Regulative Principle of Worship

History

Causes

The principle came out of a practical Reformation problem. Once the Reformers rejected the authority of the medieval church to bind consciences, they needed a rule for what to keep from its liturgy. Lutherans and the English settlement answered that ceremonies are adiaphora, indifferent things the church may order for good reason. The Reformed answered that worship is not an indifferent matter, because God has always specified how he is to be approached.

The texts are old. God tells Israel not to add to or take from what he commands (Deuteronomy 12:32), the tabernacle is built to a pattern given on the mountain (Exodus 25:9), and Nadab and Abihu die for offering fire the LORD “had not commanded them” (Leviticus 10:1–3). The golden calf supplies the sharper case, since Aaron proclaimed a feast to the LORD while making it (Exodus 32:5).

John Calvin argued the case in The Necessity of Reforming the Church (1544) and devoted a chapter of the Institutes to the impiety of giving God a visible form (1.11). The Heidelberg Catechism (Q96) puts the rule in the second commandment: God is not to be worshipped “in any other way than He has commanded in His Word.”

Influence

The principle became confessional in the Westminster Confession (21.1), which holds that God may not be worshipped “according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.” Through the Westminster standards it shaped Presbyterian, Congregational and Particular Baptist worship: plain buildings, no images, the sermon central, and in the strictest form exclusive psalmody sung without instruments.

It is also the reason Puritan and Scottish worship looked so different from Anglican worship with which it shared a language and a Bible, and the engine behind the vestments and ceremonies disputes that split English Protestantism.

Key ideas and contributors

God sets the terms of his own worship. The argument is not that ceremony is distasteful but that worship is an approach to God, and the one approached decides how. Every scriptural case of worship invented by the worshipper ends badly.

The second commandment governs how, not just what. The first commandment names who is worshipped; the second, on the Reformed reading, names how. That makes the rule a matter of the Decalogue rather than of taste.

Elements, circumstances, forms. The standard refinement distinguishes elements of worship, which must be commanded — reading and preaching the word, prayer, singing, the sacraments, oaths and vows — from circumstances like the hour of the service or the shape of the building, which are left to Christian prudence and “the light of nature” (Westminster Confession 1.6). Most disputes between Reformed churches are over which category something falls in.

Freedom of conscience. The principle was argued as a liberty, not a restriction: if the church may require in worship only what God requires, no synod can bind a believer’s conscience with a ceremony of its own making.

Other contributors: John Knox, who carried it into Scotland; the Westminster divines, who made it confessional; and in the modern period writers such as Sam Waldron and Ligon Duncan who have restated it for Baptist and Presbyterian churches.

Key controversies

The normative principle. Lutheran and Anglican churches hold the opposite default — what Scripture does not forbid, the church may order — and argue that Paul’s instruction that everything be done decently and in order (1 Corinthians 14:40) assumes a church with discretion to exercise. They add that the New Testament nowhere lays down a liturgy, which is awkward for a rule requiring prescription.

The line between element and circumstance. Critics say the distinction does the work the principle claims Scripture does. Hymns of human composition, musical instruments, choirs, projection screens and children’s talks have all been argued on both sides of it, and the Reformed world has split repeatedly over where it falls.

Exclusive psalmody. The strictest application holds that since God gave a book of songs, the church should sing it and nothing else. Most Reformed churches now sing hymns, which their stricter brethren read as the principle abandoned and they themselves read as the principle correctly applied.

Does the Old Testament evidence carry over? Nadab and Abihu served under a detailed ritual code that no longer binds. Opponents argue that drawing a rule for Christian worship from the ritual law is precisely the move the Reformed otherwise refuse to make. Defenders answer that the principle is about God’s prerogative, not about the ceremonies themselves.

What remains unresolved

Both sides agree that worship should be reverent and governed by Scripture rather than fashion. The unresolved question is whether silence in Scripture is a prohibition or a permission, and no argument from the text has settled it, because the question is about how to read silence.