What Is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

What Is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics

by R. C. Sproul

Few evangelical Christians today understand Reformed theology, even though it has become an immensely influential theological tradition. Recognizing only key terms relating to predestination or the five points, many Christians want a better explanation of the concepts and beliefs that make up a Reformed perspective. What is Reformed Theology?What is Reformed Theology? is an introduction to a doctrine that has eluded so many evangelical Christians. And who better to teach about Reformed theology than R. C. Sproul? In thoroughly expounding the foundational doctrines and five points, Sproul asserts the reality of God's amazing grace. For anyone wanting to know more about Reformed theology, this candid book offers a coherent and complete introduction to an established belief.

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Paperback, 217 pages

Published June 1st 2005 by Baker Books (first published September 10th 1997)

tags: faith, religion, unfinished, spirituality, nonfiction, theology, christian living, christianity, christian, christian non fiction

Book Quotes

“It is a profound political reality that Christ now occupies the supreme seat of cosmic authority. The kings of this world and all secular governments may ignore this reality, but they cannot undo it. The universe is no democracy. It is a monarchy. God himself has appointed his beloved Son as the preeminent King. Jesus does not rule by referendum, but by divine right. In the future every knee will bow before him, either willingly or unwillingly. Those who refuse to do so will have their knees broken with a rod of iron.”

― R. C. Sproul

topics: Authority, Gospel, Secularism, Soverignty Of God

“When we engage in the quest to understand God, it is theology. When our quest is limited to understanding how people react to theology, it is religion.”

― R. C. Sproul

“We do not “find” God as a result of our search for him. We are found by him. The search for God does not end in conversion; it begins at conversion. It is the converted person who genuinely and sincerely seeks after God. Jonathan Edwards remarked that seeking after God is the main business of the Christian life.”

― R. C. Sproul

“If to secure our redemption Christ only needed to make an atonement for us, he could have come down from heaven and gone directly to the cross. But he also had to fulfill all righteousness by submitting at every point to the law of God. By his sinless life he achieved positive merit, which merit is imputed to all who put their faith in him. Christ not only died for us but he lived for us as well.”

― R. C. Sproul

“To be dead in sin is to be in a state of moral and spiritual bondage. By nature we are slaves to sin. This does not mean that the fall has destroyed or eradicated the human will. Fallen man still has all the faculties to make choices. We still have a mind and a will. The problem is not that we cannot make choices. Natural men make choices all the time. The problem is that, in our fallen condition, we make sinful choices. We make these choices freely. We sin precisely because we want to sin, and we are capable of choosing exactly what we want to choose.”

― R. C. Sproul

“The church is called to be semper reformanda, “always reforming.”

― R. C. Sproul

“On the other hand, it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he have previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. . . . So long as we do not look beyond the earth, we are quite pleased with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue; we address ourselves in the most flattering terms, and seem only less than demigods.”

― R. C. Sproul

“I love the church. It is the body of Christ. It nurtures my soul and aids in my sanctification. But the church cannot redeem me. Christ and Christ alone can save me. The sacraments are precious to me. They edify and strengthen me, but they cannot justify me.”

― R. C. Sproul

“The Apostle Paul frequently admonishes and instructs Christians not to be quarrelsome, divisive, or combative. He extols the virtues of patience, charity, and tolerance. Yet when it came to the gospel itself, this same apostle was uncompromising.”

― R. C. Sproul

“For Rome justification is the result of faith plus works. In Reformed theology justification is the result of faith alone, a faith that always produces works. Antinomianism teaches justification by faith minus works. Reformed theology rejects both the Roman and the antinomian views.”

― R. C. Sproul

“To state it more simply, the study of religion is chiefly the study of a certain kind of human behavior, be it under the rubric of anthropology, sociology, or psychology. The study of theology, on the other hand, is the study of God. Religion is anthropocentric; theology is theocentric. The difference between religion and theology is ultimately the difference between God and man—hardly a small difference.”

― R. C. Sproul

“To say the Bible is the Word of God that errs is clearly to indulge in impious doublespeak. If it is the Word of God, it does not err. If it errs, it is not the Word of God. Surely we can have a word about God that errs, but we cannot have a word from God that errs.”

― R. C. Sproul

“The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today but, oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world—in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift from God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational.2”

― R. C. Sproul

“It is not the Word of God because the church says so; but that the Word of God might be spoken, therefore the church comes into being. The church does not make the Word, but it is made by the Word.”

― R. C. Sproul

“Reformed theology is committed to Christianity as a revealed faith, a faith that rests not on human insight but on information that comes to us from God himself.”

― R. C. Sproul

“The doctrine of inspiration declares that God enabled the human writers of Scripture to be agents of divine revelation, so that what they wrote was not only their writing but in a higher sense the very Word of God.”

― R. C. Sproul

“The inspiration of the Bible refers then to the divine superintendence of Scripture, preserving it from the intrusion of human error. It refers to God’s preserving his Word through the words of human authors.”

― R. C. Sproul

“When we say the Bible is infallible in its origin, we are merely ascribing its origin to a God who is infallible. This is not to say that the biblical writers were intrinsically or in themselves infallible. They were human beings who, like other humans, proved the axiom Errare humanum est, “To err is human.” It is precisely because humans are given to error that, for the Bible to be the Word of God, its human authors required assistance in their task.”

― R. C. Sproul

“Let us examine briefly a formula that has had some currency in our day: “The Bible is the Word of God, which errs.” Now let us expunge some of these words. Remove “The Bible is,” so that the formula reads: “The Word of God, which errs.” Now erase “The Word of” and “which.” The result is “God errs.” To say the Bible is the Word of God that errs is clearly to indulge in impious doublespeak. If it is the Word of God, it does not err. If it errs, it is not the Word of God.”

― R. C. Sproul

R. C. Sproul

Robert Charles Sproul was an American Reformed theologian and ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America. He was the founder and chairman of Ligonier Ministries and could be heard daily on the Renewing Your Mind radio broadcast in the United States and internationally. Under Sproul's direction, Ligonier Ministries produced the Ligonier Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which would eventually grow into the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, of which Sproul, alongside Norman Geisler, was one of the chief architects. Sproul has been described as "the greatest and most influential proponent of the recovery of Reformed theology in the last century."

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