R.C. Sproul in 5 Sayings

Throughout his ministry, R.C. Sproul made theology accessible by applying the deep truths of the Christian faith to everyday life. Today, Stephen Nichols attempts to summarize Dr. Sproul’s major ideas into five key phrases.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. On this episode, we are continuing our series of looking at these great figures in church history by boiling down all of their thought to five sayings. This week we are looking at the five sayings of Dr. R.C. Sproul, the late 20th, 21st century theologian. And we'll begin with this saying, “Sin is cosmic treason.” Now R.C. got a lot of books in the mail. And one day he got a book in the mail, and it was Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. This was a standard reference book of quotations, and the book was accompanied by a letter. And as he's reading the letter, he's told by the publisher that he's receiving this copy of the book because one of his quotations has made it into the book. And the quotation is indeed “Sin is cosmic treason.” This is a way of getting at two doctrines that are very important to him: the holiness of God, of course, on the one pole and on the other pole, the sinfulness of man. We talk about little sins. We even have this expression peccadillo. But this saying reminds us that all sin is not regional treason. It's not even national treason. It's on a cosmic scale because it is against God. So first saying “Sin is cosmic treason.”

The second saying is very similar to this. When R.C. he was first converted in college, he read the whole Bible through cover to cover, and he remembers and he often reflected on that reading. And he said when he got through the Bible, he came to this conclusion, “God is a God who plays for keeps.” This is a serious God. This is a serious thing, the Christian life. And so we remember that our “God is a God who plays for keeps.”

The third saying represents a doctrine was very important to him, Doctrine of justification by faith. He saw this as crucial in the history of Christianity. Of course, he loved Luther and the Reformers. And so this is the sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, the gospel at the center and justification at the center. But R.C. had a great way of expressing a doctrine that is central to justification and that is the doctrine of imputation. And he said it this way, “If anyone ever gets to heaven, it will be by wearing the robes of someone else's righteousness.” And of course, he is in a picturesque fashion talking about Christ, and Christ's active and passive obedience, Christ's accomplishing of securing our redemption on the cross, taking our sinful rags and giving us his righteous robe. If we ever get to heaven, it's not because of our own clothes, it will be because we are wearing Christ's righteous robes, which he freely gives us by God's grace.

The fourth phrase comes from his column, which ran for decades in the Devotional magazine Tabletalk. And the column was titled simply this, “Right Now Counts Forever.” That column was begun in the early 70s, and it was a time where there was much discussion about secularism. Harvey Cox had just published his book, The Secular City, and Francis Schaeffer was all over in videos wearing knickers talking about the dangers of secular humanism. And R.C. understood secularism as simply saying, “The only thing that matters is the here and now.” And he counter punched that with this saying, “No, right now indeed counts forever because there is a forever, there is an eternity.”

Well, that brings us to our last saying. We have to have somewhere in here the notion of the holiness of God. But I'm going to give more than a saying. I'll give a few sentences. This comes from the very last chapter of his classic text, The Holiness of God. It's about right smack dab in the middle of the chapter. In my well-worn copy, it's page 255. And so, for our fifth saying, R.C. says this, “Christianity is not about involvement with religious experience as a tangent. It involves a meeting with a holy God who forms the center or core of human existence. The Christian faith is theocentric. God is not at the edge of Christian's lives, but at the very center. God defines our entire life and worldview.” That's R.C. Sproul in five sayings. And I'm Steve Nichols, and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.