When it comes to historic Protestant orthodoxy, few late-20th-century writers have done as much to defend the faith as Dr. R.C. Sproul. In some quarters, the very mention of his name is enough to send Arminians, Papists, Fundamentalists, and bibliophobes running for cover. Not, however, at The Door. When we first interviewed Dr. Sproul in the early `80s, we made such a big deal of the fact that he had just abandoned his "wet-look" hairstyle for a much poofier, blow-dried do that now when we feel a rush of Sproul-awe coming on, we just look at an old Vitalis-era photo of the good Doctor and somehow he seems like a regular guy again.

R.C. Sproul is not a regular guy. First of all, regular guys don't go by their first two initials (the "C," by the way, stands for Charles). Second, regular guys don't author dozens of books with titles like Grace Unknown: The Heart of Reformed Theology, Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology, and The Character of God: Discovering the Who God Who Is (obviously, Sproul is something of a colon man). Third, regular guys don't sprinkle their casual conversations with words like "soteriology" (the study of salvation), "Pelagianism" (the heretical doctrine that man does not possess a sinful nature), and "semi-Pelagianism" (uh, the doctrine that man sort of doesn't possess a sinful nature). Fourth, regular guys don't get thanked in the liner notes to the latest Van Halen album, Van Halen III (seriously). Alas, the album is the group's worst, making the odds that other hard rock bands will follow suit and thank Dr. Sproul in their liner notes rather long ones indeed.

When The Door's Arsenio Orteza called Dr. Sproul's office to conduct the following interview, he was placed on hold and forced to listen to a taped message that went: "Thank you for calling Ligonier Ministries, the home of Renewing Your Mind, the daily radio broadcast of Dr. R.C. Sproul. All of our resource consultants are serving other people right now, but your call is extremely important to us, so stay on the line, and the next available consultant will be with you as soon as possible." Ominously, in light of Dr. Sproul's Van Halen connection, the music accompanying the recording was classical.

Actually, classical music isn't so strange where Dr. Sproul is concerned. He calls himself, after all, a "classicist," even going so far as to refer to his fellow classicist St. Thomas Aquinas as "Thomas." Of course, because he also refers to Billy Graham as "Billy," R.C. (the "R" stands for Robert) may simply be that most rare of classicists - the casual kind. One thing he's definitely not casual about, however, is the Reformation. One could say, in fact, that his entire 25-year ministry - the books, the radio show, the Bible-study magazine (Tabletalk), the distinguished visiting professorships, the Renewing Your Hair line of shampoos and conditioners - has been one huge attempt to simultaneously defend and propagate the ideas of Martin and John (er, Luther and Calvin), especially their emphasis on "the three solas": sola fide (faith alone), sola scriptura (scripture alone), and sola gratia (grace alone). Hey, anyone who can even pronounce Italian has our vote!

Dr. Sproul's latest book is Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will (Baker). Even if you didn't know there was a controversy over free will, we think you'll find Dr. Sproul's comments insightful, provocative, and even a little humble - that is, when you can actually understand them.

DOOR: Considering all the current high-profile controversies both in and out of the church, why write a book on the eve of the year 2000 about the controversy over free will of all things?
SPROUL: Interesting question. Well, if you recall, at the beginning of Willing to Believe, I make reference to J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston's historical introductory essay, which was written at least 25 years ago, to Luther's The Bondage of the Will. In it they more or less predicted a crisis within evangelicalism with respect to sola gratia.
DOOR: Gesundheit.
SPROUL: --
DOOR: Um, you were saying -
SPROUL: In a very real way, I think they were prophetic. When we had the Ace Conference a couple of years ago at Cambridge, and examined the solas of the Reformation, I was assigned to give the plenary speech on sola gratia. And as I was preparing for that, it became all the more acute to me that this problem is one that has affected evangelicalism at its core, particularly with respect to the more well-known doctrine of sola fide.
DOOR: In what way?
SPROUL: What Packer and Johnson said, as Luther said to Erasmus, is that sola gratia is really the underpinnings of sola fide. I've seen the decline of concern, interest, and awareness of the Reformation doctrine of sola fide, and I think that part of the cause is the loss of the Reformation view of sola gratia, if I'm making sense.
DOOR: In other words, if human effort is required for salvation, then God's grace alone could be seen as therefore insufficient.
SPROUL: Yes.
DOOR: In Willing to Believe, you identify the central tenet of Arminianism as the idea that God's grace is necessary for salvation but resistible and therefore capable of being thwarted.
SPROUL: Yes
DOOR: You also discuss the stamp it has placed on American Christianity since the 18th century. Do you think Arminianism is so ingrained that it's hopeless to talk of eradicating it?
SPROUL: Well, I'm a Calvinist, so I don't talk in terms of hopelessness (laughs). I have to be optimistic all the time. But, humanly speaking, I'm not very optimistic.
DOOR: Why not?
SPROUL: Because in this country there is that classical marriage or syncretistic blend between semi-Pelagian theology and American humanism.
DOOR: Uh, we've noticed that too.
SPROUL: It's downright un-American to think that we are really slaves to sin. Yet you have these polls that George Barna takes, and you see a majority of professing evangelicals saying that man is basically good. That's astonishing to me!
DOOR: Us too, especially in light of how many people are so basically bad they won't even subscribe to our magazine.
SPROUL: It's astonishing to me in light of evangelical history, because even semi-Pelagianism, of course, historically, would deny that man is basically good.
DOOR: Used to be that even Arminians knew that man had a sinful nature.
SPROUL: Yeah, but that's the apparent contradiction isn't it?
DOOR: How so?
SPROUL: If you ask an American, "Are you perfect?," they'll say, "Nobody's perfect. Everybody has some flaws." They might even say that we're all sinners. But, if you begin to probe that and to explore the extent to which they think we are held captive by a sinful disposition, you discover that whatever the people are saying about sin, they think it's something that's really peripheral. It's accidental to our nature. It's not something that penetrates to the core. And I think that's true even in modern evangelicalism.
DOOR: But it's true to some extent even in not-so-modern theology. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, granted the human will greater freedom than Calvin. And Aquinas wasn't exactly a theological lightweight.
SPROUL: I certainly wouldn't consider him a theological lightweight.
DOOR: But the sections on free will in his Summa seem to be semi-Pelagian.
SPROUL: You know, I have to confess to you that I'm a little bit puzzled about Thomas.
DOOR: "Thomas"?
SPROUL: I'm not sure that I understand Thomas at this point. When he talks about free will, he sounds - you used the term "semi-Pelagian." I would maybe say semi-semi-Pelagian (laughs). Or, even more, semi-Augustinian. You understand that his devotion to Augustine permeates the Summa, and I don't see Thomas consciously opposing Augustine in any great manner. But when he talks about nature and grace in the Summa, he makes that important distinction between operative and co-operative grace. And when he talks about the grace of regeneration, no matter how it's transmitted - whether sacramentally or what - he insists it's still operative, whereas classic semi-Pelagianism would say that it's co-operative. So at that point Thomas sounds very much to me like an Augustinian and like a Calvinist. But, on the other hand, when he talks about free will, he isn't quite as clear to me. It's difficult because so often Thomas is read through the grid of subsequent generations of Roman Catholic scholarship, and I've often wondered where Thomas himself would've stood in the 16th-century controversy. My bias would incline me to think he would've stood with Luther, at least soteriologically if not ecclesialogically.
DOOR: By the way, how's your hair these days?
SPROUL: I still have it.
DOOR: -
SPROUL: -
DOOR: Um, soteriologically -
SPROUL: Keep in mind that Calvin and Luther and all the rest of these guys that I talk about in the book labored the point that in terms of the faculty of the will, man is still regarded as possessing free will in the sense that he doesn't act from coercion. And Thomas would agree with that. The question is whether in that degree of freedom man still has the moral ability to cooperate with the prevenient grace. There are sections in the Summa that would indicate that man still did have that ability, so Thomas would not be affirming a total moral inability as Augustine and Luther and Calvin and Edwards did. And as I do, of course.
DOOR: Must one agree with Calvin in order to be a good Christian?
SPROUL: Well, I think you can be a Christian and still be semi-Pelagian.
DOOR: Our semi-Pelagian readers will be thrilled to hear that. In your book you say that semi-Pelagians are Christians, but just "barely."
SPROUL: (Laughs) All of us who are Christians are only barely Christians. But the thing, of course, that I had in mind there was that if a person conceives of that island of righteousness that's unaffected by the fall and that ability by which the decisive action is made that determines his eternal destiny - if a person conceives of that as the sine qua non of a righteous action that a fallen creature has to do to be saved, then the scary thing - the scary question - is, is that person ultimately trusting in their own goodness to get them into heaven? If they are, then that would vitiate any affirmation of sola fide, wouldn't it?
DOOR: We're still looking up sine qua non.
SPROUL: But again, let me just say, I think that the overwhelming majority of Arminians and other kinds of semi-Pelagians affirm sola fide and don't want to come to that conclusion. So, however they think about the free action that makes the decisive difference, they tend not to think of it as a meritorious thing or as an inherently righteous thing that becomes the decisive factor for which they are saved. Am I making sense?
DOOR: Yes. Now -
SPROUL: They don't want to say that. Maybe a few of them will, but, if they say that, then I think they are toast.
DOOR: Speaking of toast, you criticize Billy Graham in your book for building his appeal on semi-Pelagian assumptions. To a lot of people, criticizing Billy Graham is fightin' words.
SPROUL: That's an icon there.
DOOR: After all, an entire generation has grown up with the image of a football stadium full of people responding to a Billy Graham altar call as the defining public image of American evangelicalism. Most people would probably even say that no matter how theologically imprecise he may be, he's certainly more than made up for it with his evangelism.
SPROUL: I've been ambivalent as long as I can remember about that style of evangelism. But it's not an ambivalence of equal ultimacy. I've had far more positive response to it than negative.
DOOR: Why?
SPROUL: Because when I think of Billy preaching in the `50s and `60s, in those crusades, and the sermons I heard.
DOOR: "Billy"?
SPROUL: - Billy would unequivocally stress the serious reality of man's profoundly fallen condition. He made no bones about our being lost in sin and in desperate need of the saving work of Christ. It was a simple sin-and-salvation message that I recall. But even back in the `50s and `60s, he would still say, "Ninety-nine percent of it God does, one percent you do. You have to make the response. Come up here and write your name in the Lamb's Book of Life," that kind of language, which was the language of his not-so-illustrious predecessor.
DOOR: Would that be the 19th-century revivalist Charles Grandison Finney?
SPROUL: Finney, yeah. I don't think Finney was even semi-Pelagian.
DOOR: Don't you mean "Charles"?
SPROUL: Finney was an unabashed Pelagian.
DOOR: Uh, "Grandison"?
SPROUL: Most evangelicals haven't read him, and they're shocked when they read Finney's own statements because he was vehemently pro-Pelagianism.
DOOR: He was almost flat-out heretical in a number of ways, wasn't he?
SPROUL: I'd take out the "almost." Not only that, but he categorically rejected substitutionary atonement and justification by faith alone.
DOOR: Was he theologically wacko or just not very bright?
SPROUL: He was no dummy. He was trained in law and more or less self-trained in theology.
DOOR: "Self-trained"?
SPROUL: He wrote a book called Systematic Theology, and I'd hate to think of a guy writing a systematic theology who's that ignorant.
DOOR: What do you see as the key difference between him and Billy Graham?
SPROUL: Billy Graham has always humbly declared that he's a preacher, not a theologian. That kind of humility you didn't find with Finney. Finney presumed to be a theologian. So he has to be held accountable by that standard. That's why I devote a chapter to him and only mention Billy in passing. I think Billy Graham is a guy who understood the absolute need for personal salvation, the power of the gospel, preached sin and salvation as faithfully as he knew how his whole life, and was not and never claimed to be a technical theologian. But I think that some theological defects came through in his preaching, and some of them have their roots in that whole revivalist tradition, which was really generated by Finney. I have no problem with somebody preaching the gospel to mass audiences and calling them to repentance and to committing their lives to Christ. The danger that I worry about in the evangelical culture today is that what has happened - through no design of Billy Graham's, certainly - is that so many folks now understand the way of salvation as walking an aisle, raising a hand, praying the prayers, signing a card. That is, as responding to some particular evangelistic methodology.
DOOR: That's bad?
SPROUL: One of my great concerns is that we've got to understand the difference between a profession of faith and faith. Everyone who has faith is called to profess faith, but not everybody who professes faith has faith. We are not saved by a profession of faith. A lot of people, it seems to me, in the evangelical world, believe that if they have walked the walk, raised the hand, signed the card - that is, made some kind of methodological profession of faith - that they're saved. And that's scary!
DOOR: That's the second thing you've mentioned. Why is it scary?
SPROUL: Because salvation comes through trust in the gospel. Now, I don't think God requires that we ourselves understand how we come to faith in order to be saved.
DOOR: Our readers who don't understand how they came to faith will be relieved to hear that.
SPROUL: In other words, I believe that I came to faith through the pure, unvarnished, sovereign work of God, by an immediate, supernatural work of regeneration in my heart, that my heart was a heart of stone and utterly incapable of making any positive response to Christ until God the Holy Spirit changed my soul by regeneration. I believe that I was reborn before I believed. Now, believing that I was reborn before I believed doesn't make me saved, does it?
DOOR: Is this a trick question?
SPROUL: Just because my doctrine is right - and I believe it is - doesn't save me. Likewise, another person, who I believe comes to faith the same way I came to faith, through the sovereign, immediate work of the Holy Spirit - they may not understand all the nuances of that, and they may be deceived about how they came to faith, but that's not the issue that's going to keep them out of heaven. The question is, "Do they have saving faith?" Not how they understood how they got there.
DOOR: Early in your book, you write, "Every Christian has errors of some sort in his thinking." Do you have inklings about what yours are?
SPROUL: I have inklings about where they may be. As a systematic theologian, you look at all the different subdivisions of theology - soteriology, eschatology, pneumatology, and all of that - I don't think any theologian is equally astute in every area. I know, for example, that I'm a whole lot more iffy in my own thinking about eschatology than I am about soteriology or Christology. Now, chances are that where my errors are going to be most blatant would be in those areas that I'm less competent in. The scary thing is, they could also be in the areas where I'm most certain (laughs), where I've done the greatest amount of thinking.
DOOR: That's the third scary thing you've mentioned.
SPROUL: I believe everything that I believe, and I believe that everything I believe is correct. Let's say, as Calvin said, that no theologian is ever more than 80 percent right. I'm certain that any theologian believes 100 percent of what they teach, and if they knew where their 20 percent was, they'd change it. I don't know where my errors are, or I'd correct them.
DOOR: And Calvin's 80-20 estimate could've been part of his 20-percent error.
SPROUL: -
DOOR: Um, you mention in your book that one of the purposes of sola gratia is to make sure that God gets all the glory and the credit for the work of salvation, to make sure that none of the glory or credit would go to man.
SPROUL: Right.
DOOR: Dorothy Sayers once wrote that there were two ways to commit gluttony, "by sheer excess in eating and drinking, or by the opposite fault of fastidiousness." In other words, both faults involve an overconcern with the appetite. Do you see a parallel between what Sayers is saying and Calvinism's concern that man get no glory lest God not get it all?

SPROUL: I think that's a very real possibility. I worry about that myself. On the other hand, my defense would be this: I don't think the big problem in the evangelical world today is that we're overemphasizing the glory of God. But it's very possible that in our zeal to recover the theocentric focus of redemption that we could be guilty of overstating our case. That's always a danger. I don't think we are, but I grant the possibility of falling into that trap.
DOOR: Do you consider yourself part of the Religious Right these days?
SPROUL: Well, I've never considered myself part of the Religious Left. But, at the same time, I've always considered myself a classicist -
DOOR: Uh, us too ... We think ...
SPROUL: - rather than a fundamentalist. And, to be perfectly candid, with the crisis going on today on evangelicalism and the way in which it's being, in many circles, redefined from its historic meaning, I'm not sure what the term "evangelical" means anymore, or that I am one. I know that I am one in terms of the classic, historic evangelicalism. But, in terms of how it's being redefined today, I doubt if I am one. And if you mean by "Religious Right" historic orthodoxy, then I would identify myself totally with the Religious Right. But if by the "Religious Right" you mean right-wing-Americanization stuff and everything -
DOOR: We do.
SPROUL: I'm politically conservative and even more conservative economically, but I have never been one to wrap the Christian faith in the American flag.
DOOR: Is that the fourth scary thing?
SPROUL: When people do that, yes, that scares me.