Book Review: The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul

There’s a moment in seminary — and if you’ve been there, you know exactly what I’m talking about — where the professor stops lecturing and the room goes quiet. Not the polite quiet of note-taking. The other kind. The kind where something has shifted in the air and everybody feels it and nobody wants to be the first to move.

R.C. Sproul describes exactly that moment in the opening chapter of The Holiness of God. He’s a young seminary student. A visiting professor begins to teach on the holiness of God from Isaiah 6. And something happens. Students begin to tremble. Some weep. One rushes out of the room. Sproul himself is undone. It wasn’t emotionalism. It wasn’t manipulation. It was the sudden, terrifying realization that the God they had been studying in their neat theological categories was actually holy — and that holiness was not a warm, comforting attribute but something more like a consuming fire standing three inches from their face.

That scene, which opens Chapter 1 (“The Holy Grail”), sets the trajectory for the entire book. And four decades later, it still hits like a freight train. Because most of us — if we’re honest — have domesticated God. We’ve made Him manageable. We’ve turned the Lion of Judah into a house cat. And Sproul wrote this book to tear that comfortable illusion to pieces.

What It’s About

The Holiness of God is R.C. Sproul’s most important book — and he would have told you the same thing. Originally published in 1985 as a companion to his landmark Ligonier Ministries video teaching series, and revised and expanded in 1998, it is a sustained meditation on the one attribute of God that Scripture repeats three times in succession: “Holy, holy, holy.” Not “love, love, love.” Not “mercy, mercy, mercy.” Holy.

Sproul works through the biblical data methodically but never dryly. He begins with Isaiah’s throne room vision, moves through the “trauma of holiness” — his phrase for what happens when sinful creatures encounter the living God — and then traces that theme through the stories of figures like Moses, Job, and Habakkuk. He gives an entire chapter to Martin Luther’s Anfechtung, that untranslatable German word for the spiritual terror and existential crisis Luther endured before his breakthrough on justification. He connects the holiness of God to the justice of God, to the wrath of God, and ultimately — crucially — to the grace of God.

Why This Book Still Matters

We live in a therapeutic age. The dominant question in most churches is not “Is God holy?” but “Is God helpful?” We want a God who manages our anxiety, blesses our career transitions, and shows up in our quiet times like a warm cup of coffee. The concept of holiness — real, biblical, terrifying holiness — has been almost entirely evacuated from popular Christianity.

Sproul saw this coming forty years ago. And The Holiness of God was his counter-offensive. It remains the most accessible, most compelling, and most pastorally sensitive introduction to divine holiness ever written in English.

The book also matters because the current Reformed resurgence desperately needs it. It’s easy to affirm the doctrines of grace intellectually. It’s another thing entirely to feel the weight of them in your bones. Sproul doesn’t just teach you that God is holy. He makes you feel it. And that feeling — that sacred dread mixed with inexplicable attraction — is what transforms theology from an academic exercise into worship.

What It Gets Right

It starts with God, not with you. This sounds obvious, but it’s shockingly rare, even in Reformed circles. Most books begin with the human situation. Our sin. Our need. Our brokenness. Sproul flips the script entirely. He begins with God’s holiness, and then lets that holiness reveal everything else. Sin isn’t defined by how it makes us feel. Sin is defined by what it is in the presence of a holy God. This is the Isaianic move: “Woe is me! For I am undone.” Isaiah doesn’t discover his sinfulness through introspection. He discovers it by seeing God. Sproul understood that the order matters. Get the order wrong, and you end up with a self-help gospel.

The Luther chapter is a masterpiece. Chapter 3, which deals with Martin Luther’s spiritual crisis, is worth the price of the book by itself. Sproul walks you through Luther’s early monastic life — the obsessive confessions, the self-flagellation, the paralyzing terror before a holy God — and then shows you how Luther’s breakthrough on Romans 1:17 (“The just shall live by faith”) was not merely a theological correction but a rescue operation. Luther was drowning. The Anfechtung was destroying him. And it was precisely through that agony that Luther came to understand justification by faith alone. Sproul tells this story with the narrative skill of a novelist and the theological precision of a systematician. You feel Luther’s terror. You feel his relief. And if you’re paying attention, you feel your own.

It connects holiness to the cross with surgical precision. A lot of popular theology treats the cross as God’s solution to our unhappiness. Sproul insists — rightly, biblically — that the cross is God’s solution to our guilt before His holiness. The cross is not therapy. It is propitiation. It is the holy God satisfying His own justice so that unholy people can stand in His presence and live. When you read Sproul’s treatment of the atonement in light of everything he’s built about holiness, the cross becomes staggering again. Not sentimental. Not merely moving. Staggering.

Where It Falls Short

The book is a product of its time, and occasionally you feel it. Sproul’s illustrations — vivid and effective in the 1980s and 90s — sometimes land with a slight datedness. The theology is timeless. Some of the packaging isn’t.

More substantively, the book could go further on the relationship between God’s holiness and suffering. Sproul touches on it — particularly in his treatment of Job and Habakkuk — but given the weight of the topic, it feels undercooked. If you’re someone walking through genuine anguish hoping to make sense of your pain in light of God’s holiness, you’ll find threads to pull, but not a fully woven tapestry. For that, you’ll need to supplement with other works.

Who Should Read This

The Bottom Line

The Holiness of God is not a book that merely informs you. It is a book that confronts you. Sproul didn’t write it to add to your theological library. He wrote it to wreck your comfortable assumptions about who God is and rebuild them on a biblical foundation. And it works. Forty years later, it still works.

If you have never read a serious book on the character of God, start here. Not with the love of God. Not with the grace of God. Start with the holiness of God. Because everything else — every doctrine you will ever study, every prayer you will ever pray — will be distorted if you get this wrong. Sproul understood that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, not a stage you graduate past.

Read it. Read it slowly. And don’t be surprised if it changes you.

Rating: 5/5

Related reviews: What Is Reformed Theology? by R.C. Sproul | Knowing God by J.I. Packer | Do Christians Have Free Will?

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