The Acceptable Way: The Regulative Principle of Worship and the Ordered Freedom of the Church

The Acceptable Way

The Regulative Principle of Worship and the Ordered Freedom of the Church

J. Neil Daniels

Abstract

Reformed and evangelical Christians who confess the same doctrine of Scripture worship in strikingly different rooms. Behind the difference lies the regulative principle of worship, the conviction that the gathered church may do in worship only what God has authorized. This essay traces the principle from Calvin through the Puritans to the Baptists, sets out the biblical arguments the Westminster divines and later Reformed dogmaticians have used to establish it, and works through the modern controversy running from John Frame's expansion of the principle to all of life, T. David Gordon's ecclesiological rebuttal, R. J. Gore's charge that the Puritan account is unworkable, and Samuel Waldron's confessional defense. It weighs the relation between the principle and sola scriptura, answers the leading objections, and names the abuses that attend the doctrine on both sides, legalism and pragmatic chaos. The argument closes with a constructive case: a structured liturgy shaped by the pattern of covenant renewal and grounded in worship "in spirit and truth," its elements bounded by Scripture, its forms left free, and its conduct entrusted to the church's own officers, ordered enough to guard against invention and open enough to leave room for the Spirit.

 

I. A Shared Sentence, Different Rooms

Two congregations can subscribe to the same sentence about worship and assemble in rooms that share almost nothing. R. J. Gore sets Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia beside College Hill Reformed Presbyterian in Beaver Falls: instruments and hymns on one side, unaccompanied psalmody on the other, both professing that God may be worshiped only as he has commanded.¹ The distance between them is not sloppy application of a rule they hold in common. It is a disagreement about what the rule reaches.

The rule is the regulative principle of worship. In its traditional form it says that in the corporate worship of the church we may do only those things God has commanded, and that whatever lacks such warrant is excluded.² Its rival, usually tied to Lutheran and Anglican practice, is the normative principle: whatever Scripture does not forbid is permitted.³ Ligon Duncan calls the regulative principle an extension of sola scriptura, the Bible functioning as the final authority not only in faith and life but in the manner of corporate worship.⁴ Scott Aniol reduces the contrast to a single burden of proof. Under the one principle the burden falls on anyone who would add; under the other, on anyone who would forbid.⁵

The Westminster Confession states it at 21.1. The acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by God himself and so limited by his revealed will that he may not be worshiped by the imaginations of men or in any way not prescribed in Scripture.⁶ The confession ties this to the sufficiency it has already claimed at 1.6, where the whole counsel of God is either expressly set down or deducible by good and necessary consequence, with nothing to be added by new revelation or human tradition.⁷ Worship is the sharp edge of a wider doctrine about where authority lies.

Much of the trouble comes from a poverty of terms. Gordon insists that four categories are needed, not two. An element is a distinct act of worship: prayer, praise, the ministry of the Word, the sacraments. A circumstance is a consideration common to human gatherings generally, the time and place of meeting, the lighting, the seating, the amplification of a voice. A form is the lexical or musical content of an element, Psalm 1 rather than Psalm 51, the decision to pray the Lord's Prayer. A rubric is the manner of performing an element, kneeling or standing for prayer, breaking the bread when the Supper is served.⁸ Each is governed differently. Scripture warrants the elements by positive command. Circumstances answer to the light of nature and Christian prudence. Forms and rubrics must accord with biblical truth but are not fixed to the words of Scripture.⁹ Collapse the four into two, Gordon argues, and every difference over worship starts to look like a difference over elements, which is where the fights turn intractable.

Not every Reformed treatment keeps to Gordon's four terms. Beeke and Smalley, in the newest major systematic treatment of the question, work with three: an element is what God sets apart as holy, a means of grace through which he manifests his presence; a form is the content given to an element, the specific words of a prayer as against the act of praying; a circumstance is the ordinary business of gathering people in a room without religious significance of its own, lighting, seating, amplification.¹⁰ That three-part scheme folds Gordon's rubric back into form, and it is close enough to his four-part version that the two rarely produce different verdicts in practice. The sharper challenge comes from Frame, who in his fullest restatement of the question rejects the whole categorial apparatus, calling the substance-and-accident language behind element-and-circumstance talk "Aristotelian, rather than Scriptural," and asking where Scripture ever rebukes anyone for miscategorizing a circumstance as an element or the reverse.¹¹ Nobody, he points out, has produced the text. That challenge does not go away by restating the terms more carefully. Part IV below returns to it directly.

II. From Geneva to the Baptists

The principle grew up against late medieval Rome. The Reformers judged the cult of the saints, the veneration of Mary, and the use of images to have gone past the bounds of biblical worship and to have raised tradition to the level of revelation.¹² In 1544 Calvin presented The Necessity of Reforming the Church to Charles V, casting the Reformation first as a return to the pure worship of God commanded in Scripture. God rejects, Calvin wrote, all human devices at variance with his command, and disapproves of every mode of worship not sanctioned by his Word.¹³ He did not coin the phrase, but he set the concept in place. The Heidelberg Catechism made the same move under the second commandment: God is to be worshiped in no other way than he has commanded.¹⁴ The Belgic Confession framed it as liberty, rejecting human innovations imposed on the conscience in worship.¹⁵ Knox put it bluntly, that all worship invented by the brain of man without God's express commandment is idolatry.¹⁶

The mature formulation came out of the seventeenth-century conflict between the Puritans and the high-church party. Charles I provoked the Bishops' Wars by forcing the Book of Common Prayer on the churches, and it was in that setting that the Westminster divines drafted their statement.¹⁷ John Allen Delivuk stresses that they did not reach the principle by stacking proof texts. They derived it from other doctrines, chiefly the sufficiency of Scripture, which most of them treated as its ground.¹⁸

The Baptists took the same principle and pressed it further. The 1689 London Confession reproduces the Westminster language on worship almost word for word, yet at one point it tightens. Where Westminster allowed what may be deduced by good and necessary consequence, the Baptists wrote necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture, a deliberate narrowing meant to keep inference from doing too much work.¹⁹ Aniol's thesis is that Baptists applied the principle not only to the substance of worship, as the Puritans did, but to its forms. Believer's baptism by immersion is the clearest case: the mode and the subject both had to answer to the New Testament, and infant baptism failed for want of precept or example.²⁰ The same instinct ran through their observance of the Supper, where Kiffin and Collins argued over sitting rather than kneeling, evening rather than noon, breaking the bread rather than cutting it.²¹ Benjamin Keach defended congregational hymnody on the ground of the principle itself, appealing to Christ and the disciples singing a hymn after the Supper.²² Even polity followed, the London Confession adding an article on the ordering of the church and dropping Westminster's chapter on synods for lack of warrant.²³ Matthew Ward notes the cost of the rigor. Every practice a group thought it had a mandate for became a ground for separation, and the commitment that made Baptists Baptists also kept them from uniting.²⁴

III. The Biblical Warrant

Delivuk lays out five lines the divines used, and they remain the backbone of any biblical case.

The first is the sufficiency of Scripture. Robert Harris, one of the framers, argued from the smallest details of the record. If God descends to describe the very gestures of Christ, sitting and standing, he is not likely to have omitted the substance of his own worship. To claim the Bible offers only a partial rule needing human supplement is to charge it with imperfection.²⁵ Second Timothy 3:16 to 17, that Scripture equips the man of God for every good work, is the text the argument leans on.²⁶

The second is Christian liberty and the limits of church power. This is the argument Gordon regards as the whole point of the doctrine. Samuel Rutherford and George Gillespie held that God alone is Lord of the conscience, and that the church may not bind the conscience with anything beside the Word, even in matters otherwise indifferent.²⁷ The Westminster Confession says as much at 20.2, freeing the believer from doctrines and commandments of men that are beside Scripture in worship.²⁸ James Bannerman drew the contrast with the opposing camp in a single sentence: the Church of England's doctrine of worship holds that it may decree everything except what Scripture forbids, while the Presbyterian doctrine holds that it may decree nothing except what Scripture enjoins, expressly or by implication.²⁹ The principle, on this reading, is not a rule about aesthetics but a defense of the worshiper against the officers who would impose on him.

The third is the second commandment and the sin the Puritans called will-worship, from Colossians 2:23. James Ussher, an Anglican archbishop who nonetheless shaped the Assembly, read the commandment as binding all men to the form of worship God prescribes and forbidding every form devised by men.³⁰ The Larger Catechism gathers the point in its questions on the second commandment, condemning any religious worship not instituted by God.³¹

The fourth is a rule of interpretation: a positive command forbids its contrary. Rutherford drew it from the negative arguments of Scripture, Yahweh saying of child sacrifice that he never commanded it nor did it enter his mind.³² Thomas Gataker applied it to the sacraments, asking why water and not wine in baptism, why bread and not cheese at the Supper, and answering that God determined the elements and thereby excluded the rest.³³ The divines used the rule with care, Delivuk notes, applying it only where God had already spoken and leaving other matters as adiaphora.³⁴

The fifth is uniformity, Gillespie's argument that God intends one pattern for the worship of his people, so that human innovation fractures what Scripture means to hold together.³⁵

Behind the confessional arguments lies a plain biblical theme, one Duncan traces across the canon and Putman summarizes, and one Beeke and Smalley trace in even finer narrative grain. God rejected Cain's offering. Nadab and Abihu were consumed for offering strange fire that Yahweh had not commanded, and the verdict given for it is precise: he would be treated as holy, the term is the niphal of qadash, by those who come near him, and glorified before the people, which means unauthorized worship fails to honor God as the Holy One rather than merely breaking a rule.³⁶ Saul was condemned for his sacrifice of the Amalekite spoil. Through Jeremiah, Yahweh charged Judah with burning their children to Baal, something he never commanded and that never entered his mind.³⁷ The pattern runs earlier and later than these texts alone. Moses spent six chapters detailing a tabernacle built exactly to specification, the phrase "as Yahweh commanded" recurring fifteen times in the record of its construction and continuing into the consecration of the priests.³⁸ Centuries afterward, the ark was carried on an oxcart instead of borne by Levites on poles as the law required; when the cart lurched and a man reached out to steady it, Yahweh struck him dead, and David's own verdict on the disaster names the failure precisely: "we did not seek him according to the rule."³⁹ Jeroboam's sin at the golden calves included a self-ordained priesthood and a feast "which he had devised of his own heart," and Ahaz built his altar to a pattern he had admired in Damascus.⁴⁰ None of these kings needed a treatise to know they had crossed a line. The refrain across all of it is that God cares how he is worshiped, not only whom, and the record shows the cost of forgetting the difference.

IV. The Modern Controversy

The sharpest modern exchange runs between John Frame and T. David Gordon. Frame opened it in 1992 by affirming the principle and then unsettling it. He labeled the Reformed rule RP1, whatever is not commanded is forbidden, and its rival RP2, whatever is not forbidden is permitted.⁴¹ He granted three qualifications the confession already makes: good and necessary consequence loosens the demand for explicit command, circumstances fall outside the principle, and the mode or manner of an element is left open.⁴² Then came the turn. Frame placed all of life under RP1, arguing there are no true adiaphora, since even buying cabbage is to be done to the glory of God under 1 Corinthians 10:31. If everything is commanded in this broad sense, the wall between worship and the rest of life falls, and the eloquent semicolon of Westminster 20.2, which distinguishes worship from ordinary life, is misplaced.⁴³

Gordon's reply pressed a single correction. The regulative principle is an ecclesiological doctrine about the nature and limits of church power and the liberty of conscience. Its question was never worship as against the rest of life, but what church officers may require of the assembled saints as against what an individual may freely do.⁴⁴ He read Frame as having severed the doctrine from its matrix in the doctrine of the church, following Bannerman, Owen, and Clowney in tying it to church power.⁴⁵ Paul's practice makes the distinction: women silent in the churches yet free to speak at home, eating at home governed differently from eating in the assembly.⁴⁶ Gordon's reductio is memorable. Since Frame thinks buying cabbage is addressed by Scripture and done to God's glory, would he then make cabbage-buying a lawful element of worship and require it of the congregation? He noted, drily, that Frame can find biblical warrant for cabbage-buying but professes to find none for a sermon.⁴⁷ Frame's brief response declined to name his targets, insisted liberty of conscience holds in every sphere, and denied that his view licensed the church to require anything it pleased.⁴⁸ The fuller answer came fourteen years later.

That fuller answer, an appendix to Frame's Doctrine of the Christian Life, restates the whole argument with more patience and meets Gordon's charges by name. Frame introduces his own terminology here, worship in the "broad sense," the whole of life as a living sacrifice under Romans 12:1, against worship in the "narrow sense," the gathered service, and he denies flatly that folding the regulative principle into one covers both: "I am not saying that 'anything goes' in worship, or that we may do anything in a worship service that we may do outside it."⁴⁹ Public worship still answers to specific scriptural prescriptions for praise, prayer, teaching, and the sacraments; what he rejects is the claim that a separate, stricter regulative principle governs worship alone, distinct in kind from the one that governs changing a tire to the glory of God under 1 Corinthians 10:31, where Scripture gives no explicit instructions but still frames the act by faith, love, and the name of Christ.⁵⁰ On the categories themselves he is sharper than in 1992. The distinction between the substance of an element and the accident of a circumstance, he argues, is Aristotelian language smuggled into a doctrine that claims to rest on Scripture alone, and no one has produced a biblical text where God rebukes a worshiper for miscategorizing one as the other.⁵¹ He presses the point against the tradition's own showcase cases: the tabernacle's minute instructions never amount to a list of elements for synagogue or Lord's Day worship, and if a divinely itemized list is what the regulative principle actually requires, no one has ever produced one for either form of gathering.⁵² To Gordon's charge that denying the worship-life distinction would let a magistrate or a church require anything unforbidden, Frame answers that sufficiency was never a claim to exhaustiveness. Scripture is sufficient for the magistrate not by fixing a tax rate but by supplying every divine norm relevant to taxing justly, and the same holds for worship: general commands, applied by godly wisdom, not an exhaustive schedule.⁵³

The controversy widened when Gore published Covenantal Worship and Gordon reviewed it. Gore counts five approaches loose in the contemporary church: a pragmatic principle that asks only what works, a Roman Catholic "ecclesial" principle that trusts whatever the church decrees, the normative and regulative principles proper, and his own fifth way, a "covenantal" principle asking whether a practice is consistent with covenant faithfulness.⁵⁴ Gore's thesis is that the Puritan principle differs from Calvin's, and that its definition of circumstances is so narrow as to be unworkable.⁵⁵ He points to the way Girardeau and Thornwell defined circumstances, where a set form of prayer cannot count as a circumstance because it qualifies the act of prayer itself, and so becomes an element and is forbidden.⁵⁶ The sheer volume of ink spilled over what counts as a circumstance is, for Gore, evidence that the formula does not work.⁵⁷ He enlists Packer and Horton Davies as witnesses that the Puritan expression departed from Calvin.⁵⁸

Gordon answered that Gore had lost the categories. Working with only element and circumstance, and redefining circumstance as adiaphora, Gore had to treat every difference as elemental. The Apostles' Creed, the Gloria, the manner of communion, are matters of form and rubric, not element, and once those categories are restored the supposed gulf between Calvin and the Puritans shrinks to differences of form.⁵⁹ On the synagogue, which Gore made central, Gordon argued that it was a place of study and prayer rather than covenant worship, voluntary, without pledge of divine presence or sacrament, and so not a template for the Lord's Day assembly.⁶⁰ And Calvin, Gordon held, states the same principle the Puritans did, in the Institutes and the Necessity, so that the most Gore can show is a gap between Calvin's principle and his practice, not a different principle.⁶¹ Gore, replying, held his ground: the difficulty of drawing the line is not like the mystery of the Trinity or the two natures, which are clearly defined even where they are hard, but a genuine defect in the formula itself.⁶²

Samuel Waldron, writing as a Reformed Baptist, offers the most useful mediation. He concedes that the tradition has not stated the distinction well, and that the name regulative principle of worship says both too much and too little, too much in speaking of worship generally when the strict application belongs to the gathered church, too little in limiting to worship what also governs the doctrine, government, and tasks of the church.⁶³ But he defends the core against Frame. The gathered church is not the scattered church. Christ pledges a special presence where two or three gather in his name, where the church assembles, where an unbeliever entering may fall on his face and confess that God is among them.⁶⁴ The assembly is holy in a way the rest of life is not, and so is regulated in a way the rest of life is not.⁶⁵

V. The Principle and Sola Scriptura

The question underneath the whole debate is whether affirming the sufficiency of Scripture commits one to the regulative principle at all. Rhyne Putman answers no, and the answer turns on what sufficiency means. He distinguishes only-sourceism, the view that Scripture is the only source of knowledge about God, also called nuda scriptura or solo scriptura, from only-normism, the view that Scripture is the supreme source and the only norm, the norming norm that is not itself normed (norma normans non normata).⁶⁶ The Reformers held the latter, what James Leo Garrett called scriptura suprema, granting tradition, reason, and experience a real but subordinate place while denying that any of them stands as a second source of revelation.⁶⁷

The distinction matters because only-sourceism is what generates both strict principles. If Scripture is an exhaustive list, then either whatever is off the list is forbidden or whatever is off the list is permitted, and both readings assume the list is complete.⁶⁸ Only-normism entails neither. Putman's constructive proposal widens the question past command and prohibition to the intent of the biblical author and the pattern of divine revelation, and reads worship along three dimensions: the deontological duty to obey explicit commands and prohibitions, the teleological question of what an act serves, and the ontological concern for the character of the worshiper.⁶⁹

Waldron takes up the same challenge and answers it from within the confessional tradition. If the regulative principle simply is the sufficiency of Scripture, and Scripture is sufficient for all of life, why does the principle not govern all of life? His answer is that the confession restricts sufficiency to what is necessary for God's glory, salvation, faith, and the ordered life of the church, not to botany or mathematics.⁷⁰ Drawing on Meredith Kline, he argues that the canon is covenantal, given to order the corporate life of the covenant people, so that canon connotes community. The written canon emerged when Israel became a nation too large to be governed by one patriarch, and its purpose was to constitute and regulate the assembly.⁷¹ On this reading 2 Timothy 3:16 to 17 is not a charter for all of life but for the man of God equipped to order the church.⁷² The principle applies to the church because the canon was given for the church.

VI. Objections and the Synagogue

Waldron catalogs ten contemporary objections, and several are worth stating with their answers.

That the principle imposes a different rule for the church than for the rest of life. The answer is the gathered-scattered distinction and the special presence of Christ in the assembly, reinforced by the Christian Sabbath, where one day is holy in a way the others are not, and by the unique holiness of the church in 1 Timothy 3:15.⁷³

That it imposes a different hermeneutic. Here Waldron corrects a confusion shared by friend and foe. The regulative principle is not an interpretive principle at all but a governing one, so the talk of two hermeneutics, which Gordon accepted and others rejected, misdescribes the doctrine.⁷⁴

That it entails extreme applications, exclusive psalmody and the rejection of instruments. Waldron answers that principle and application are not the same, that the confessions which state the principle never teach either practice, and that the frequent historical pairing of two ideas does not make them logically joined.⁷⁵

That the church is patterned on the synagogue, which was unregulated, and not on the temple, which alone was regulated. This is the objection Gore and Steve Schlissel press hardest, arguing that Jesus worshiped in a synagogue of human origin and so could not have held the Puritan principle without sinning.⁷⁶ Two answers converge. Gordon's is that the synagogue was study, not covenant worship, and so raises no problem.⁷⁷ Waldron's is bolder: the synagogue is divinely appointed, grounded in the holy convocations of Leviticus 23, and its elements, prayer, praise, and the reading and explanation of Scripture, follow by good and necessary consequence.⁷⁸ And the church is in fact pictured throughout the New Testament as the new temple, so if temple worship was regulated, the conclusion is that the church is regulated too.⁷⁹ Frame takes a third position that undercuts the demand on both sides: nothing in Scripture supplies an explicit list of elements for the synagogue any more than it does for the "hours of prayer" mentioned in passing at the temple in Acts 3:1, so if a divinely itemized list is truly what the traditional view requires, the tradition has never produced one even for the forms of worship it treats as its strongest cases.⁸⁰ The objection, on his reading, proves too much for everybody, not merely too much for the regulativist.

A related objection presses further into Christ's own practice. He kept the Feast of Dedication, Hanukkah, a celebration with no warrant in the law of Moses, and Scripture elsewhere approves of Purim, a feast Esther and Mordecai instituted without any recorded word from Yahweh.⁸¹ Beeke and Smalley answer that both were occasional days of thanksgiving rather than binding elements of worship, precisely the category the Confession carves out at 21.5 for "religious oaths, vows, solemn fastings, and thanksgivings upon special occasions."⁸² A church may hold such a service so long as it is understood as a matter of edification and good order rather than a divine command binding every conscience, which is also why British and Dutch Reformed churches could apply the same principle and reach different verdicts on whether to keep Christmas and Easter on the calendar.⁸³ Christ's attendance at a feast, on this reading, no more endorses every human addition surrounding it than his attendance at the biblically mandated feasts endorsed every rabbinic elaboration layered onto those.

A different kind of objection targets not the categories but the temperament the doctrine seems to produce, the charge that regulated worship treats worshipers as disembodied souls, cold and rationalist, an inheritance from Neoplatonism or Stoicism rather than the gospel.⁸⁴ The charge gains what force it has from Christ's own words to the Samaritan woman, that true worshipers will worship the Father "in spirit and in truth," since God is spirit (John 4:23–24). Read carelessly, that could sound like a mandate for bare interiority, worship stripped of body and form. But the passage itself will not support the reading. Christ is abolishing a place, Jerusalem or Gerizim, not a body; the worship he describes flows from the living water of the Spirit poured out on flesh-and-blood people, and Reformed worship at its best has always engaged the whole person, the ear in hearing the Word, the eye and hand and mouth in the Supper, the voice in song, love exercised from the heart rather than merely reasoned about.⁸⁵ What in-spirit-and-truth worship excludes is not embodiment but self-manufactured religion, the eloquent speaker who pleases the mind without piercing the conscience, the ritual that delights the senses without renovating the affections, the show of devotion that props up a reputation rather than answering to God.⁸⁶ Simplicity is not sterility. It is worship with nothing left to hide behind.

That the principle requires an explicit command for everything. It does not; apostolic example and good and necessary consequence suffice, and no proponent has required a command for each detail.⁸⁷ That it demands every element in every service. It does not; Calvin observed the Supper far less often than he wished, and baptism requires a candidate.⁸⁸ That the relation of the two testaments is unclear. The types and shadows of temple worship are abolished in Christ, fulfilled at the well in John 4 and set aside in Colossians 2, so that what carries over is what is not ceremonial.⁸⁹

Waldron adds a striking illustration from the role of women in the assembly. Paul's directions that women keep silence in the churches and that men lead in prayer are explicitly tied to the gathering, three times over in 1 Corinthians 14 and again in 1 Timothy 2, and they forbid in the assembly what is permitted elsewhere.⁹⁰ The regulation is of the assembly as such, which is the whole burden of the doctrine.

VII. The Abuses on Both Sides

The doctrine is abused in two directions, and honesty requires naming both.

On one side lies legalism, the pressing of applications as though they were the principle. When exclusive psalmody and non-instrumentalism are made to follow necessarily from the regulative principle, an application is smuggled in as an entailment, and Waldron's own judgment is that these arguments are flawed even on the principle's own terms.⁹¹ The charge of will-worship becomes a weapon, and the demand for a proof text behind every act turns worship into the wooden exercise Frame warns against.⁹² The early Baptists show the social cost. Their consistency, Matthew Ward argues, was disintegrative; every practice thought to carry a mandate became a cause for separation, and Henry Jessey noted the inconsistency of insisting on the exact form of baptism while allowing variation elsewhere.⁹³ Gore's real target belongs here: a definition of circumstances so narrow that the church has no room to contextualize its worship as times change, which drives even its own advocates to invent escape routes.⁹⁴

On the other side lies pragmatic chaos, the normative principle drifting into what Gregg Allison and Gore call a pragmatic principle, worship governed by what works rather than what God has commanded.⁹⁵ Allison's own observation is that this is not a minority report; in the contemporary evangelical church the normative principle reigns by default, since congregation after congregation fights its worship wars without ever naming either principle, let alone arguing for one against the other.⁹⁶ Where someone has tried to name it, the results are telling. Mark Driscoll's attempted synthesis, a "missional worship principle," defines faithful worship as doing what God commands in Scripture and not doing what God prohibits in Scripture, in culturally contextualized ways for the furtherance of the gospel, which sounds disciplined until one notices it has smuggled the normative principle's own "not prohibited" clause back in under a missional label.⁹⁷ Aniol names the underlying error, the picture of the Bible as a list of permissions and prohibitions, so that anything off the list is a matter of indifference to God.⁹⁸ Putman drives it to absurdity. If Scripture must forbid a thing for it to be excluded, then nudist churches and worship conducted by rolling on the floor and making animal noises escape censure, which no serious proponent of either principle accepts.⁹⁹ The contemporary evangelical drift toward entertainment is the live form of the danger, worship that prizes enthusiasm over obedience.¹⁰⁰ Baptists are not exempt. Richard Pratt notes the ease with which modern Baptists serve the Supper in individual cups and wafers, far from the one loaf Paul drew theology from, while insisting on the precise form of baptism, a selective rigor that betrays how far the older consistency has slipped.¹⁰¹

VIII. A Case for Ordered Liberty

The way through is not to abandon regulation but to locate it rightly and to keep the categories the debate keeps collapsing. Elements are bounded by Scripture. Forms and rubrics must accord with biblical truth but are free within it. Circumstances answer to prudence. Mode leaves room for the Spirit. Held together, these guard against invention on one side and legalism on the other.

The most fruitful construction comes from Michael Farley, who distinguishes three hermeneutical models. The praxis-oriented regulative principle limits worship to what the New Testament explicitly commands or exemplifies, which is the strict Puritan approach.¹⁰² Farley judges it inadequate, since no New Testament book was written as a liturgical manual, and reading the whole New Testament as a new Leviticus both misuses those documents and excludes two-thirds of the canon.¹⁰³ The theologically oriented regulative principle warrants a practice by the biblical truth it embodies rather than by explicit attestation alone, and comes in a patristic-ecumenical form and a biblical-typological form.¹⁰⁴ The typological model has the greater merit. It reads the whole canon, drawing on the Old Testament through a Christological lens, and is more restrained than the patristic model because it moves from God-given practices rather than from general themes.¹⁰⁵

The typological reading yields what the debate badly needs, a biblical shape for the service that is neither a proof-texted list nor a free-for-all. Farley, following Meyers, Leithart, and Ross, finds in the sacrificial order of Leviticus 9 and the covenant-making of Exodus 24 a consistent sequence of covenant renewal, recontextualized for the church: God calls the assembly, cleanses it in confession and pardon, consecrates it and lifts it into his presence through the ministry of the Word, receives its offering of prayer and gift, communes with it at the table, and sends it out with blessing.¹⁰⁶ Because the church is the new temple and the body of the risen Christ, the covenant reality of tabernacle and temple is fulfilled not only in Christ but in the worship of the church, and the pattern carries over transformed rather than abolished.¹⁰⁷ The same structure, arrived at independently through the New Testament's own explicit commands rather than through typology alone, yields seven concrete acts: the public reading of Scripture, corporate prayer, the preaching and teaching of the Word, the singing of God's praise, the gathering of gifts for the saints and the poor, baptism, and the Lord's Supper, each with its own New Testament warrant and each finding its place somewhere in the sequence above.¹⁰⁸ This is structure with a warrant, an order drawn from the whole of Scripture rather than imposed by taste.

Structure of this kind also settles a question the debate too often leaves hanging, who is responsible for holding the elements and the freedom together in a single service. The temptation in many contemporary congregations is to split the difference organizationally, handing the sung praise and its accompanying elements to a "worship leader" who answers to no eldership and the preaching to a minister who does, as though the first half of the service were a different kind of act than the second. That division has no warrant. The whole gathering is priestly work offered in Christ's special presence, and Christ, the church's great High Priest, leads its praise through the officers he has appointed rather than through a bifurcated authority structure.¹⁰⁹ The elders who bear responsibility for teaching the Word are the same elders responsible for how the church sings it, prays it, and eats and drinks it at the Table, and a congregation that forgets this is not thereby freer. It has simply relocated its liturgical decisions from the session to whoever happens to hold the platform on a given Sunday, which is pragmatic chaos wearing a costume.

The same sources that supply the structure leave room for the Spirit. Putman notes that the New Testament is the founding document of the church but not a church-planting manual; its epistles are occasional, addressed to churches already established, and they model Spirit-led contextual ministry rather than a fixed order.¹¹⁰ The regulation is real, since Paul does set parameters, governing the Supper in 1 Corinthians 11 and tongues and prophecy in 1 Corinthians 14, but it is not a script.¹¹¹ Even the strict party concedes the freedom. Gordon grants that a minister may pray specifically for Mr. Smith's cancer surgery, which no text supplies, and may compose a sermon rather than merely read Scripture, because forms are not fixed to the words of the Bible.¹¹² Girardeau's own protest against a set liturgy, that to require it impeaches the office of the Holy Spirit who teaches us how to pray, cuts toward freedom as much as toward strictness.¹¹³ Christ told the Samaritan woman that true worshipers worship the Father "in spirit and in truth," and that phrase names the deepest ground of the freedom this argument has been describing all along: worship anchored in revealed truth and yet alive by the Spirit poured out on flesh-and-blood people, not a séance and not a script.¹¹⁴ Frame's insight about mode belongs here too. Song is less an element than a way of doing other things, praying, teaching, praising, so that the question is not what God commands us to sing but what he commands us to do in prayer and praise.¹¹⁵

The balance falls out on its own. The elements guard against chaos, because the assembly is no place to invent, and the commanded acts of Word, sacrament, prayer, and praise are not negotiable. The freedom in form, rubric, and mode guards against legalism, because the Spirit is not bound to a single wording and the church in every age must apply the pattern to its own moment. Gordon, the strictest voice in the exchange, pastored for nine years using an order that differed only in small details from Calvin's Strasbourg service, with weekly communion, corporate confession, and a weekly creed, and preferred it to the barer Puritan practice.¹¹⁶ The principle rightly held does not forbid a rich liturgy. It forbids an invented one.

IX. Conclusion

There is a horizon behind all of this that the debate over categories can make easy to forget. The church's worship, ordered as it is by texts and arguments, is not finally a merely earthly transaction. Because the church is united to the risen and ascended Christ, it is, in Paul's phrase, already seated with him in the heavenly places, and its Lord's Day gathering is a real if partial participation in the worship of heaven itself, the innumerable company of angels and the assembly of the firstborn before the throne.¹¹⁷ Clowney put the mystery as plainly as it can be put: in the Spirit, the church worships in heaven where Jesus is, and in the Spirit, Jesus worships on earth where the church is.¹¹⁸ That claim does not settle a single dispute about elements or circumstances. But it explains why the stakes have felt as high as they have to everyone in this argument, from Calvin to Waldron. Worship regulated wrongly, whether by human invention or by a legalism that forgets the Spirit, misrepresents not a preference but the very throne room it claims to approach.

Gordon ends his review with the sentence the whole tradition turns on: when the Christian assembly gathers in the presence of God, it should approach him only by means of his own appointment.¹¹⁹ Putman ends his essay with the complement: what finally matters is worship directed to the right object, for the right reasons, from the right heart, God-focused, Christ-exalting, Spirit-empowered, over any custom or tradition.¹²⁰ The two are not at odds. A church can order its worship by the pattern of covenant renewal, hold its elements to the warrant of Scripture, leave its forms and prayers open to the leading of the Spirit, and in doing so refuse both the cage and the carnival. The acceptable way was instituted by God. Within it there is more freedom than the legalist fears and more order than the pragmatist keeps.

 

Notes

1.       R. J. Gore Jr., "Covenantal Worship: Reconsidering the Critics," Westminster Theological Journal 67, no. 2 (2005): 365–66.

2.       Rhyne R. Putman, "Does an Affirmation of 'Sola Scriptura' Entail the Regulative Principle of Worship?" Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry 19, no. 2 (2022): 230.

3.       Scott Aniol, "Form and Substance: Baptist Ecclesiology and the Regulative Principle," Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry 15, no. 1 (2018): 23.

4.       Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 230, citing Ligon Duncan, Does God Care How We Worship? (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2020), 11–12.

5.       Aniol, "Form and Substance," 23.

6.       Westminster Confession of Faith 21.1, as cited in John Allen Delivuk, "Biblical Authority and the Proof of the Regulative Principle of Worship in The Westminster Confession," Westminster Theological Journal 58, no. 2 (1996): 238.

7.       Westminster Confession of Faith 1.6, as cited in Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 232–33.

8.       T. David Gordon, "Review Article: The Westminster Assembly's Unworkable and Unscriptural View of Worship?" Westminster Theological Journal 65, no. 2 (2003): 347–48.

9.       Gordon, "Unworkable and Unscriptural," 348–49.

10.    Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, vol. 4, Church and Last Things (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024), 418–20.

11.    John M. Frame, "Appendix: A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle," in The Doctrine of the Christian Life (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), 469–71.

12.    Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 230–31.

13.    John Calvin, The Necessity of Reforming the Church, as cited in Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 231.

14.    Heidelberg Catechism q. 96, as cited in Aniol, "Form and Substance," 23.

15.    Belgic Confession art. 32, as cited in Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 232.

16.    John Knox, "A Notable Sermon," as cited in Aniol, "Form and Substance," 24.

17.    Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 232.

18.    Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 240–41.

19.    Aniol, "Form and Substance," 30–31.

20.    Aniol, "Form and Substance," 26–28.

21.    Aniol, "Form and Substance," 28–29.

22.    Aniol, "Form and Substance," 29, citing Benjamin Keach, The Breach Repaired in God's Worship (London: Hancock, 1691).

23.    Aniol, "Form and Substance," 30.

24.    Matthew Ward, Pure Worship: The Early English Baptist Distinctive (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014), 139, as cited in Aniol, "Form and Substance," 31.

25.    Robert Harris, The Workes of Robert Harris, as cited in Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 241.

26.    Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 241; cf. Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 235.

27.    Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 242–44.

28.    Westminster Confession of Faith 20.2, as cited in Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 242.

29.    James Bannerman, The Church of Christ: A Treatise on the Nature, Powers, Ordinances, Discipline, and Government of the Christian Church, 2 vols. (1868; repr., London: Banner of Truth, 1974), 1:339–40, as quoted in Gregg R. Allison, Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 431–32.

30.    James Ussher, A Body of Divinitie, as cited in Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 244–45.

31.    Westminster Larger Catechism qq. 108–9, as cited in Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 245–46.

32.    Samuel Rutherford, The Divine Right of Church-Government, as cited in Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 246.

33.    Thomas Gataker, A Ivst Defence, as cited in Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 246–47.

34.    Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 247.

35.    George Gillespie, A Treatise of Miscellany Questions, as cited in Delivuk, "Biblical Authority," 248–49.

36.    Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:414–15, on Lev. 10:1–3.

37.    Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 239–40, drawing on Duncan, Does God Care How We Worship? 19–53.

38.    Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:413–14, citing Ex. 39:1, 5, 7, 21, 26, 29, 31, 43; 40:19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 32; and Lev. 8:4, 9, 13, 17, 21, 29; 9:7, 10.

39.    Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:415, citing 1 Chron. 13:6–10; 15:2, 13 (ESV).

40.    Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:415–16, citing 1 Kings 12:31–33; 2 Kings 16:10–16.

41.    John M. Frame, "Some Questions about the Regulative Principle," Westminster Theological Journal 54, no. 2 (1992): 357–58.

42.    Frame, "Some Questions," 358–59.

43.    Frame, "Some Questions," 361–63.

44.    Gordon, "Some Answers about the Regulative Principle," Westminster Theological Journal 55, no. 2 (1993): 322–23.

45.    Gordon, "Some Answers," 323, 328, citing James Bannerman, The Church of Christ, and Edmund P. Clowney.

46.    Gordon, "Some Answers," 323.

47.    Gordon, "Some Answers," 328–29.

48.    John M. Frame, "Reply to T. David Gordon," Westminster Theological Journal 56, no. 1 (1994): 182.

49.    Frame, "A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle," 464–65.

50.    Frame, "A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle," 464–65.

51.    Frame, "A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle," 469–71.

52.    Frame, "A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle," 473–74.

53.    Frame, "A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle," 480–81.

54.    Allison, Sojourners and Strangers, 429n41, summarizing Gore, Covenantal Worship, 9–10.

55.    Gore, "Reconsidering the Critics," 363–64.

56.    Gore, "Reconsidering the Critics," 369–70, citing John Girardeau, The Discretionary Power of the Church.

57.    Gore, "Reconsidering the Critics," 376–77.

58.    Gore, "Reconsidering the Critics," 364–65, citing Derek Thomas and, in turn, J. I. Packer and Horton Davies.

59.    Gordon, "Unworkable and Unscriptural," 349–50.

60.    Gordon, "Unworkable and Unscriptural," 346–47.

61.    Gordon, "Unworkable and Unscriptural," 350–52, citing Calvin, Institutes 4.10.24, 30.

62.    Gore, "Reconsidering the Critics," 376–77.

63.    Samuel E. Waldron, "The Regulative Principle of Worship: Contemporary Objections," Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies 3 (2016): 186.

64.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 187, citing Matt 18:20; 1 Cor 5:4; 14:23–25.

65.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 189.

66.    Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 235–36.

67.    Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 236–37.

68.    Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 237–38.

69.    Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 240, 242–43.

70.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 209–10.

71.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 212–14, drawing on Meredith G. Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972).

72.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 214.

73.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 188–89.

74.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 190–91, citing T. David Gordon and D. Scott Meadows.

75.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 191–92.

76.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 193–96, citing Gore, Covenantal Worship, and Steve Schlissel.

77.    Gordon, "Unworkable and Unscriptural," 346–47.

78.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 198–200, citing Lev 23:2–4.

79.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 197–98, citing 1 Cor 3:16–17; 2 Cor 6:16; Eph 2:21; 1 Pet 2:5; Heb 3:6.

80.    Frame, "A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle," 473–74.

81.    Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:416–17, citing John 10:22 and Est. 9:20–32.

82.    Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:417, citing Westminster Confession of Faith 21.5.

83.    Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:417n50, citing the Church Order of the Synod of Dort.

84.    Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:425, citing Gore, Covenantal Worship, 93–95.

85.    Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:425, citing John Owen, The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1862), 7:423–30.

86.    Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:422–25, citing Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, in The Complete Works of Stephen Charnock (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), 1:283, 299.

87.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 202–3.

88.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 203.

89.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 203–4, citing John 4:21–24; Col 2:16–17.

90.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 205–8, citing 1 Cor 14:33–35; 1 Tim 2:8–15.

91.    Waldron, "Contemporary Objections," 191–92.

92.    Frame, "Some Questions," 366.

93.    Ward, Pure Worship, 139, and Henry Jessey, as cited in Aniol, "Form and Substance," 31.

94.    Gore, "Reconsidering the Critics," 377–78.

95.    Allison, Sojourners and Strangers, 428–29.

96.    Allison, Sojourners and Strangers, 432.

97.    Allison, Sojourners and Strangers, 432n60, quoting Mark Driscoll, "Regulative Principle" (sermon, 2008).

98.    Scott Aniol, Sound Worship, as cited in Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 236.

99.    Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 236.

100.  Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 230.

101.  Richard L. Pratt Jr., "A Reformed Response," as cited in Aniol, "Form and Substance," 31–32.

102.  Michael A. Farley, "What Is 'Biblical' Worship? Biblical Hermeneutics and Evangelical Theologies of Worship," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 51, no. 3 (2008): 592.

103.  Farley, "What Is 'Biblical' Worship?" 610–11.

104.  Farley, "What Is 'Biblical' Worship?" 596–97.

105.  Farley, "What Is 'Biblical' Worship?" 612.

106.  Farley, "What Is 'Biblical' Worship?" 605–7, drawing on Jeffrey Meyers, Peter Leithart, and Allen Ross.

107.  Farley, "What Is 'Biblical' Worship?" 607–10.

108.  Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:420–22.

109.  Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:426–27.

110.  Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 240–41.

111.  Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 241.

112.  Gordon, "Unworkable and Unscriptural," 348–49.

113.  John Girardeau, as cited in Gore, "Reconsidering the Critics," 370.

114.  Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:422–23, on John 4:21–24.

115.  Frame, "Some Questions," 360.

116.  Gordon, "Unworkable and Unscriptural," 355–56.

117.  Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:427–28, citing Heb. 3:1; 4:14–16; 7:25–26; 12:22–24; Eph. 2:6, 18–22.

118.  Edmund P. Clowney, "Corporate Worship: A Means of Grace," in Give Praise to God: A Vision for Reforming Worship, ed. Philip Graham Ryken, Derek W. H. Thomas, and J. Ligon Duncan III (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2003), 96, as quoted in Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 4:427.

119.  Gordon, "Unworkable and Unscriptural," 356.

120.  Putman, "Sola Scriptura," 243.