The Regulative Principle: Cookie Cutter Worship?

 As a sort of follow up on Andrew’s earlier RPW (regulative principle of worship) post, I thought I’d mention Ligon Duncan’s helpful essays in Give Praise to God (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2003).  Duncan wrote chapter 1 (Does God Care How We Worship) and chapter 2 (Foundations for Biblically Directed Worship).  These were helpful for me as they set out the RPW clearly and positively “applied” the RPW.  Here are a few quick lines from chapter 1.  His main point, perhaps, as he paraphrases James Boice, is “Sing the Bible, pray the Bible, read the Bible, and preach the Bible in worship.”

“True Christian worship is by the book.  It is according to Scripture.  The Bible alone ultimately directs the form and content of Christian worship.” 

“God’s own character (who he is; his attributes) and word must govern our worship of God.”

Here are a few from chapter 2.

“Our doctrine of worship is an implication of our doctrine of God… the regulative principle is grounded in God’s character and not merely in some peculiarity of the Sinai covenant.”

“Often we hear, and agree with, the dictum that ‘we become like what we worship,’ but the Reformed understanding of worship teaches us that it is also true that ‘we become like how we worship.”

“The regulative principle is designed to secure the believer’s freedom from the dominion of human opinion in worship.”

Near the end of the essay, Duncan explains how the RPW leads to simple, biblical, transferable, flexible, and reverent worship.  I appreciated those, especially flexible and transferable.  This Bible-formed and normed (RPW) worship is “more culturally transportable for the work of missions than the more elaborate high-church forms or the more electronic and entertainment oriented forms of contemporary worship.” 

In other words, the RPW ”does not produce a cookie-cutter pattern.”  The proper understanding of it doesn’t mean we force everyone to sing Genevan or Scottish tunes, for example, but it does mean we sing Scripture.  The RPW doesn’t mean we force people to become traditionally/culturally like us (whether German or Dutch or Welsh), but it does mean the same Scriptures tell us how to worship no matter what tradition/culture we’re in.   The RPW will “look” a little different in each culture/tradition.

To end, here’s Duncan again.  “Do not let anyone tell you that historic [RPW] worship will not transfer or that it cannot work outside of Anglo-American culture or in the context of a postmodern generation.”

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Reforming Worship: According to the Word

This is a great book.  I’m sorry I put off reading it for a few years!  Phil Ryken, Derek Thomas, and Ligon Duncan edited Give Praise to God together as a festschrift for J. M. Boice, as sort of a tribute to Boice’s emphasis on worship according to the Word.  The structure of the book is 4-fold:  1) The Bible and Worship, 2) Elements of Biblical Worship, 3) Preparing for Biblical Worship, and 4) Worship, History, and Culture.

I especially liked Duncan’s first two chapters, which is basically a two part essay on the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW).  Here’s Duncan: “True Christian worship is by the book.  It is according to Scripture.  The Bible alone ultimately directs the form and content of Christian worship” (p. 20).

He goes on.  “The key benefit of the regulative principle is that it helps to assure that God – not man – is the supreme authority for how corporate worship is to be conducted, by assuring that the Bible, God’s own special revelation (and not our opinions, tastes, likes, and theories), is the prime factor in our conduct of and approach to corporate worship” (p. 24).  Duncan explains the RPW from the OT and NT in the last part of this (his first) essay.

He also has a penetrating discussion of idolatry and the RPW.  You’ll have to read the full essay, especially the golden calf section (cf. Ex 32), but here’s where he goes:  “…there are two ways to commit idolatry: worship something other than the true God or worship the true God in the wrong way.

I’ll stop here, and post more about this essay (and Duncan’s other one), as well as a few parts of the fine essays by Ryken and Thomas as well as Terry Johnson.  I may not blog on it for awhile, but to increase your curiosity, Robert Godfrey has a great article on worship and the emotions, Nick Needham has a good one on the church’s worship through the ages, and Mike Horton closes the book with a great discussion of modernism and postmoderism (“Challenges and Opportunities for Ministry Today”).

You’ll want this book if you need more “training” on the whats and hows of worship according to the Word.  Also, for our RR friends not in the Reformed/Presbyterian tradition, I’m pretty confident it would wrestle you around as you consider what God-honoring worship is all about.  Enjoy!

shane lems

sunnyside wa