Every pastor should read this book. Every Christian college student absolutely must. And every parent who wonders why their child came home from a secular university with their faith shaken needs to understand what The Consequences of Ideas lays out with extraordinary clarity: the Western intellectual tradition did not drift accidentally toward materialism, relativism, and nihilism. It was driven there by specific ideas held by specific people — ideas that can be named, traced, and answered.
R.C. Sproul was one of the great Reformed teachers of the twentieth century, and this compact 224-page survey of Western philosophy may be his most accessible and practically useful work. Beginning with ancient Greece — Plato, Aristotle, Socrates — and moving through Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, and Freud, Sproul shows how each thinker’s foundational commitments produced consequences that ripple through culture for generations.
Al Mohler has noted that Sproul possessed “the extraordinary gift of making complex ideas simple without making them simplistic” — and nowhere is that gift more on display than in this volume. Pastor Tim Challies called it “a book that helps readers understand how we got to where we are, and why so many people think the way they do today.”
This is not a book that demands a philosophy degree to appreciate. It is written for thoughtful Christians who want to understand the world they’re trying to reach. When you finish it, you will recognize the philosophical assumptions hiding behind the social justice movement, the sexual revolution, the therapeutic culture, and the postmodern university. You will be able to name what you see.
Ideas have consequences. Sproul proves it beyond all reasonable doubt.
📚 Purchase: Available on Amazon and at Crossway.
Book Details: Publisher: Crossway | June 2000 | 224 pages | ISBN-13: 978-1433503146