Robert Charles Sproul (born February 13, 1939) is an American Calvinist theologian, author, and pastor. He is the founder and chairman of Ligonier Ministries (named after the Ligonier Valley just outside of Pittsburgh, where the ministry started as a study center for college and seminary students) and can be heard daily on the Renewing Your Mind radio broadcast in the United States and internationally.
Sproul holds degrees from Westminster College, Pennsylvania (BA, 1961), Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary (M.Div, 1964), the Free University of Amsterdam (Drs., 1969), and Whitefield Theological Seminary (PhD, 2001). He has taught at numerous colleges and seminaries, including Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando and Jackson, Mississippi, and Knox Theological Seminary in Ft. Lauderdale.
Currently, Sproul is Senior Minister of Preaching and Teaching at Saint Andrew's, a congregation in Sanford, Florida. He was ordained as an elder in the United Presbyterian Church in the USA in 1965, but left that denomination around 1975 and joined the Presbyterian Church in America. He is also a Council member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.
Sproul has been an ardent advocate of Calvinism in his many print, audio, and video publications, and he is also known for his advocacy of the Thomistic (classical) approaches to Christian apologetics, less common among Reformed apologists, and his rejection of presuppositionalism. A dominant theme in many of Sproul's Renewing Your Mind lessons is the holiness and sovereignty of God.
Sproul, a critic of the Roman Catholic Church and Catholic theology, denounced the 1994 ecumenical document Evangelicals and Catholics Together.
In 2003, a Festschrift was published in his honor. After Darkness, Light: Essays in Honor of R. C. Sproul included contributions from Robert Godfrey, Sinclair Ferguson, O. Palmer Robertson, Michael Horton, Douglas Wilson, John F. MacArthur, and Jay E. Adams.
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