholic confessions. We all agree that God is self-existent,
that He’s eternal, that He’s simple, that He is omniscient and omnipotent, and omnipresent,
and all those other attributes that we astringe together with respect to our idea of God.
And so I said there’s nothing really particularly unique about our doctrine of God. And then
I would then go on to the paradoxical statement, I said, “However, if anybody asks me what
was the overwhelming distinctive character of Reformed theology, I would say it’s our
doctrine of God.” And then people who were not used to hearing me play with paradox would
look at me like I had just made a mistake in speaking, and I know what those looks look
like because I see them often. But you’re supposed to laugh at that. [laughter] But I’m not supposed to laugh. That’s
one of the things my doctor told me I’m not allowed to do is to laugh. And he didn’t
want me to be involved in conversations. And I told that to Steve Lawson, I said, “I
can’t talk to you at all because if I talk to you, I’ll be guilty of both talking and
laughing because you can’t say anything that isn’t funny.” And even worse is Sinclair,
who wounded my ribs last years with his humor. But in any case, where was I? [laughter] Oh, Reformed theology, I said what I mean
by that is this, that on the first page of our theology is our doctrine of God, but the
thing about Reformed theology is that when we get to page 2, we don’t forget what we
said on page 1, that Reformed theology informs every other doctrine. That’s why doctrine
is systemic. And our doctrine of God informs our doctrine of Christ. It informs our doctrine
of the atonement. It informs our doctrine of salvation. It informs our doctrine of sin.
It informs every aspect of our theology. And so it is… it is the control mechanism for
all of our Christian thought, is who… how we understand who God is. Then when we started the study center years
ago, I had a friend who came in, and he was trying to help us work out a mission statement
and asking me leading questions to that end. And he said, “Well now, what is it that
you want to teach that people in the world don’t know?” And I said, “That’s easy. I want to be
able to teach people who God is. I mean, I know they already know that God is because
God has made clear of that through His general revelation,” which I’ll talk about, God
willing, tomorrow morning. “But,” I said, “But they don’t know who He is.” And
what I see as our mission chiefly is to try to unfold God’s revelation of Himself, so
that people can come to an understanding of who God is. Let me back up just a second back to my college
days. When I was in college, it was when it appeared the first really run away best selling
paraphrase of the New Testament, which was written by J. B. Phillips. And at the same
time J. B. Phillips wrote a little monograph entitled, Your God is Too Small. And I remember
reading that as a college student and being impacted by that as well. That is exactly
the problem that as we begin our Christian walk as spiritual infants, we don’t really
grow to the fullness of conformity to the image of Christ until we gain the mind of
Christ. And to have the mind of Christ is to think like Jesus. And Jesus’ thoughts
were altogether theocentric. His thoughts were dominated by thoughts of the Father,
of His being, of His character, of His will, of His purpose, of His mission. And that has
to be duplicated in the lives of Christians, that for us to grow in grace, we have to grow
in our knowledge of God, not just so that we can puff up our intellect and become proud
of our learning, but that we may know Him. And the old saying is the more we know Him,
the more we love Him, and the more we love Him, the greater our capacity is to serve
Him, to worship Him, to honor Him, and to obey Him. So this is just absolutely key to
the Christian life. So anyway back to this man who asked me what
the big picture was, and I said, “Just to help people… come to help people find out
who God is.” And he said, “Well, that’s fine for the
secular person, but what do you think is the most important thing you need to teach Christians?” And I said, “That’s easy.” And He said, “What’s that?” I said, “To find out who God is because
that’s the biggest problem in our churches.” Our worship, our church experience, our church
life is driven by our understanding of the nature of God. If we have a low view of God,
we’ll have a low view of the church. If we have a low view of God, we’ll have a
low view of worship. If we have a high view of God, then we will have a high view of reverence
and adoration. Worship will never, ever be casual when we understand who God is. Our
prayers will never, ever be superficial if we come to understand who it is to whom we
are speaking and who we are who are doing the speaking in our prayers. And so that everything
in the Christian life is conditioned and determined by that central understanding of the character
of God. Now, back to what I was saying about C.S.
Lewis and the sameness that he found in the giants of the faith, again as I said, when
I was in seminary, I was introduced in a new way, in a deeper way to Luther, to Calvin,
and to Edwards. And all three of those men were profoundly different each from the other
two in their own way. And of the three, existentially I most identified with Luther. Luther was
kind of a profane Christian, and I understood that because that’s who I was, and that’s
the kind of thing I came out of. And I really identified with Luther’s struggles when
he was in the monastery when he was overwhelmed by a sense of his relentless guilt, because
Luther understood the holiness of God, and Luther was not able to deceive himself and
put up these rationalizations as a shield to protect himself from the penetrating conviction
of the character of God. If ever a man knew that he was a sinner, it was Martin Luther.
And he on one occasion was asked the question, do you love God? And he said, “Love God,
sometimes I hate Him.” And what he was baring in his soul was that of the deepest existential
feeling of any sinful creature. Nothing is more odious to a sinner than a being who is
altogether holy. We can’t stand it. That’s why we don’t want God in our thinking in
our natural fallen condition, because God’s holiness destroys us. And then of course,
it was that relentless holiness that drove him to the cross, that drove him to Christ
for his redemption. And when he realized what Christ had done for him by giving him righteousness,
Christ’s own righteousness to Luther, that meant so much to Luther to be forgiven and
to be clothed by that righteousness that he was willing to stand against the whole world
for the sake of the gospel. And you know the rest of that is history, and if you want to
know that you talk to Bob Godfrey. He knows about all things historical, even the dying
words of Mae West that I heard this afternoon. [laughter] Stop cackling. You’re not allowed
to do that. Chris Larson: Yeah, no laughing. When did… R.C. Sproul: I’m not done. Chris Larson: Oh, okay. R.C. Sproul: Where was I? Chris Larson: You were at Luther. R.C. Sproul: I was at Luther, but I’m not
done with Luther, and I want to talk about Calvin. But I identified so much with Luther.
And a lot of the things, Chris, that I have to say is over the years because I’m always
harping on the holiness of God, and whenever I get a chance to preach one time at a church,
I’ll always preach on that subject. And because of that, some people think, wow, you
must really be a holy man to have such a captivating interest in the holiness of God. And I say,
no, you don’t understand me at all. I’m like Luther. I know that I’ll do everything
in my power to fool myself and to think that I’m having some semblance of righteousness,
that all it is a semblance. It’s a shadow. It’s not the real thing. And my natural
tendency as a sinner is the same as anybody else’s, is to try to bring God’s standard
down as low as I possibly can, so it will get closer to where I am. I want to exaggerate
my own achievements and diminish God’s glory, so that they can come closer together. But
when I study the holiness of God, then that’s a corrective to my natural…. In other words,
what I’m saying is that the reason I love the holiness of God is not because I’m holy
but because I’m not. And I need that in order to make any progress in my Christian
life. Now at that point is where Calvin at the very
beginning of The Institutes, I go back to that over and over again, and if you have
never read Calvin’s Institutes, throw away all your misconceptions about Calvin as being
mean spirited and nasty and all of that. There never was a heart more tender for God than
John Calvin. And of the three, his systematic understanding of theology is without parallel
among the three, Luther and Edwards, and both Luther and Edwards owed a lot to Calvin. But
you read Calvin’s Institutes and you’re just transported into the presence of God,
and particularly in the early pages where he talks about us, that we examine ourselves
from the perspective of this world, where we keep our gaze fixed below, where we think
our vision is more than adequate when in the light of the sun behind us, we look at objects
here on the ground, and we think we’re endowed with a keen eyesight and that we have everything
clearly perceived, until that moment that we turn our gaze directly to the sun, and
we’ve blinded by the refulgence and the brightness of it, and we can’t stand to
look at it any closer. And then we realize that the sight that we thought we had that
was so great on terrestrial levels was only dim, bare reflections compared to the heavenly
matter. And he said while our eyes are fixed on this world, we look at ourselves in that
perspective and flatter ourselves and consider ourselves as slightly less than demigods,
but once we turn our gaze to heaven and consider what kind of a being God is, all of those
conceptions are destroyed, and we are left, as Calvin said, as Scripture uniformly relates
that holy men of old when they had a glimpse of the holiness of God they were reduced to
fear and trembling and tears and ruination. Because that’s what the revelation of God
does, that’s what the holiness of God does, and that is life changing, life transforming.
And so Calvin was just as driven by that passionate understanding for who God is as Luther was. And of course, if anybody takes it to the
next level, it’s Edwards. And I was first introduced to Jonathan Edwards in college
where we had a course in American… Introduction to American Literature. And our professor
was not a Christian, and the textbook that we had was an anthology of American literature,
and it went through it historically. And so the beginning section was 18th century literature,
and it had copies of a sermon by Michael Wigglesworth entitled, “The Day of Doom,” which was
all about punishment in hell and all the rest. So, and then the other thing
we had was the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and that was my first
exposure to Edwards, reading that sermon. And of course, the professor went on and on,
as did the textbook author about this was the sample of the frontier emotionalism and
hell fire and damnation, and that Edwards was sadistic and all of that because he enjoyed
tormenting people about hell. That’s not how I read the sermon. First of all, I thought
if there was anything true of Jonathan Edwards, it was that he believed in hell. And if he
were sadistic, he would have told people there wasn’t a hell and take delight in preparing
them for that place. Instead Edwards cared deeply about his congregation, and the two
words that were used more often in any of his manuscripts were the words lovely and
excellence. And he was intoxicated by the sweetness of Christ and the loveliness of
Christ and of God and the excellence of God. And in that sermon, “Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God,” when I read it, I saw the accent was on the hand that was holding
the sinner from falling into the pit of hell, and that it was a sermon of grace. I saw myself
being supported by that hand, and the only thing that kept that strand of the spider
web from being severed and dropping me into the pit was the grace of God. And that left
a tremendous impact on me, so that I was interested more in studying Edwards. Well, then when I got to seminary there, I
was studying under a world expert on Edwards in Dr. Gerstner. And I had courses in Edwards
and got immersed in Edwards’ theology, his “Divine and Supernatural Light,” the sermon
that brought him into prominence in New England. And Edwards, of course, I believe as the Encyclopedia
Britannica said that he was America’s greatest intellectual and greatest philosopher theologian
ever. And he was brilliant at the level of an Augustine. He was far more brilliant than
Luther or Calvin. He was up there with Aquinas and Augustine, and excuse me, but Francis
Turretin as well. And Edwards’ mind would take you into realms where nobody else would
wander. I remember reading his sermon on Gethsemane
and on the agony of Jesus sweating blood and beyond that his sermon on First John where
we will be like Him for we shall see Him as He is, and listen to or read Edwards talk
about the beatific vision, the Visio Dei, the vision of God, and how in heaven we’ll
be able to contemplate God immediately. That all of our knowledge now comes through our
senses, I mean, of the external world comes through our senses, and our senses learn things
through mediation, through mediated objects. I see Sinclair sitting there, and I see with
my eyes I see he’s wearing a suit and a tie and all of that, but I don’t have a
direct perception of his mind or of his being. All I can see are the outward appearances.
I can’t see his heart. I can’t see his soul. He can’t see my soul. We have to talk
with each other to get anywhere with that kind of understanding. But when we will see
God, God is not a body, and that this perception will not be empirical. It will be immediate,
that I will have an immediate knowledge in my mind, immaterial understanding to the immaterial
God. And when Edwards explores that, you’re on a spaceship to glory. And that kind of
thinking about God radiates throughout Edwards’ writings. And I mean, this is the same testimony
you’ll hear from John Piper. I mean, John Piper was arrested, stopped, you know, in
his tracks by Edwards. And I have a friend here in Lake Mary who’s
the sheriff of Lake Mary, and I was having lunch with him one day, and he talked about
people who arrived at the hospital DOA, dead on arrival. And then he said, “But we have
other cases where we have victims who are DRT. And I said, “What’s DRT? What’s the
difference between DRT and DOA? He says, “Well, DOA is dead on arrival.
DRT is dead right there.” That’s what happened to me with Edwards.
I was dead right there. You get slain by that kind of study. Chris Larson: Let me ask… Let me ask you
then, Isaiah 6, when did that become locus classicus for your Biblical exposition of
the holiness of God? R.C. Sproul: I’m embarrassed about that
question and try to avoid it because I stole that. I was… I was at a conference. I used
to do a conference for college students every year in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio
with John Guest and the Coalition for Christian Outreach, and at one of those conferences,
I heard John Guest give a sermon on Isaiah 6 that I thought was the most stirring sermon
I ever heard in my life. It really was. And of course, he stole it too. He stole it from
his professor back in England, Alec Motyer, who is a professor of Old Testament, a great
one. He’s written a commentary on Isaiah. But that sermon from Isaiah 6, just captivated
me so that I went back and did my own work on it and studied further. Rudolph Otto’s
book on The Idea of the Holy, (Das Heilige) also had an impact on my understanding of
that and Isaiah 6. So I put together a series of lectures back in the… probably 1969 or
70, like six lectures on the holiness of God, and I gave that series first at Saranac Lake
at a Young Life Camp up in Up State New York at the beginning of the fall semester for
their teachers that were doing stuff with High School seniors that were going off to
college. And that was strange because I gave that series there, and there was a pastor
there from Chattanooga who heard it, and he got me down to Chattanooga. That’s where
I got involved with Maclellan Foundation. That’s where I met, what’s his name? Hug
me, I’ve been mugged. Hug me, I’ve been mugged. What was his name? Mike Cromartie.
He was president of the student body at Covenant College. And through that I got to know Gordon
Clark and Chuck Colson. All of that came through that first series of lectures on the holiness
of God. And so I started doing that series here and around, and then some friends in
Cincinnati came up on their vacation, and this fellow was in charge of video education
for General Electric. They did video teaching programs for Israeli pilots on understanding
the maintenance of jet engines that GE had been selling to the Israelis, and so this
guy was an expert in educational video. And he came on his vacation, and I did this series
on the holiness of God, and he videotaped it, so he could take it back to his Bible
study that he had in his home in Cincinnati. Well, before you know it that started getting
deposited around the country, and several more... several more iterations of that were
done on video. And the rest is history. Chris Larson: So that was the early ‘70s,
carried on through the study center, and then the book was published in 1985, so just last
year was our silver anniversary for Holiness. R.C. Sproul: Yeah, I guess. Chris Larson: So what did the publisher think
when you came to them with this idea? R.C. Sproul: The publisher, I’m not sure
I came to them with it or that they came to me. I think they came to me, Chris, if I’m
not mistaken and wanted that in book form. Chris Larson: Well, Tyndale has re-released
the book with a new cover, new type setting, and so we have that here. But they took the
occasion to solicit some different feedback from people who have been impacted by this
– David Wells, Derek Thomas, Mark Driscoll, Harry Reeder, Gerald Bray, Eric Alexander
– and just being able to show the impact and the enduring relevance of this. What we
see today in terms of the generation that’s out there of younger evangelicals, what encourages
you about that and then what concerns you about the current generation of evangelicals,
as it would relate to understanding the doctrine of God? R.C. Sproul: You know, I was very much moved
and gratified by the response to the book and to the series. John MacArthur heard the
series, and he told me that he was in the middle of an expository series on something
else, and after he heard that, he said he had to stop what he was doing, and he changed
themes and did a series on the holiness of God. Bill Hybels heard it in his car on a
tape. It wasn’t on the radio yet. And he said when he heard it, he pulled off the road
and was weeping. And of course, Colson said he was on the floor with his face in the rug.
And it’s just amazing to hear that kind of response. But again, it really wasn’t
a testimony to me. It’s the subject matter. That is, Calvin said, “Scripture uniformly
relates.” That this is that kind of experience that people have. It’s transforming because
people are awakened to who God is, and the idols of our own making are shattered by that. And of course, I’ve been trying to give
a heavy dose of that to broad evangelicalism all these years. I’m not at all happy where
so-called evangelicalism is today. It’s so bad that I don’t like to even call myself
an evangelical anymore because the currency of that word has so been devalued over the
last few decades that the meaning that it had historically has been all but obscured.
But what we call the broadly evangelical church needs more than anything else, I think, an
awakening of who God is. And we’re seeing that. At the same time broad evangelicalism
is losing its force and is becoming almost mainline liberal, there’s this resurgence
of interest in the Puritans, and the young, restless Reformed guys out there, and a greater
interest in coming to the doctrines of grace. Those are all founded in our understanding
of the doctrine of God. So I’m very much encouraged by that, Chris. It’s much stronger
now than it was 40 years ago.
