Theologia et Vita

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 do...

The Gnostics who occupied Irenaeus's attention in the late second century had a characteristic move when pressed on Scripture: they would concede the text, then dissolve it. The writings were ambiguous, they said, or corrupted, or useful only to those already initiated into the oral tradition their teachers preserved. Irenaeus had watched this happen enough times to name it plainly in Against Heresies 3.2.1, written around 180 A.D. — these men, when "confuted from the Scriptures, turn round and accuse these same Scriptures, as if they were not correct, nor of authority." The move was familiar then. It is familiar now, though the vocabulary has changed. What made Irenaeus's response to this significant was not its forcefulness but its structure. He did not answer the Gnostics primarily by appealing to episcopal authority or to liturgical tradition, though he valued both. He answered them by going back to the text. His argument in 2.30.6 is almost blunt about it: ...

Guardrails for Theology: Paul’s Prohibition Against Exceeding Scripture in 1 Corinthians 4:6 J. Neil Daniels When Paul tells the Corinthians “not to go beyond what is written” (1 Cor. 4:6), he is drawing a firm line for the boundaries of both theology and church authority. His words were not spoken in a vacuum. The Corinthian congregation had begun to elevate certain leaders above others, dividing into camps based on personal allegiance rather than their shared allegiance to Christ. In recalling “what is written,” Paul directs them back to the Hebrew Scriptures (what we now call the Old Testament) which, following the example of Christ and the apostles, the early church received as God’s authoritative Word. His concern is clear: every theological conclusion and every ecclesiastical practice must rest on the solid ground of Scripture, not on the shifting sands of human speculation or the allure of novel ideas that cannot be substantiated from the text. The Greek phrase τὸ μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγρ...

Recovering the Rightful Role of Tradition: Oliver Crisp and the Hierarchy of Authority J. Neil Daniels The Misuse of Sola Scriptura The phrase sola Scriptura has carried a lot of baggage it was never meant to bear. The Reformers weren’t tossing tradition overboard, as if the centuries of faithful reflection counted for nothing. What they were doing—if we actually read them carefully—was staking a claim that Scripture stands as the supreme, final authority. Not the only voice in the room, but the voice that settles the matter when disputes arise. But here’s where things get messy. Certain sects and fringe groups—Socinians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others—took the principle and twisted it into something more like solo Scriptura (to borrow Keith Mathison’s phrase). That is, Scripture isolated from the historic church, torn away from the corporate memory of the saints. In that scheme, my own reading of the text, however eccentric, becomes just as binding as the testimony of generations....