The Regulative Principle VS. Normative Principle Vortex of Pain
While I admire the intentions of the Regulative Principle as stated in the previous post, I think the regulative principle expects too much regarding worship services from the Bible from the git go (git is a word in Spartanburg, South Carolina) and then has to do all sorts of ducks and feints and back-flips to keep the comprehensive pretensions of RP propped up. The “use of musical instruments controversy” strikes me as an apt window into the inevitable cu-de-sacs endemic to RP. Again, the RP’s are right to listen hard to the Bible and try to do what it says. But I doubt it is saying as much as they imagine or think they need to have it say if biblical ministry is to take place.
Emerging? In his book Confessions of a Reformission Rev. Mark Driscoll at least could say “no commanded order of church service is to be found anywhere in Scripture, nor is any detailed example of a worship service from the first-century church,” which my colleague in New testament and expert in first century Greek papyri and inscriptions would concur with. The consequence of critiquing RP might be to open an unbiblical Pandora’s Box where preaching has to fight for its life but this need not be the result. Driscoll, in the same book, recounts his own strenuous effort to hear whatever guidance the Bible had to offer regarding church governance, which he thinks he found in some sort of elder rule.
Is it not clear that we should let the Bible regulate whatever it means to regulate but not more? Check out the scriptural support for Chapter 21 (the RP section) of the Westminster Confession. Virtually none of the passages read in context bear directly on the questions they supposedly answer. I suspect that at least two tendencies are at work here: 1. What Karl Barth calls an alien norm, an external question brought to the text which then the text is bound to deliver on and 2. the treatment of the Bible as a puzzle that the Puritan divines have largely put together for us. We have much to thank the Puritans for and the Westminster Confession is a gift to the church, but in this matter exegesis should trump and correct our theology.
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Emerging? In his book Confessions of a Reformission Rev. Mark Driscoll at least could say “no commanded order of church service is to be found anywhere in Scripture, nor is any detailed example of a worship service from the first-century church,” which my colleague in New testament and expert in first century Greek papyri and inscriptions would concur with. The consequence of critiquing RP might be to open an unbiblical Pandora’s Box where preaching has to fight for its life but this need not be the result. Driscoll, in the same book, recounts his own strenuous effort to hear whatever guidance the Bible had to offer regarding church governance, which he thinks he found in some sort of elder rule.
Is it not clear that we should let the Bible regulate whatever it means to regulate but not more? Check out the scriptural support for Chapter 21 (the RP section) of the Westminster Confession. Virtually none of the passages read in context bear directly on the questions they supposedly answer. I suspect that at least two tendencies are at work here: 1. What Karl Barth calls an alien norm, an external question brought to the text which then the text is bound to deliver on and 2. the treatment of the Bible as a puzzle that the Puritan divines have largely put together for us. We have much to thank the Puritans for and the Westminster Confession is a gift to the church, but in this matter exegesis should trump and correct our theology.
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regulative principle, elders, church, mark driscoll, westminster confession, normative principle, puritans, theology, religion, christianity
posted by Mark DeVine at 10:37 AM
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