Theopedia

Worship

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

— John 4:24 (ESV)

Definition

Worship is the reverence and service owed to God alone, rendered in the way he himself has appointed rather than in a way worshipers devise for themselves. Scripture requires this reverence on the ground of who God is: the only Lord and maker of all, “just, good, and doth good unto all,” to be “feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart and all the soul, and with all the might.”1 But it also insists, in the same breath, that not every sincere or reverent act qualifies: “the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, nor the suggestions of Satan… or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures.”1 This is the Regulative Principle of Worship: corporate worship is composed only of what God has commanded in Scripture, explicitly or by good and necessary consequence, not of whatever Scripture happens not to forbid. Because God is spirit, not a being with a location or a visible form, worship of him cannot be tied to a particular place or represented by images; it must be spiritual, “in spirit and truth,” as Jesus told the woman at the well (John 4:20-24).2

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession devotes its twenty-second chapter to worship, following the same formulation used earlier by the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration. Its opening paragraph states the regulative principle directly: acceptable worship “is instituted by [God] himself, and so limited by his own revealed will,” that it may not include anything “not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures.”1 The chapter then narrows the principle’s scope. Worship belongs to God alone, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to no creature, “since the fall, not without a mediator, nor in the mediation of any other but Christ alone.”3 Prayer is to be made in Christ’s name, by the help of the Spirit, “with understanding, reverence, humility, fervency, faith, love, and perseverance,” and, if vocal, in a known tongue.4 It is not to be made for the dead or for anyone known to have committed the sin unto death.5

Having stated the principle, the confession lists what it actually authorizes: “the reading of the Scriptures, preaching, and hearing the Word of God, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with grace in our hearts to the Lord; as also the administration of baptism, and the Lord’s supper, are all parts of religious worship of God, to be performed in obedience to him, with understanding, faith, reverence, and godly fear,” together with occasional fasting and thanksgiving.6 Worship is not confined to the gathered church: “in spirit and truth” describes private and family worship as much as public assembly, though the confession still requires believers not to neglect gathering together, “as the custom of some is.”7 The chapter closes by tying the Lord’s Day to worship as its own commanded circumstance: God has set apart one day in seven, now the first day of the week since Christ’s resurrection, as a Sabbath to be kept holy by resting from worldly labor and employments and devoting the day to worship and to duties of necessity and mercy.8

The distinction that runs under all of this is one many Reformed writers draw explicitly: God has commanded the elements of worship (the specific acts named above) while leaving their circumstances (the hour of the service, the building used, the order of items) to be settled by “the light of nature and Christian prudence,” so long as the church’s general rules for orderly conduct are kept.9 The regulative principle governs the first category, not the second; it does not require a chapter and verse for the time on the clock a congregation meets, only for what it does once gathered.

Biblical Basis

The regulative principle’s clearest single ground is the second commandment. Exodus 20:4-6 forbids not only the worship of false gods (the first commandment’s concern) but the worship of the true God by any “graven image” or humanly devised representation.10 Calvin reads the command as reaching further than physical idols: it “curbs the licentious daring which would subject the incomprehensible God to our senses,” and its second clause “forbids the worship of images on any religious ground” whatever the worshiper’s intent.11 Deuteronomy 12:32 states the same restriction as a positive rule rather than a prohibition of images specifically: “Whatever I command you, you shall be careful to do it; you shall not add to it or take from it.”

Colossians 2:20-23 extends the principle to the New Testament church. Paul rebukes the Colossian error not for irreverence but for the opposite: rules and ascetic practices that had “an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion [will-worship] and asceticism” (Col. 2:23), yet were of no value against the flesh precisely because they were self-made rather than commanded. Calvin treats this as decisive against any worship practice defended merely because it seems wise, humble, or harmless: “he knew that all fictitious worship is condemned in the Church,” regardless of how such traditions recommend themselves to the human mind.12 John 4:24 supplies the positive counterpart: because “God is spirit,” worship answering to his nature must be spiritual, not confined to a place, a building, or a physical form.2

Historical Development

Calvin’s polemic against “human inventions in religion” in the Institutes is the headwater of the Reformed application of the regulative principle.12 Writing against a medieval church that had multiplied ceremonies, vestments, and observances defended chiefly on the ground that Scripture nowhere forbade them, Calvin argued that the burden runs the other way: nothing may be added to worship on the strength of its not being prohibited, because worship answers only to what God has commanded.

The English and Scottish Reformed and Puritan traditions carried the principle into confessional form. The Westminster Confession (1646) stated it in chapter 21, and the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration (1658) and the Particular Baptist Second London Confession (1677/1689) each reproduced substantially the same chapter, differing from Westminster mainly on matters of church government and the sacraments rather than on worship itself.13 The Particular Baptists who framed the 1689 confession stood within this same Puritan insistence that only what Scripture commands may be brought into the church’s worship, applying it alongside their distinctive convictions about the church’s membership and baptism.

Opposing Views

The regulative principle is commonly set against the Normative Principle of Worship, the historic position of the Lutheran and Anglican traditions (and, in a looser form, of much of evangelicalism outside confessionally Reformed and Baptist churches). On this view, worship should include what Scripture commands, but it may also include anything Scripture does not forbid, provided it serves good order and edification. Practices are treated as adiaphora, matters of no binding spiritual consequence, to be settled by the church’s own prudence rather than required by a specific biblical warrant. Bavinck illustrates the difference with the communion table: where the Reformed removed the altar as an unwarranted holdover from the sacrificial theology it implied, “the Lutheran Church kept the altar, regarding the matter an adiaphoron,” and the Anglican church moved further still toward the older sacrificial pattern.14 The normative principle does not, on its own terms, abandon Scripture as worship’s rule; it simply locates the boundary at what Scripture forbids rather than at what it commands, and treats a wider range of forms, vestments, liturgical calendars, instrumental arrangements, as within the church’s own discretion.

Objections and Responses

Objection: the regulative principle proves too much. Taken strictly, would it not rule out pulpits, hymnals, church buildings, or microphones, none of which Scripture commands?

Response: this objection trades on the distinction the confession itself draws between elements and circumstances.9 The regulative principle binds the church to commanded elements of worship, reading and preaching the Word, prayer, singing, the sacraments, not to every incidental means of carrying them out. A pulpit and a microphone are circumstances that serve the commanded element of preaching; they are not themselves new elements of worship, and Christian prudence, not a specific text of Scripture, governs them.

Objection: doesn’t the second commandment concern idolatry specifically, images of false gods, rather than the broader question of worship practices generally?

Response: Hodge answers that the two commandments address different objects. The first “forbids the worship of any other being than Jehovah”; the second forbids “the worship of any visible object whatever,” including images of the true God himself.10 The Israelites who worshiped Jehovah under the form of a golden calf (Exod. 32) broke the second commandment precisely while intending to keep the first; the text does not read their sin as merely worshiping a false god by accident.

Objection: singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs together with uninspired hymnody, using musical instruments, or observing a fixed liturgical calendar are common in many Reformed and Baptist churches today. Doesn’t that practice concede the normative principle in fact, whatever the confession says in theory?

Response: this is a live dispute within regulative-principle churches themselves rather than a rejection of the principle. Advocates of exclusive psalmody or unaccompanied singing argue that Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 warrant psalms and inspired song but not later compositions or instruments; advocates of broader hymnody and instrumental accompaniment argue that “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” already names a category broader than the Psalter, and that instruments fall under circumstance rather than element. Both sides argue from what they take Scripture to warrant, which is itself evidence that the debate is being conducted on regulative-principle terms, not normative-principle ones.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 1. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 2. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 3. ↩

  5. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 4. ↩

  6. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 5. ↩

  7. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 6. ↩

  8. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 7. ↩

  9. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 6. ↩ ↩2

  10. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), chap. 19, “The Law,” 288-289. ↩ ↩2

  11. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 2, chap. 8. ↩

  12. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 10, 422. ↩ ↩2

  13. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “History and Literature.” ↩

  14. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩