15 comments

1. Heavens. The sad thing is most who read this will think its absolutely wonderful.

   • Ok, so aside from first saying ‘We are committed to the Bible as the only rule of faith and practice’ immediately followed by contradicting that statement with the whole culture and church history clause, is there something else I’m missing?

   • Jason,

     I don’t have any difficulty with their language about the church and tradition. It has a place when we consider how to implement the biblical instruction on worship. The great difficulty is that the one. The one era of church history that people tend to skip — or so it seems — is the 16th and 17th centuries when we formed and adopted our confessions.

2. Preach what?
   Where is the gospel?
   This is legalism.
   We honor God by proclaiming what Christ has done for us.

   • Andrew,

     I was not thinking of legalism. What makes you say that? This is only a short section from a much larger document.

   • I guess I was just looking at that last part and doing the commandments of God. So since I got myself in this mess, what is the issue, because I apparently don’t see it and you got me wondering. 🙂

3. “We do not do anything he forbids.” Then they do more than God commands.

   • Ding, ding, ding! Winner!

   • nothing more, nothing less, nothing else, as a friend of mine once put it

   • Nick,

     You’re just right:

     But the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshiped 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.

     WCF 21.1

4. Implicit is the idea that ‘We’ can improve on what God has asked, that we can do better than His standard.

5. There is no “only” in the “we do everything God commands.” They leave some wriggle room for those who want to introduce things in worship that are not strictly forbidden.

   • “We do not do anything he forbids.”

     That is the Lutheran/Anglican principle. The Biblical/Reformed principle is that we do only what God commands.

     I highlighted this passage because I hear this frequently articulated as if it were the Reformed principle.

6. Was going to say: An example of confusion of Regulative Principle and Normative Principle in an ignorant desire to be Reformed (?)

   • Alberto,

     I would omit the adjective but yes I agree that it is a confusion of the two principles. It illustrates the extent to which the normative has been confused for the regulative. I think this mistake happens frequently.

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