Puritan Papers: Vol. 3, 1963-1964

J. I. Packer

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781596387973
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Calvin is spotlighted in this volume, originally presented on the 400th anniversary of his death. Other chapters in this volume deal with the Puritan approach to worship and "things indifferent."

Part 1

Diversity
in Unity

1963

1

The Puritan Approach
to Worship

J. I. Packer

I formulated this title with some care, because I did not want to have to handle my subject controversially. Indeed, I looked forward to preparing this paper as a welcome relief from controversy, of which I have had my fair share during the past few months. It is sometimes said that Evangelicals are not interested in worship. If by worship one means the technicalities of liturgical study, this may be true. But I do not suppose that I am the only Evangelical who finds that the actual exercise of worship, the deliberate lifting of one’s eyes from man and his mistakes to contemplate God and His glory, grows increasingly precious as the years go by, and brings solace and refreshment to the spirit in a way that nothing else can do.

Certainly, this was the experience of the great Puritans; and what I want to do now is to allow them to share it with us, and lead us deeper into the enjoyment of it for ourselves. Hence my choice of the word “approach” in my title. We are to follow the Puritans in their approach to worship, which was, as we shall see, itself an approach to God. My main concern is thus not with the controversies about worship which divided the Puritans both from Anglican officialdom and from each other, but rather with the view of the nature of worship, and of the principles for practicing it, on which in fact they were all agreed.

The Externals of Worship

But their controversies about the formal and external aspects of worship were real and sustained, religiously motivated and passionately pursued, and to establish my right to pass them by in the body of my paper I must first deal briefly with them now. I shall not trace their historical details, nor take sides (for I do not want to start them all over again!), but I shall try to bring into focus the problems which occasioned them, so that we see just how much—and at some points, how little—divided the conflicting parties. The problems themselves, as we shall see, remain living issues for us today.

Three main questions lay at the root of all the arguing. They were as follows:

1. In what sense are the Scriptures authoritative for Christian worship?

It is usually said, that, whereas Luther’s rule in ordering public worship was to allow traditional things that were not contrary to Scripture and seemed helpful, it was Calvin’s rule to admit nothing that the Bible did not directly prescribe; and that the Church of England officially followed Luther’s principle, whereas the Puritans within its ranks espoused that of Calvin. This way of putting it gives the impression that Luther and the reformed Church of England did not regard Holy Scripture as constituting an authoritative rule for worship at all—which was, of course, the constant Puritan accusation right up to the Civil War. It also gives the impression that the Puritan critique of Anglican public worship represented a reversion to the principles and practice of Calvin at Geneva—which, to be sure, the Puritans themselves thought it was. But both impressions are misleading.

A truer way of stating the issue would be to say that the authority and sufficiency of Scripture in all matters of Christian and church life was common ground to both sides, but that they were not agreed as to how this principle should be applied. In other words, their disagreement related to the interpretation and contents of Holy Scripture, rather than to the formal principle of the nature and extent of its authority. This is how it was that all parties to the debate could believe that their own position was a biblically proper one.

German, Swiss, and English Reformers held common basic principles about worship. They agreed that Christian worship must express man’s reception of, and response to, evangelical truth, and they were substantially in agreement as to what that truth was. They agreed in analyzing worship as an exercise of mind and heart in praise, thanksgiving, prayer, confession of sin, trust in God’s promises, and the hearing of God’s Word, read and preached. They were in agreement also as to the nature and number of the gospel sacraments, and their place in the Church’s worship. They took the same view of the office of the Christian minister in leading the worship of the congregation. They agreed also that each church, or federation of churches (“every particular or national Church,” as Article 34 puts it) is responsible for settling the details of its own worship in accordance with the apostolic principle that all must be done “unto edifying” (1 Cor. 14:26), and that as a means to that end everything must be done “decently and in order” (14:40). Finally, they were all agreed that each church has liberty (the presupposition of its responsibility) to arrange its worship in the way best adapted to edify its own worshippers, in the light of their state, background, and needs; so that they all took it for granted that the worship of varied churches in varying pastoral situations would vary in detail.

The only real differences regarding worship between any of the first generation of Reformers were differences of personal judgment as to what would edify and what would not—differences of the kind reflected in Calvin’s judgment that the second (Edwardian) Prayer Book of 1552 contained multas tolerabiles ineptias (“many bearable pieces of foolishness”), or in the troubles at Frankfort in 1554, when the “Coxian” group of exiles adhered to the 1552 Prayer Book as being sufficiently sound and edifying, while the “Knoxians” felt obliged to abandon it in favor of an alternative order drawn up on the Geneva pattern.

The idea that direct biblical warrant, in the form of precept or precedent, is required to sanction every item included in the public worship of God was in fact a Puritan innovation, which crystallized out in the course of the prolonged debates that followed the Elizabethan settlement. It is an idea distinct from the principle that tainted ceremonies, which hide the truth from worshippers and buttress superstitious error, should be dropped, as both dishonoring God and impeding edification. On this latter principle all the English Reformers were agreed from the start, as the 1549 Prayer Book, Preface “Of Ceremonies” shows; though they did not succeed in agreeing as to its application, which was why in 1550 Hooper clashed with the authorities over episcopal vesture, and why in the 1560s those who were first called Puritans felt obliged to campaign against the Prayer Book requirement of surplices, wedding rings, baptizing with the sign of the cross, and kneeling at Holy Communion. But this new principle went further, declaring that no justification of nonbiblical rites and ceremonies in worship as convenient means to biblically prescribed ends could in the nature of the case be valid (in other words, that the line taken in the Preface “Of Ceremonies” was wrong); all ceremonies must have direct biblical warrant, or they were impious intrusions. The same principle was applied to church government.

The attempt to put the Puritan ideal of church life and worship onto this footing led to some curiosities of argument, such as the “proof” that two services a Sunday were obligatory, from Numbers 28:9–10, which prescribes two burnt offerings each Sabbath; or the “proof” that catechizing was a duty, from “hold fast the form of sound words” (2 Tim. 1:13); or the “proof” that liturgical forms were unlawful, from Romans 8:26, or the “proof” that the minister should stand in one place throughout the service from “Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples” (Acts 1:15); or the “proof” of the necessity of the controversial “prophesyings” (area preaching meetings, at which several ministers spoke successively on the same passage of Scripture), from 1 Corinthians 14:31 (“ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn and all may be comforted”). Much of this can be cogently defended, in terms of the principle that all things must be done unto edifying, but it is hard to regard these biblical arguments as anything like conclusive.

It should also be noticed that when the Puritans singled out some of the ineptiae of the Prayer Book as intolerable; when they challenged the principle that each church has liberty to ordain nonbiblical ceremonies in worship where these seem conducive to edification and reverence; when they repudiated all set prayers; when they rejected kneeling in public worship, the Christian year, weekly Communion, and the practice of confirmation; they were not in fact reverting to Calvin, but departing from him, though, as Horton Davies says,1 it is doubtful whether they realized this.

Even if they had realized it, however, it would not have affected their position; for their basic concern was not to secure Reformed solidarity, as such (much though they made of this idea in controversy), but simply to obey God’s authoritative Word. But the question at issue was: How should the sufficiency of Scripture be understood in connection with worship? The Puritans thought the official Anglican view on this point lax and wrong-headed; Anglican spokesmen like Hooker criticized the developed Puritan view as legalistic and irrational. Which was right? The question still presses today. Do we agree with John Owen that “God’s worship hath no accidentals . . . all that is in it and belonging to it, and the manner of it, is false worship, if it have not a divine institution in particular?” The problem is not simple, and much can still be said on both sides.

2. What regulations are proper for Christian worship?

There were, and are, three possible ways of ordering public worship: to have a set liturgy like the Book of Common Prayer, or a manual of general guidance like the Westminster Directory, or to leave it entirely to the individual minister or congregation to regulate its own worship at will. These alternatives are historically associated with Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Independents and Quakers respectively. Which now is preferable? How strong are the objections to each? Does liturgical worship necessarily breed formality and deadness? Is extempore prayer necessarily uneven in quality? Does it really make it harder for worship to be congregational than it is if a known form is being used? Does a regular order followed Sunday by Sunday quench the Spirit? Is it necessary, if a congregation would honor the Holy Spirit, for it to refuse to tie itself to an established pattern of worship, and simply at each meeting to wait on the Spirit for a fresh leading? On these issues, Evangelicals would differ now, as the Puritans differed in their day. Baxter, for instance, like Calvin and Knox, approved of a liturgy with room for extempore prayer at the minister’s discretion; but Owen maintained that “all liturgies, as such, are . . . false worship . . . used to defeat Christ’s promise of gifts and God’s Spirit.” Which was right? Here again, is an issue which is not simple, and cannot be regarded as dead.

3. What discipline is proper in connection with worship?

No doubt there would be general agreement that the attempts made under Elizabeth and the Stuarts to enforce strict national uniformity to the Book of Common Prayer were regrettable, and did more harm than good. Nobody, one hopes, would wish to defend the kind of discipline administered upon nonconformists by the Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber before the Civil War, and the judges and J.P.s of England during the years of the Clarendon Code. Yet a problem remains. Granted that the discipline we have mentioned was ungodly in its rigidity and disregard for tender consciences, is there to be no discipline in connection with public worship at all? Today, in some Protestant churches where set prayers are the rule, rituals and prayers from the Roman mass are introduced, and in others where extempore prayer is practiced, ministers are heard basing their public intercessions on the heresy that all men are God’s children. In both these instances worship is spoiled through the doctrinal aberration of the minister. Is there not need for discipline in such cases? But of what sort? What steps are appropriate today in face of such disfigurements as these? The problem exercised the Puritans in their day, and it will be well if it continues to exercise us in ours.

The Inner Reality of Worship

But these problems concerned the forms and externals of worship only, and our present interest is rather in the inner reality of worship, as the Puritans understood it. Here, wherever else they differed, they were at one, and the written material they have left us is completely homogeneous, as we shall hope to show by a fairly wide range of quotations. What is worship? It is, says John Owen, an activity designed to “raise unto God a revenue of glory out of the creation.” In the broadest sense of the word, all true piety is worship. “Godliness is a worship,” wrote Swinnock. “Worship comprehends all that respect which man oweth and giveth to his Maker. . . . It is the tribute which we pay to the King of Kings, whereby we acknowledge his sovereignty over us, and our dependence on him. . . . All that inward reverence and respect, and all that outward obedience and service to God, which the word (sc., godliness) enjoineth, is included in this one word worship.”2 Usually, however, the Puritans used the word in its narrower and more common sense, to signify all our communion with God: invocation, adoration, meditation, praise, prayer, and the receiving of instruction from His word, both in public and in private.

Worship must be, as our Lord said, “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). The Puritans understood this as meaning that, on the one hand, worship must be inward, a matter of “heart-work,” and, on the other, worship must be a response to the revealed reality of God’s will and work, applied to the heart by the Holy Spirit. Therefore they insisted that worship must be simple and scriptural. Simplicity was to them the safeguard of inwardness, just as Scripture was the fountainhead of truth. The austere simplicity of Puritan worship has often been criticized as uncouth, but to the Puritans it was an essential part of the beauty of Christian worship. This comes out in a pair of sermons by Owen on Ephesians 2:18, entitled “The nature and beauty of gospel worship,” in which the weightiest of all the Puritan theologians formulates to perfection the...