The Holiness of God

R. C. Sproul, a theologian in the Reformed tradition of Protestant Christianity, wrote The Holiness of God as a work of popular theology exploring what he considers the most important and least understood attribute of the biblical God: His holiness. Sproul combines personal memoir, biblical exposition, church history, and philosophical argument to build a cumulative case that understanding God's holiness is foundational to the Christian life.

Sproul opens with a personal narrative from his college years. As a new Christian, he recounts being compelled by an inner summons to walk to the campus chapel at midnight. Kneeling in the chancel, the area near the altar, he experienced alternating waves of terror and peace in God's presence. He traces this encounter to a lecture on Saint Augustine's doctrine of creation ex nihilo, the idea that God created the universe out of nothing by His spoken command. The concept ignited what he describes as a second conversion, not to God the Son but to God the Father, awakening a desire to understand God's holiness.

Sproul turns to Isaiah's vision in the temple (Isaiah 6). Isaiah, an aristocratic prophet, entered the temple after King Uzziah's death and saw God on a throne, surrounded by seraphim, angelic beings whose six wings expressed both worship and creatureliness. The seraphim sang "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty," a threefold repetition Sproul calls the Trisagion. In Hebrew literary convention, repeating a word three times elevates it to the highest possible degree, and holiness is the only divine attribute raised to this level in Scripture. Isaiah cried out and declared himself "undone," experiencing what Sproul describes as personal disintegration when measured against the absolute standard of holiness. God responded with grace, purifying Isaiah's lips with a burning coal and commissioning him for service.

Sproul defines holiness not primarily as moral purity but as transcendent separateness, from a root meaning "to cut" or "to separate." When the Bible calls God holy, it means He is so far above creatures that He seems almost totally foreign; when it calls earthly things holy, it means God has set them apart from common use. Rather than being one attribute among many, holiness functions as a synonym for God's deity, modifying everything else about Him. Sproul introduces Rudolf Otto, an early-twentieth-century German scholar who coined the term mysterium tremendum to describe the human experience of encountering the holy, marked by dread, awe, and paradoxical attraction.

Sproul illustrates "the trauma of holiness" through New Testament episodes. When Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee (Mark 4), the disciples' fear paradoxically increased, because in Christ's power over nature they encountered something more terrifying than the storm itself. After the miraculous catch of fish (Luke 5), Simon Peter fell at Jesus' knees and begged Him to depart, confessing himself a sinful man. Sproul explains the hostility of the Pharisees, a Jewish religious sect known for strict legal observance, through an analogy from Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull's The Peter Principle: Just as super-competent employees threaten those above them, Jesus' authentic holiness exposed the Pharisees' counterfeit piety. The Sadducees, who traced their name to the priest Zadok (meaning "righteous"), faced the same exposure. He extends this dynamic into modern life, recounting how a golfer accused Billy Graham, a prominent Christian evangelist, of forcing religion on him despite Graham never mentioning it.

Sproul devotes a chapter to Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century German monk whose protest against the Roman Catholic Church launched the Protestant Reformation. He surveys evidence used to judge Luther unbalanced, including a near-death experience with lightning in 1505 and daily confessions that once lasted six hours. Sproul argues this behavior reflected a brilliant legal mind applied to God's law: If the Great Commandment requires loving God with all one's heart, no one keeps it for five minutes. He describes Luther's "tower experience," the moment Luther grasped that God's justice in Romans refers not to condemnation but to the righteousness given to sinners through faith, a discovery that became the Reformation's battle cry: "The just shall live by faith."

Sproul confronts difficult Old Testament passages of divine judgment. Aaron's sons Nadab and Abihu were consumed by fire for offering unauthorized incense (Leviticus 10). Uzzah, likely a Kohathite, a member of the Levitical clan trained to handle sacred objects, was struck down for touching the ark of the covenant (1 Chronicles 13). Sproul defines sin as "cosmic treason" against a perfectly pure Sovereign and reframes the Old Testament capital-punishment code as a massive reduction from the original penalty of instant death for any sin (Genesis 2:17). He concludes that the most severe act of divine judgment is the Cross, where the only truly innocent person bore the world's sins, making it simultaneously the most just and most gracious act in history.

Sproul traces biblical figures who wrestled with God: Jacob, who wrestled an angel and received the name Israel; Job, whose demands for answers were met with God's overwhelming questions about creation; the prophet Habakkuk, transformed from despair to confidence; and Saul of Tarsus, whose encounter with Christ on the Damascus Road changed him from persecutor into the apostle Paul. Sproul explains that the first fruit of justification, the act of being declared righteous before God through Christ, is peace with God. The second is access to God's presence, symbolized by the tearing of the temple veil at Christ's death.

Sproul explains the Christian call to holiness as both a status and a process. Believers are called to present themselves as living sacrifices and to pursue genuine transformation through renewal of the mind via disciplined study of Scripture. He explains Luther's phrase simul justus et peccator ("at the same time just and sinner"): Believers are declared righteous through Christ's transferred righteousness while still sinful in practice, and genuine justification always produces sanctification, the ongoing process of growth in holiness.

Sproul reverses the title of Jonathan Edwards's famous eighteenth-century sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" to argue that the deeper problem is "God in the hands of angry sinners." He defends Edwards's vivid imagery as compassionate warning and contends that unconverted people do not merely neglect God but actively hate Him. He critiques both Pelagianism, which denies the need for supernatural grace, and Semi-Pelagianism, which holds that fallen sinners can choose rebirth before their hearts are changed, endorsing instead the Augustinian position that only God's grace can awaken dead souls.

Sproul argues that God's holiness is revealed through nature to all people, drawing on Paul's teaching in Romans 1:20 that God's invisible qualities are clearly seen through creation. The failure is not intellectual but moral: People exchange the truth of God for a lie and worship creatures rather than the Creator. He employs the ancient Greek philosopher Plato's cave allegory and the Reformer John Calvin's metaphor of the blindfold to describe humanity's willful refusal to see what is plainly visible.

The book concludes with an exploration of holy space and holy time. Sproul traces consecrated places, from Moses' burning bush to Jacob's Bethel, each marking a passage from the profane to the sacred. He distinguishes chronos (ordinary clock time) from kairos (sacred, pivotal moments in redemptive history) and examines the Sabbath and the Lord's Supper, the Christian communion meal, as key institutions of sacred time. Sproul closes by affirming that when believers erect barriers against the intrusion of the holy, they exchange the sacred for the profane and rob both God of His glory and themselves of His grace.