Everything on this page is written by UECF.NET as background for readers new to the book. It is our own introductory material, not a quotation or paraphrase of any passage from The Holiness of God. The printed book remains the place to hear R. C. Sproul in his own words.
Who was R. C. Sproul?
Robert Charles Sproul (13 February 1939 – 14 December 2017) was an American Reformed pastor, seminary professor, and teacher whose life’s work was to make the character of God clear to ordinary Christians. He studied at Westminster College, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and the Free University of Amsterdam, and later taught at several seminaries. In 1971 he founded the Ligonier Valley Study Center in Pennsylvania, which grew into Ligonier Ministries — a teaching ministry known for its conferences, the magazine Tabletalk, and the radio programme Renewing Your Mind.
Sproul served as a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and as the first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida. He wrote dozens of books for the church, but The Holiness of God is the title most closely tied to his name. He died in 2017. This companion is a study guide to one book; it is not a biography, and it does not speak for Ligonier Ministries.
What is The Holiness of God about?
The book is a sustained exposition of one biblical claim: God is holy. Sproul works from Scripture — especially Isaiah’s temple vision, Peter’s cry in the boat, the hard judgment narratives, Luther’s conscience, and the New Testament call to be holy — to show that holiness is not a decorative attribute. It is the quality of God’s being that makes sense of worship, sin, justice, the cross, and the Christian life. First published by Tyndale House in 1985 and expanded in 1998, the standard later edition has eleven chapters, from “The Holy Grail” through “Holy Space and Holy Time.”
The Internet Archive record for the title is archive.org/details/holinessofgod0000spro. That record, and related later printings, list the same eleven-chapter structure this companion follows. UECF.NET has not borrowed, scanned, or reproduced the book. We have used publicly available bibliographic facts — title, author, publisher, edition history, and chapter titles — to key an original study guide to the printed work.
Historical background
Sproul wrote in a late-twentieth-century evangelical world that could speak fluently about God’s love and relatively little about his holiness. The book belongs to that moment: it is popular theology written for the church, not a technical monograph. Its staying power comes from the biblical scenes it refuses to skip. Isaiah 6, Luke 5, Leviticus 10, Romans 1, and 1 Peter 1 are not illustrations added after a theory. They are the argument.
The 1998 revision added two chapters that carry the doctrine into general revelation and into the ordering of time and place. Readers of an older nine-chapter printing will find chapters 1–9 of this companion still aligned with their book; chapters 10 and 11 belong to the revised edition.
Major themes of this study companion
Across the eleven chapter pages you will meet a handful of threads: God’s otherness and purity; the trauma of meeting him; justice that will not treat sin as small; peace that comes only after enmity is ended; the call to a holy life; and the shaping of ordinary space and time. None of the explanatory prose on those pages is Sproul’s wording. It is UECF.NET’s own teaching, written to send you back to Scripture and back to the book.
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