Liturgy

Liturgy is a fixed, prescribed order of worship, typically set prayers, readings, and responses a congregation follows rather than composes anew each time it gathers. Whether any such form may be imposed as binding, not merely used, is where Christian traditions divide. Traditions governed by the normative principle of worship treat a written liturgy as a legitimate circumstance of worship, left to the church’s own prudence. The Reformed and Baptist tradition, governed by the regulative principle instead, has historically resisted a liturgy imposed as though it carried an authority Scripture itself never gave it.

Confessional Witness

Neither the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession nor its Westminster and Savoy forerunners devotes a chapter to liturgy as such. A fixed order of service falls under what the confession calls a “circumstance” of worship rather than a commanded “element,” left to “the light of nature and Christian prudence,” the same elements/circumstances distinction worship’s own chapter on religious worship draws.¹ The Puritan tradition pressed that same distinction directly against the Book of Common Prayer.

Historical Development

The Puritan directories and the 1662 Act of Uniformity

Before England’s Great Ejection of 1662, English Puritan congregations did not reject written aids to worship outright; they used “several different church directories of worship to help structure their public worship services.”² What they resisted was a single liturgy imposed by civil and ecclesiastical authority as mandatory for every congregation, the role the Book of Common Prayer had held since the Elizabethan settlement. After 1662 stripped Puritan ministers of their livings for refusing to conform to that Prayer Book, congregations that continued outside the established church “simplified their worship services even more and began to not use a specific liturgical criterion.”² Leland Ryken frames the wider Puritan instinct behind this shift: “Given the context of Catholic/Anglican extravagance in public worship, the whole thrust of Puritan worship was toward getting rid of the clutter and focusing on the essential.”³

Owen’s Discourse Concerning Liturgies

John Owen made the case against imposed liturgy at length in the same year as the Great Ejection, in A Discourse Concerning Liturgies and Their Imposition (1662).⁴ Owen held that “the strict structure and regiment” of a mandatory liturgy suppressed the experiential communion a congregation was meant to have with God in worship, and that requiring it went beyond what God himself had authorized.⁵ His own catechism on worship states the underlying principle: the “ways and means” of worship “depend merely on God’s sovereign pleasure and institution,” so that no human authority may add its own inventions “unto what he hath appointed,” the Book of Common Prayer included by Owen’s own name for it.⁶ Owen found the positive alternative in Scripture itself, which “contains a full and perfect revelation of the will of God as to his whole worship and all the concernments of it,” making the Bible, rather than a set book, the church’s liturgical standard.⁷ Horton Davies summarizes the Puritan conviction this rested on: “the Puritans were the champions of the authority of the ‘pure Word of God’ as the criterion not only for church doctrine, but also for church worship and church government.”⁸

Opposing Views

Churches governed by the normative principle of worship, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran among them, have historically treated a fixed liturgy as a legitimate and often treasured circumstance of worship: a received, tested form that guards against novelty and unites a congregation across time rather than an unwarranted addition to what Scripture commands. On this view, the absence of a specific biblical command for a given prayer or responsive reading does not disqualify it, provided it serves good order and does not contradict Scripture.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t rejecting a fixed, prescribed liturgy leave congregational worship disordered, since no two services follow identical words? The Puritan and Reformed answer locates order in Scripture itself rather than in a set book. Owen’s own catechism grounds worship’s “ways and means” entirely in what God has revealed, not in a congregation’s freedom to do as it pleases; Scripture read, preached, and prayed under the Spirit’s help was, on this view, sufficient to keep worship “in a holy, evangelical manner” without a mandatory script.⁷ For Owen, the freedom in view was freedom from an imposed human book, still governed by Scripture’s own order.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 6. ↩
Jacob Boyd, “John Owen’s Theology of Public Worship,” Themelios 49, no. 2 (2024): 357. ↩ ↩²
Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), 119-20, quoted in Boyd, “John Owen’s Theology of Public Worship,” 357. ↩
John Owen, “A Discourse Concerning Liturgies and Their Imposition,” in Church Purity and Unity, The Works of John Owen, vol. 15, ed. William H. Goold (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1991), 8, cited in Boyd, “John Owen’s Theology of Public Worship,” 357. ↩
Boyd, “John Owen’s Theology of Public Worship,” 357-58. ↩
John Owen, “A Brief Instruction in the Worship of God,” in Church Purity and Unity, The Works of John Owen, vol. 15, 449, quoted in Boyd, “John Owen’s Theology of Public Worship,” 358-59. ↩
Owen, “A Brief Instruction in the Worship of God,” 450, quoted in Boyd, “John Owen’s Theology of Public Worship,” 359. ↩ ↩²
Horton Davies, The Worship of the English Puritans (Grand Rapids: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1997), 49, quoted in Boyd, “John Owen’s Theology of Public Worship,” 358. ↩