Scripture And “ Things Indifferent”
2
SCRIPTURE AND
“THINGS INDIFFERENT”
Iain Murray
In 1522 at the Manor House at Sodbury, in Gloucestershire, William Tyndale laid the foundation principle of English Protestantism when he confronted the ecclesiastics who gathered around the dinner table of Sir John Walsh with what John Foxe calls “open and manifest Scripture.” Four years later the same principle began to be applied to leaven the whole nation with the secret arrival from Flanders of the first printed New Testaments in English and Tyndale, the translator, now a hunted exile, justified his illegal action in these terms: “I perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes. . . . God hath put a rule in the Scripture, without which thou canst not move an hair of thine head, but that it is damnable in the sight of God.”1
At the price of great suffering Protestantism won its way in this country, not because of the superior numbers or learning of its adherents, but because through the Scriptures rivers of spiritual life had been opened up, so that instead of the teaching and traditions of a corrupt Church, men and women were hearing the words of the living God. When Tyndale’s friend, John Rogers, was tried before his martyrdom, one of his Catholic judges declared: “Thou canst prove nothing by the Scripture: the Scripture is dead and must have a lively exposition.” At which Rogers exclaimed, “No, no, the Scripture is alive.”
It is this conviction which explains why Christians endured so much at the beginning of the Reformation to translate and spread the Bible: they knew that here alone are the words of eternal life and that man can only live as he receives every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God. Scripture is the voice of God, and whether or not we are the subjects of God’s blessing or wrath may be experimentally determined by whether or not we reverence and obey what is written in Scripture. To be without Scripture is to be without God and without hope in the world. Moreover, Scripture is the only infallible record we have of the will of Christ. Prior to the Reformation, Englishmen had no means of telling what had the approbation of Christ, because, as John Hooper wrote in 1547, “he that had sought all the churches in England before the sixteen years, should not have found one Bible.” It was only when Scripture was reopened that Anti-Christ, who previously had been disguised as “the best Christian man,” was found to be in possession of the professing Church. And when this apostate Church turned in wrath upon its would-be reformers, those who suffered for their faith in Scripture had no doubt that they were dying in the cause of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Questions at Issue
The question of the authority of the Bible, raised at the outset of the English Reformation, was not, however, immediately settled. It was not settled when there was an official acceptance of Protestantism in the reign of Edward Vl (1547–1553), nor was it settled after the Marian terror by Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity in 1559; rather the reign of Elizabeth witnessed the emergence of a Puritan movement within professing Protestantism and the whole driving force of this movement was the conviction that the full authority of the Word of God had not yet been accepted by the English Church. The struggle which ensued in the following hundred years was not merely a Puritan attempt to secure alterations in clerical dress, or religious ceremonies, or externals of church order as such: it lay deeper than all these particular issues.
The Puritans claimed that the Scriptures are not only a full revelation of the Gospel of Christ but also that they contain all things necessary for the government and worship of His Church. They believed it to be a fundamental principle that just as no spiritual teaching is to be accepted which is not found in Scripture, so nothing of spiritual significance is to be added to the Church beyond what is warranted by the written Word. This principle—the regulative principle of Scripture, as it was later called—they held to be bound up with the Bible’s own teaching about its authority and upon the basis of this principle they laid down their whole policy for the reformation of the Church in two major propositions:
1. Everything introduced into the Church without scriptural sanction is unlawful.
2. The form of the visible Church in the New Testament is permanently binding upon all generations of Christians.
Against these propositions the defenders of the Elizabethan Church settlement, notably John Whitgift (c. 1530–1604) and Richard Hooker (c. 1554–1600), formulated two counter-propositions:
1. They alleged that the Puritans had misconceived the intention of Scripture: while the Bible is binding in all matters relating to salvation, it did allow liberty to the Church to introduce “things indifferent” (adiaphora was the technical term), that is to say, things which were not forbidden by Scripture and things which Christian prudence might suggest to be beneficial to the government or worship of the Church in certain circumstances.
2. They denied that the pattern of the New Testament Church was permanently obligatory on the grounds that the information which the Scriptures give us on this subject is not sufficient, as the Puritans claimed, but incomplete and indecisive, suggesting that Christ did not intend any one form of Church government to be of Divine authority.
Preliminary Observations
Before we turn our attention to what is involved in these conflicting statements, let me make a few preliminary comments:
1. The Puritan teaching on the regulative principle of Scripture is almost as obsolete in England as the teaching that the earth is flat. Since the last forty years of the seventeenth century when the idea of any Church government by “divine right” was scouted and laughed out of court, evangelicals and nonevangelicals alike have generally concurred in regarding the Puritan position as naive and untenable. The only persons whom the recent Methodist-Anglican Report could muster to support the idea that “the Church may only do what is explicitly affirmed and commanded in Holy Scripture” are Reformation radicals, Anabaptists, and Puritans of the seventeenth century.2 All that we need here say of this attitude is to observe that it is not based upon any refutation of the Puritan position. What John Owen wrote to Samuel Parker in 1669 is still true. Parker, a staunch upholder of the Act of Uniformity of 1662, attacked the regulative principle as “the foundation of all Puritanism,” but in reply to his arguments Owen declared that Parker had used “no engines but what have been discovered to be insufficient to that purpose a hundred times.” Owen quotes Parker’s chief argument in these words, “What the Scripture forbids not, it allows; and what it allows is not unlawful; and what is not unlawful may lawfully be done.” “This tale, I confess, we have been told many and many a time,” says Owen, “but it hath been as often answered that the whole of it, as to anything of reasoning, is captious and sophistical.”3 Despite three centuries of declamation, if the Puritans’ works on Church polity were reopened, justification would be found for Owen’s assertion.
2. At first sight it might appear that Puritan teaching on this issue has no urgent relevance to our contemporary situation. Someone might say, “What is the use of our discussing the extent of the authority of Scripture when what is really challenged today is whether the Bible has any final authority at all?” The Puritan answer to such a question would be that it suggests a man-centered assessment of the situation: the rejection of the inerrancy of the Bible by the modern world is a problem to evangelicals, but there is a more fundamental problem, and that is, “Why are we not enjoying more of the manifest favor of God upon our churches?” In the light of that question it is by no means irrelevant to ask, “To what extent does God intend His Word to be our sole guide and rule? Is Scripture regulating our Church life today to the extent which Christ wills that it should?”
It is not impossible that we have been so preoccupied with defending the Scripture that we have not been sufficiently fearful lest we should fail to obey the Word ourselves. The Puritan’s first deduction from his belief that Scripture is the voice of God was that he would be personally accountable to the Lord with regard to all that His Word contains. “While we have Christ’s Word for the things we do or refuse to do,” says Henry Barrow, “we need not fear the threats of any vain men; neither be amazed at any vain titles of church, sacraments, etc. For this we know, that there is no church can excuse us for the breach of God’s law before that great Judge.”4
We shall not recapture the spirit of this quotation until we re-examine our whole view of Scripture. A renewed study of the regulative principle at the present time would not be a musty theological excursion into the problems of some bygone era; rather, it would confront us with the very test which our modern Christianity needs, and it would throw our minds forward to that Day when all our deeds done in the body will be judged by the rule of Scripture: “Our whole preaching must be Scripture proof,” says Thomas Brooks, “or we and our works must burn together.” The Puritans show us how personal responsibility must at once follow a belief in Scripture infallibility.
3. Another reason why this subject is relevant to us is that it forces us to consider where the boundary lies between a lawful practice of expediency and a sinful compromise: in other words, what is the point at which Scripture ceases to be our only guide and leaves us to devise new forms and methods according to the circumstances in which we are placed? We are entering an era when church traditions of all kinds are breaking down, and experiments are increasingly being called for in evangelism, worship, and church government. New departures in music, religious drama, and visual aids are all being made and some churches have already gone so far as to substitute a film for a sermon on Sunday evenings. The fundamental question surely is, How far does the Scripture allow all this? There is no disagreement about the fact that the exercise of prudence, wisdom, and common sense are Christian duties; the disagreement between ourselves and the Puritans is that we have acted as though there is a wide area of church practice which lies outside the scope of the New Testament. They drew the line between legitimate expediency and disobedience at a different point from that at which we draw it. As evangelicals we have been inclined to believe that wherever our failure lies, it does not lie in our disobedience to Scripture. But if the Puritan teaching on the regulative principle is true, it places our conduct in a different light.
Essentials and Nonessentials
Before we leave these observations one further question must be raised. It will be seen that if the Puritan teaching on the regulative principle is given prominence, then inevitably the question of our practice in church order, government, and worship assumes an importance which it has not been customary for evangelicals to give to it. We may therefore be predisposed to conclude, with Whitgift, that the Puritans, by calling attention to external matters and to issues not “essential to salvation,” were not rightly distinguishing between fundamentals (the Gospel and the doctrines of the faith) and secondary issues. Whitgift told Cartwright that the tendency of the Puritan policy was to bring about “the overthrow of the gospel through contention about external things. . . . Surely, if they be matters ‘necessary to salvation,’ then is there some just cause of breaking the peace of the church for them; but, if they be matters of no such weight, then can you not excuse either yourself or them.”5 In similar vein Bishop Hall declared that it was “a thousand times better to swallow a ceremony than to rend a church.”
Richard Hooker used this same distinction between essentials and nonessentials in replying to the Puritan charge that the Elizabethan Church settlement did not accept the authority of Scripture in its entirety. He claimed that to reject the Puritan view of biblical authority in no way denied “the absolute perfection of Scripture,” because God designed Scripture to be “a full instruction in all things unto salvation necessary . . . so the Scripture, yea, every sentence thereof, is perfect, and wanteth nothing requisite unto that purpose for which God delivered the same.”6 Such things as ceremonies, order, discipline, and government, Whitgift and Hooker asserted, are distinct from the Gospel and matters of faith, and by alleging the need of scriptural authority on issues not necessary for salvation the Puritans were guilty of “racking and stretching” the Bible to cover areas over which God never intended it to give definite instruction.
We can only briefly indicate the nature of the Puritan reply to this charge. They held that the one foundation upon which a sinner’s salvation depends is the truth concerning the Person and Work of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 3:11). Yet there are also a number of other truths plainly revealed in Scripture which cannot strictly be said to be “necessary for salvation,” for a man may misapprehend them or be misled over them and yet be saved. “I doubt not but divers of the fathers of the Greek church,” says Cartwright, “which were great patrons of free-will (at least as their words pretend) are saved, holding the foundation of the faith, which is Christ.”7 Whitgift struggles to avoid this (chiding Cartwright for “speaking so dangerously”) because the argument breaks down his premise that the Scriptures only speak clearly on what is “necessary for salvation.” As an orthodox Elizabethan Protestant he has to agree that the Scripture is decisive against free-will. And so, if Cartwright is correct, the Bible speaks authoritatively on what is a “nonessential”—nonessential, that is according to Whitgift’s definition, namely, not necessary for salvation. Whitgift cannot accept this conclusion and instead replies that if a person dies in the opinion of free-will he cannot be saved.
To the Puritans, Whitgift was trying to maintain a distinction which could not be maintained. And they regarded their opponents’ habit of discriminating between essentials and nonessentials as a dangerous procedure. Dangerous, not because it claimed to exalt Christ and the Gospel to the supreme place, but because it failed to emphasize that the New Testament offers no safety to those who knowingly neglect the least of Christ’s commandments. Samuel Rutherford says:
We urge the immutability of Christ’s laws, as well in the smallest as greatest things, though the commandments of Christ be greater or less in regard to the intrinsical matter, as to use water in baptism, or to baptise is less than to preach Christ, and believe in him, 1 Cor. 1:17. Yet they are both alike great, in regard of the authority of Christ the Commander, Matt. 28:18–19. And it’s too great boldness to alter any commandment of Christ for the smallness of the matter, for it lieth upon our conscience not because it is a greater or a lesser thing . . . but it tieth us for the authority of the law-giver: Now God’s authority is the same when he saith, You shall not worship false gods, and when he saith, You shall not add of your own one ring or pin to the Ark, Tabernacle, Temple, yea, either to break or teach others to break one of the least of the commandments of God, maketh men the least in the Kingdom of God, Matt. 5:18.8
It is true that a person may be saved by grace who through the influence of circumstances and wrong teaching has not been able to see all that Scripture requires concerning the Church; the Puritans never made correct views on Church polity the test of saving grace. But their recognition that not all revealed truths are foundation-truths without which none is saved, does not mean, as Henry Barrow points out, that we may make “some doctrines and some part of Christ’s Testament fundamental and substantial, others accidental and such as may be altered and violate without any prejudice or danger to the soul.”9 The fact that a man may be defective in knowledge and practice, and yet be saved through being on the foundation which is Christ, provides no warrant for dividing up Scripture into essentials and nonessentials—placing rules concerning the visible church in the second category, as though they could be safely left unkept.
John Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, makes the following observations on this distinction about essential truths:
Howsoever, I do acknowledge a difference of truths, and that some are more, and some less principal, yet do I wish more conscience in the application of this distinction. For although the ministers and people in the English Church are limited in their obedience to the New Testament by civil and ecclesiastical laws, this is made a salve for every sore, that they have the substance of the gospel, the doctrine of faith, all fundamental truths and whatsoever is necessary to salvation. In which defence (as it is made) there are these evils.
1. In it men not only endeavour, which is too much, the curing of Babel [i.e., the established Church], but indeed to make Babel believe she stands in no great need of curing: and that her wounds are neither deadly, nor dangerous.
2. It tends to vilify and make of small moment many of the Lord’s truths, and ordinances. . . .
3. This pleading by the ministers that they hold and enjoy every fundamental truth, and whatsoever is of necessity to salvation, considering the end of it, which is, the stopping of the people from pressing unto further obedience and profession of the will of God and ordinances of Christ, is injurious both to the growth and sincerity of the obedience of God’s people . . . it insinuates that it is sufficient if men so serve God as they can obtain salvation, though with disobedience of a great part of the revealed will of God: occasioning them thereby to serve him only, or chiefly for wages as hypocrites do. As if a child should be taught so far to honour and please his father as he might get his inheritance, but not much to trouble himself about giving or doing any further honour or service.10
It was a travesty of the Puritans’ position for Whitgift to say that Cartwright counted “external government more precious than the doctrine of faith.”11 The history of Elizabethan Puritan evangelism makes such a charge ludicrous. What the Puritans did say was that the right ordering of the Church cannot be disconnected from the Gospel: “God hath not only ordained that the word should be preached, but hath ordained also in what order and by whom it should be preached.”12 They were convinced that when God’s order is violated the Gospel itself will soon be perverted. Thus Tyndale asserts that it was when bishops and hierarchy arose in the Church that “the plough went awry; the Scripture waxed dark; Christ was no more seen.”13 On the other hand, it is when the Church keeps close to the Word that the Gospel shines forth in its purity and power. Rutherford, looking back on seventy years of struggle in England to secure a better ordering of the visible Church, did not scruple to write in 1646, “Consider if thousands more would not have been converted if Christ’s government had been set up for which Mr. Cartwright, Mr. Udal, Mr. Deering, and the godliest did supplicate the Parliament.”14
The Controversy over the Regulative Principle
The study of Puritan teaching has generally begun with the first usage of the actual term “Puritan” in the 1560’s after Queen Elizabeth had come to the throne. Nevertheless there is good reason to believe that if we take this date as the starting point of the Puritan movement we adopt a view which the Puritans themselves would not have accepted. From the time when in the 1570s John Whitgift accused Thomas Cartwright, the Elizabethan Puritan leader, of starting a “fire of discord,” the standard official line against the Puritans was that they were innovators guilty of disturbing the Church with novel opinions. This propaganda came to its climax in the words of the Act of Uniformity of 1662: “Whereas in the first year of the late Queen Elizabeth there was one uniform order of common service and prayer, and of the administration of sacraments, rites and ceremonies, in the Church of England . . . yet . . . by the great and scandalous neglect of ministers in using the said order of liturgy, great mischiefs and inconveniences have arisen and grown.”15
In contrast to this propaganda it can be held that the essential teaching of the Elizabethan Puritans goes back to the beginning of the English Reformation—thirty years before Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558. There appear to be at least two reasons why this has frequently not been recognized.
1. Attention has not been given to the clash in policy between William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) and Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556). These two men were more or less contemporaries in age, though when Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, Tyndale, a hidden fugitive in Flanders, had only three years to live. Tyndale was not only a translator, he was a natural leader and an exceptionally stirring writer with a policy in his mind which he was able to impress upon others. It was not without reason that Sir Thomas More called him “the captain of the English heretics.” Cranmer, as we know, was also a policy maker, guiding the Reformation to the official position which it was given in the reign of King Edward, but these two policies, while both pursuing Protestant interests, were not compatible with one another. And the essential difference between the two comes out in regard to the regulative principle of Scripture.
Cranmer gradually came to accept the Scripture as the sole authority in matters of faith, but he did not accept that the Church is limited in her ceremonies, practices, and government only to the New Testament. An example of this is the fact that in 1539 he held that the use of confession was “very requisite and expedient” though agreeing that it was not expressly enjoined in Scripture.16 Similarly, in Edward’s reign, while he accepted “that Bishops and Priests were not two things, but both one office in the beginning of Christ’s religion”17 he saw no need to return to the New Testament order in this respect.
In contrast to this, Tyndale demanded that not only the creed of the Church but also her organization and services should have scriptural sanction. “We bring God’s testament,” he says, “for all we do.” One of the articles charged against the writings of Tyndale’s friend, John Frith, by his Catholic persecutors was that he held the following “heresy”: “The Spirit would that nothing should be done, but that which is expressly rehearsed in the Scripture.”18
Likewise this “heretical” statement was attributed to Tyndale: “Ceremonies of the Church have brought the world from God.” In support of this assertion, John Foxe quotes the following words of Tyndale: “Seek the Word of God in all things, and without the Word of God do nothing though it appear ever so glorious.”19 Tyndale’s position was that anything introduced into the Church without a precept or promise of Scripture is mere superstition. Listen to him applying this to the Confirmation service: “If Confirmation have a promise, then it justifieth as far as the promise extendeth. If it have no promise, then is it not of God, as the bishops be not. . . . After that the bishops had left preaching, then feigned they this dumb ceremony of confirmation, to have somewhat at leastway whereby they might reign over their dioceses. . . . They will say that the Holy Ghost is given through such ceremonies. If God had so promised, so should it be; but Paul saith (Gal. 3), that the Spirit is received through preaching of the faith.”20
Tyndale’s words, of course, are describing the practice as it was under Popery, but in demanding a Scripture promise, or warrant, he was using a principle which was not to lose its relevance after Acts of Uniformity had made the nation “Protestant.”
An examination of Tyndale shows that there is little in the teaching of the Elizabethan Puritans which was not a continuity of what may be found in embryo in the martyr’s writings. Tyndale held the equality of the ministerial office over against Episcopacy; he denounced the presence of bishops in Parliament: he sought that the diaconate should be restored to its proper New Testament function; he wanted benefices restored to the people, not disposed of by lords, spiritual or secular: he held that the authority of the Church is derived solely from Christ and that in the spiritual realm “the king is as deep under the spiritual officer, to hear out of God’s Word what he ought to believe, and how to live, and how to rule, as is the poorest beggar in the realm.” He also taught that ministers should be called to their work by the congregation of believers, otherwise men would be appointed in churches “not whom virtue and learning, but whom the favour of great men commended.”
2. A second reason why Puritanism has so frequently been regarded as originating in Elizabethan times is because it was in the interests of Protestant solidarity not to disclose the seriousness of the differences which existed between the Reformers in England in the reign of King Edward. Some of the most important documents relating to this have yet to be printed in English. The major differences center around the controversy between John Hooper and Nicholas Ridley, in 1550, and between John Knox and Thomas Cranmer in 1552–53. These two controversies were both vitally concerned with the regulative principle, and they marked the beginning of an official Protestant opposition to this principle—an opposition which was based on the accusation that Hooper and Knox, along with others, were causing needless disputes by failing to practice things which were not contrary to Scripture but merely indifferent. The two particular things in question were the wearing of vestments and the rubric in the Second Book of Common Prayer requiring a kneeling posture at the communion table.
Hooper and Knox opposed these two things on the grounds that the Church had no authority to impose rites possessing religious significance21 which were not prescribed in Scripture: “There is nothing to be done in the Church,” says Hooper, “but it is commanded by the Word of God, either expressly or by necessary collection.”22 Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and Archbishop Cranmer regarded this statement as so obviously impossible and disruptive that it scarcely required any scriptural refutation. They put the emphasis in their rejoinders on what they conceived would be the evil consequences if this teaching was accepted. Ridley replying to Hooper says:
If this reason should take place, “the Apostles used it not, therefore it is not lawful for us to use it”—or this either, “They did it, therefore we must needs do it”—then all Christians may have no abiding place, all must, under pain of damnation, depart from their possessions, as Peter said they did, Behold, we have left all things, etc.; we may have no ministration of Christ’s sacraments in Churches, for they had no Churches, but were fain to do all in their own houses; we must baptize abroad in the fields as the Apostles did; we may not receive the holy communion but at supper, and with the table furnished with other meats, as the Anabaptists do now stiffly and obstinately affirm that it should be; our naming of the child in baptism, our prayer upon him, our crossing, and threefold abrenunciation, and our white chrisom, all must be left, for these we cannot prove by God’s Word, that the Apostles did them.23
Cranmer writes in the same vein to the Lords of the young King’s Privy Council who held the reins of authority in the Church:
I know your Lordships’ wisdom to be such that I trust ye will not be moved by these glorious and unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own fancy, and cease not to make trouble and disquietness when things be most quiet and in good order. If such men should be heard, although the Book were made every year anew, yet should it not lack faults in their opinion.
But, say they, it is not commanded in the Scripture to kneel, and whatsoever is not commanded in the Scripture is against the Scripture, and utterly unlawful and ungodly. But this saying is the chief foundation of the error of the Anabaptists and of divers other sects. This saying is a subversion of all order as well in religion as in common policy. If this saying be true, take away the whole Book of Service. For what should men travail to set an order in the form of service, if no order can be set but that (which) is already prescribed by the Scripture. And because I will not trouble your Lordships with reciting of many Scriptures of proofs in this matter, whosoever teacheth any such doctrine (if your Lordships will give me leave) I will set my foot by his to be tried by fire, that his doctrine is untrue, and not only untrue, but also seditious, and perilous to be heard of any subjects, as a thing breaking the bridle of obedience and loosing them from the bond of all princes’ laws.24
Twenty years later John Whitgift was to develop the same line of reasoning against Cartwright. “If all ought of necessity to be reduced to the form of government used in the Apostles’ time,” he writes, “then Christian princes must forego their authority in the Church.”25 Such a conclusion was monstrous to Whitgift. Similarly he claimed there could be no sound logic in Cartwright’s argument that “the Church in St. Paul’s time was a perfect body without archbishops and archdeacons; therefore, they are not necessary in the Church of Christ,” because if this reasoning was sound you could also argue, “It was then perfect without Christian magistrates: therefore, Christian magistrates are to be removed from the Church.” “This kind of reasoning,” he concludes, “is most perilous, and openeth a door to anabaptism and confusion.”26
The Puritan Exposition of “Adiaphora”
The main strength of Ridley’s and Cranmer’s case against the regulative principle lies in their claim that such things as vestments and the posture at communion are neither good nor bad in themselves, but indifferent, and therefore if the Church should determine that vestments and kneeling are prudent and useful then individual Christians should submit. They reasoned that there are many things which cannot be resolved from Scripture, e.g. what places Christians should meet, at what times, how often the Lord’s supper should be observed and so on, and therefore it must be lawful for the Church to determine what cannot be determined by Scripture.
The Puritan answer to this position was this: they did not assert that the Church could do nothing except what was prescribed in Scripture. It was a caricature of Puritanism which affirmed that they looked for every detail in the New Testament. What they did hold was that nothing was to be made a part (as distinguished from a circumstance)27 of worship and nothing of spiritual significance was to be added to the government of the Church except what Scripture prescribed or warranted by just inference.
The area within which we are to determine things for ourselves is the area of natural circumstances. Indifferent things, they held, are not in themselves moral or spiritual things, but they are such natural things as are physical or belonging to ordinary human life. For example, it is not a part of worship where the worship takes place, or how long it lasts, or of what material the pulpit or the communion cup is made. Or in the realm of Church government, it is not a moral thing what the nationality of the Church officer is, but it is a moral thing that he be such an officer as Christ has appointed in His Church. In one area we need the warrant of Scripture; in the other we do not.
So in 1547, when John Winram, Sub-prior of St. Andrew’s, exclaimed to John Knox, “Will ye bind us so straight, that we may do nothing without the express Word of God? What and if I ask a drink? Think ye that I sin? And yet I have not God’s Word for me,” the Scottish Reformer replied: “I wonder that ye compare things profane and holy things so indiscreetly together. . . . One meat I may eat, another I may refuse, and that without scruple of conscience. I may change one with another, even as oft as I please. Whether may we do the same in matters of religion? May we cast away what we please, and retain what we please? If I be well remembered, Moses, in the name of God, says to the people of Israel, ‘All that the Lord thy God commands thee to do, that do thou to the Lord thy God: add nothing to it; diminish nothing from it.’ By this rule think I that the Kirk of Christ will measure God’s religion, and not by that which seems good in their own eyes.”28
Yet the Puritans’ opponents were continually taking up Winram’s argument— “the Scriptures are too general to regulate everything, therefore the demand for a Scripture warrant is absurd”—and in 1646 Rutherford was still having to repeat that they had always recognized an area of common things, not belonging to the spiritual sphere but to ordinary natural life (eating, sleeping, etc.) which require no Scriptural precept for their practice: “Time, and place, name, country, form, figure, habit or garments to hold off injuries of sun and heaven, as such are never commanded, never forbidden of God, and therefore the change of these circumstances can be no change of a commandment of God. We never advanced circumstances, as such to the orbe and sphere of morals.”29 These are all things which are genuinely indifferent and which are therefore to be determined by wisdom and common sense.
This leads us to the heart of the controversy over things indifferent. Based upon the distinction made above, the Puritans went on to show that any practice in the Church purporting to be indifferent (and therefore not needing scriptural warrant) is only to be recognized as such if it fulfils certain conditions. George Gillespie gives the following:30
1. “It must be only a circumstance of divine worship: no substantial part of it: no sacred, significant and efficacious ceremony.”
In other words if a minister, like Hooper, preached in an ordinary merchant’s cloak, that was a natural, indifferent thing, but if the minister’s dress was intended to convey a spiritual meaning (like the white surplice as a symbol of purity) it ceased to be indifferent. This explains why the controversy over vestments and other ceremonies in Edward’s reign was so closely connected with the regulative principle. The Book of Common Prayer claimed a religious value and significance for such ceremonies which, though not contained in Scripture, “be apt to stir up the dull mind of man to the remembrance of his duty to God, by some notable and special signification whereby he might be edified.” To the Puritans this addition of things of supposed spiritual value in the Church could not be justified under the plea that they were things indifferent.
In the same way (they held) while the Church may lawfully determine the most expedient times for worship and the most suitable places for meeting, she has no authority to invest particular days or seasons with religious importance, nor to attach any spiritual blessing to buildings or church-yards.
2. “That which the Church may lawfully prescribe by her laws and ordinances, as a thing left to her determination, must be one of such things as were not determinable by Scripture.”
Whatever is appointed or prohibited in Scripture, either by precept or example, or whatever may justly be inferred from the same, cannot be indifferent.
3. “If the Church prescribe anything lawfully . . . her ordinance must be accompanied with some good reason and warrant given for the satisfaction of tender consciences.”
Because a thing is itself indifferent it does not mean that the Church can appoint it apart from any consideration of Scripture. “As we may not use any indifferent thing at our pleasure,” says Gillespie, referring to the individual Christian, “so neither may the Church, at her will and pleasure, command the use of it; but as our practice, so the Church’s injunction must be determined and squared” according to the rules given in God’s Word; “for those things which are in their nature indifferent are never indifferent in their use, and that because the use of them is either according to the rules of the Word, and then it is expedient, or not, and then it is unlawful.”31
These general rules governing actions and things not so specifically prescribed by Scripture, are stated by the same writer as follows:
1. All particular actions should have reference to God’s glory (1 Cor. 10:31; Rom. 14:7–8).
2. No action, though legitimate in itself, should be done if it might be a stumbling block or a possible occasion of spiritual harm to others (Rom. 14:21; 1 Cor. 10:23); rather, “as in the whole course of our life, so especially in the policy of the Church, we may do nothing (be it never so indifferent in itself) which is not profitable for edification, 1 Cor. 13:26, “Let all things be done to edifying.” From which precept Pareus inferreth that nothing ought to be done in the Church which doth not manifestly make for the utility of all and every one.”
3. We must never act contrary to the peace and purity of our conscience, for although a thing may be indifferent yet if our conscience judges it to be unlawful we may not lawfully do it (Rom. 14:14).
The Puritans wrote a great deal on the definition of things indifferent32 and the scriptural rules governing their use, and the bulkiness of the material they have left on the subject certainly suggests that they did not oversimplify the issue or by-pass its difficulties. Adiaphora became a storm center of controversy because the whole strength of the case against the Puritan position rested on the contention that, provided the Church did not appoint what was forbidden by Scripture, she might regulate her worship and government by such general rules as 1 Corinthians 14:40, “Let all things be done decently and in order.” Thus, it was claimed that vestments and episcopacy are indifferent things (not being expressly prohibited by the Word) and therefore warranted if they forwarded the general rule of promoting “order.” The Puritans were consequently forced to show in detail from Scripture that the New Testament writers never class anything of spiritual significance as adiaphora and that the “general rules” contained in the texts referred to above do not mean that in the whole sphere of her life the Church has only general principles to follow, the “spirit” of which she is free to implement by the addition or alteration of such particular spiritual matters as she deems fit. Ridley and Whitgift supposed that this must be the meaning of the Scripture because otherwise Church life would be an impossibility—various things being necessary for its continuity which Scripture does not specify, e.g. the provision of suitable buildings.
The Puritan reply, as we have seen, was that the general rules in Scripture give ample guidance over circumstantial matters and indifferent things which we are free to order, but that this is quite different from providing a general sanction for the preservation of such things as Whitgift was pleading for. “We deny not but certain things are left to the order of the Church,” says Cartwright, “because they are of the nature of those which are varied by times, places, persons, and other circumstances, and so could not at once be set down and established for ever; and yet so left to the the order of the Church, as that it do nothing against the rules aforesaid.33 But how doth this follow, that certain things are left to the order of the church, therefore to make a new ministry by making an archbishop, to alter the ministry that is appointed by making a bishop or pastor without a church or flock, to make a deacon without appointing him his church whereof he is deacon and where he might exercise his charge of providing for the poor, to abrogate clean both the name and office of the elder, with other more—how, I say, do these follow that, because the church hath power to ordain certain things, therefore it hath power to do so of these which God hath ordained and established?”34
Evidence for the Regulative Principle
Though we have seen the Puritan defence against the charge that they ignored the province of legitimate adiaphora, we cannot leave the matter here. The whole spirit of the Puritan position was far from defensive and the charge in fact had arisen as a counter to their positive assertion of the regulative principle. It is on our assessment of this principle that our final verdict on the Puritans must depend, for while we may admire their piety and their preaching, the movement itself would never have swept this country and across the Atlantic to New England as it did apart from their conviction that the regulative principle is inseparable from New Testament Christianity. It remains for us, therefore, to outline the evidence which had led them to this conclusion. Their case rested on the considerations which may be set out as follows.
1. Scripture is a complete guide for the Church’s faith and practice.
The holy Scriptures are now completely and unalterably perfect, containing such exact rules for the Churches of God in all states and ages, both under the Old and New Testament, that not only the people of God of all sorts and degrees, but also the men of God, and officers of the Church, of all sorts and ages, may thereby be made perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God . . . that the man of Cod may be perfect, thoroughly furnished to every good work,” 2 Tim. 3:16–17. And in his first Epistle to Timothy (which is the Church’s Directory for divine worship, discipline, and government) he saith, “These things write I unto thee—that thou mightest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the House of God, which is the Church of the living God.” (This is spoken in reference to matters of Church-government peculiarly), 1 Tim. 3:14–15.
So wrote some of the leaders of the London presbytery of ministers in 1646 in their work, The Divine Right of Church-Government.35
Likewise Rutherford writes, “Whatever makes us perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works, and is written for this end that any Timothy, or faithful pastor might know how he ought to behave himself in the House of God . . . must hold forth a perfect platform of Discipline,36 which doth not vary, ebb and flow, and alter according to the civil government, laws, manner and customs of men: But the Scriptures of God doth so instruct all members of the visible Church, both governors and governed, 2 Tim. 3:16–17; 1 Tim. 3:14–15. Therefore, the Scripture must hold forth a perfect form of Discipline.”37 He also proceeds to show that the Scripture does not restrict its authority to matters of faith, for Paul “speaketh of many special positive precepts and rules of policy, as of poor widows, the alms to be given to them; the not rebuking of an elder, the office of elders governing, and of elders labouring in the Word and Doctrine, the not receiving an accusation against an elder, but under two or three witnesses, the public rebuking of those who offend publicly, the not admitting to the ministry raw and green soldiers not tried, and many other particulars of policy, of all which he saith gravely, 1 Tim. 5:21, ‘I charge thee before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels, that thou observe these things,’ these things was not one commandment, but all the precepts of faith and of Church-government spoken of in this epistle.”
This claim for the completeness of the instruction which the Scripture supplies for the Church was also borne out, the Puritans held, by those texts which expressly exclude human additions or subtractions from the Divine Word (Deut. 4:2). (Rutherford spends four pages on this verse alone, Deut. 12:32; Rev. 22:18–19.) John Owen applies what he believes to be the significance of these and other verses to the question of liturgies imposed by human authority in worship, when he writes:
Whereas God himself having instituted his own worship and all the concernments of it, doth also assert his own authority and will as the sole cause and rule of all the worship that he will accept, no instance being left on record of any one that ever made additions to what he had appointed, on any pretence whatever, or by virtue of any authority whatever, that was accepted with him; and whereas the most eminent of those who have assumed that power to themselves, as also the judgment of the reasons necessary for the exerting of it, as to matter and manner, have been given up, in the righteous judgment of God, to do things not convenient, yea, abominable unto him (as in the papal church),—it is not unlikely to be the wisdom of men to be very cautious of intruding themselves into this thankless office.38
2. Christ has been given exclusive authority for settling the laws and government of His Church and He has made His will known only in Scripture.
Says Rutherford:
If the Church be a visible politic kingdom as it is, Matt. 13:45–48; 16:19; 8:12, and if the Word be the Word, scepter and law of the kingdom as it is, Matt. 6:10; 13:11; Luke 4:43; Matt. 4:23; Mark 13:8; Luke 21:10, 14; 13:10, yea the sword and royal power of the King, Rev. 1:16; 19:15, by which He ruleth and reigneth in His church, Isa. 11:4; Ps. 110:2; Heb. 1:8–9; Ps. 45:3–7; Isa. 61:1–2; 2 Cor. 10:4–6; 1 Peter 2:4–7, and if by this Word the King reigneth, bindeth, looseth, and conquereth souls and subdueth His enemies, Matt. 18:18–20; 16:19; Rev. 6:2, then certainly Christ must reign politically, and externally in His Church and walk in the midst of the golden candlesticks, Rev. 2:1. And if Christ ascending to heaven as a victorious King leading captivity captive, gave gifts to men, and appointed an external policy for the gathering of the saints by the ministry of certain officers of His kingdom, as it is, Ps. 68:18, “that the Lord God might dwell among them,” and Eph. 4:11–16, then He must reign in the external policy of pastors, teachers, elders, by Word, sacraments and discipline. Now the King Himself, the Lord who reigneth in His external policy must be the only lawgiver, James 4:12; Isa. 33:22. There can be no Rabbis or Doctors on earth who, as little kings, can make laws under Him, Matt. 23:8–10, yea, nor Apostles who can teach how the worship should externally be ordered, but what they receive of the King of the Church, 1 Cor. 11:23; Acts 15:13–18, how the house should be governed, Heb. 3:1–5: yea, nothing more reasonable, than that whatsoever is commanded by the God of heaven should be done in and for the house of the God of heaven, under the pain of His wrath, Ezra 7:23.39
The crucial text is probably Matthew 28:20, “Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. . . .” Commenting on this and kindred texts where the Lord requires precise obedience to His appointments, Owen asks whether the sense of such verses is only “to prevent the addition of what is contrary to what God hath appointed,” leaving us liberty to add such things as “may tend to the furtherance and better discharge of his appointments” (as the Puritans’ opponents urged) or whether the Puritan interpretation is not the one which has the fairest evidence of expressing the intention of Scripture. He writes:
Our Lord Jesus Christ directs his apostles to teach his disciples “to do and observe whatever he commanded them.” Those who contend for the latter [i.e., Puritan] interpretation of those and the like precepts before mentioned, affirm that there is in these words a restriction of the matter of their commission to the express commands of Christ. What he commands, they say, they were to teach men to observe, and nothing else; nor will he require the observance of aught else at our hands. The others would have his intention to be, whatever he commanded, and whatever seemeth good to them to command, so it be not contrary unto what was by him commanded; as if he had said, “Teach men to observe whatever I command them; and command you them to observe whatever you think meet, so it be not contrary to my commands.” Certainly this gloss at first view seems to defeat the main intendment of Christ, in that express limitation of their commission unto his own commands. So also under the Old Testament: giving order about his worship, the Lord lets Moses know that he must do all things according to what he should show and reveal unto him. In the close of the work committed unto him, to show what he had done was acceptable to God, it is eight or ten times repeated that he did all as the Lord commanded him; nothing was omitted, nothing added by him. That the same course might be observed in the following practice which was taken in the first institution [i.e., of the New Testament Church] the Lord commands that nothing be added to what was so appointed by him, nothing diminished from it.40
According to the Puritans, the New Testament makes all spiritual obedience and spiritual duties derive their obligation from the fact that they are sanctioned by the authority of Christ. The Church can only be a steward of His laws; her duty is to carry out His appointments. Therefore to invest requirements of her own with a religious importance or to give authority to her own institutions, is to offend against the authority of Christ in His Word and comes under the same rebuke with which He condemned the Pharisees for their self-appointed religious ceremonies of washings, their broad phylacteries, wide hemmed garments (Matt. 23:5), and the rest: “In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:9). The Lord Jesus Christ is the only source of authority in the Church, and He has delegated no authority to man in matters of faith, Church government, or worship. “The single fact that the rule of Church power in the worship of God is the rule of Scripture, is decisive of the whole controversy in regard to rites and ceremonies, and ties up the Church to the ministerial office of administering a directory made for it, instead of presumptuously attempting to make a new directory for itself.”41
Once we see the relationship of the regulative principle to the Lordship of Christ it is no longer a mystery how such a Christ-centered man as Samuel Rutherford could engage so earnestly in Church polemics.
3. If human additions are allowed in the Church they will subvert and undermine what the Scripture does teach.
Once the regulative principle is departed from there is an inevitable tendency that additions will alter and take away from Scripture. This may be denied by those who reject the principle, they may say that their additions are not contrary to Scripture, only “beside” it, but to the Puritans the testimony of Church history, both in the Bible and since, was unmistakable. They saw the tendency at work in the early Fathers, they saw it full blown in the Papacy, and they had grappled with its Catholic champions in the Reformation battle. In 1519 Eck, the Pope’s defender, had declared that it is “sufficient that the Church say such a thing is truth and to be done and the scripture does not gain-say it.”42 The argument was that it is no denial of Scripture to say that its testimony is not complete, for the New Testament was never intended to give the total or final form of the Church’s faith or order. Foxe records the following incident in the trial of the Marian martyr, Laurence Saunders, before Bishop Bonner: “A heretic he would now prove him, and all those,” said Bonner, “who did teach and believe that the administration of the sacraments and all orders of the Church are most pure which do come most nigh to the order of the primitive Church. For the Church was then in her infancy, and could not abide that perfection which was afterward to be furnished with ceremonies. And for this cause Christ Himself, and after him the apostles, did in many things bear with the rudeness of that Church.”43
Yet while the Marian burnings were still a vivid memory, Whitgift’s only answer to Cartwright’s query why the New Testament office of elders (“seniors”) was not recognized in the English Church was that the presence of “the Christian magistrate” now made the disciplinary work of elders unnecessary, and therefore the New Testament practice could not be our guide in this matter as God had not then made the improvement in His Church such as England experienced under Queen Elizabeth: “We ask not what the church was able to do then, or what it is able to do now; but whether the same government ought to be now that was then; and whether a Christian magistrate have no more authority in the government of the church now, than the heathenish and persecuting magistrate had then . . . God hath much better provided for his church by placing in it civil and Christian magistrates, whose authority is so ample and large, than by placing seniors; wherefore, where Christian magistrates be, the government of seniors is superfluous.”44
In the same manner Richard Hooker argues that even though Episcopacy was not the Church order appointed in the New Testament, that is no reason why it may not now be regarded as the best form of Church government:
Albeit the Scriptures did no way insinuate the same (i.e. Episcopacy) to be God’s ordinances, and the Apostles to have brought it in, Albeit the Church were acknowledged by all men to have been the first beginner thereof a long time after the Apostles were gone; yet is not the authority of the bishops hereby disannulled, it is not hereby proved unfit or unprofitable for the Church. . . . All things we grant which are in the Church ought to be of God. But forasmuch as they may be two ways accounted such, one if they be of his own institution and not of ours, another if they be of ours, and yet with his approbation: this latter way there is no impediment but that the same thing which is of men may be also justly and truly said to be of God, the same thing from heaven which is from earth. Of all good things God himself is author, and consequently an approver of them. The rule to discern when the actions of men are good, when they are such as they ought to be, is more ample and large than the law which God hath set particular down in his holy word; the Scripture is but a part of that rule, as hath been heretofore at large declared. If therefore all things be of God which are well done, and if all things be well done which are according to the rule of well-doing, and if the rule of well-doing be more ample than the Scripture; what necessity is there, that every thing which is of God should be set down in holy Scripture?45
To the Puritans this kind of reasoning undermined Scripture. Just as the Papists effectively brought in another Gospel by arguing that the Scriptures are not complete in the particulars of doctrine and that what they are silent upon, e.g., purgatory, we may teach if the Church thinks fit, so also the rejection of the regulative principle with regard to the Church meant that human institutions replaced the New Testament practice: Church discipline by the eldership was replaced by Elizabeth’s civil authority (who “disciplined” many Gospel ministers out of their pulpits), parity of ministers was replaced by hierarchy, the election of ministers by congregations and their ordination by presbyters was replaced by episcopal authority, and so on.
Conclusions
1. Once the regulative principle is discarded there is no other principle which can keep the Church true to the simplicity of the New Testament: “When this general truth is denied, there is no limit that can be put to the introduction of the inventions of men into the government and worship of Christ’s house.”46 If it is once conceded that Scripture is not sufficient for the ordering of the Church, then there is no way of preventing the corruption of her government and worship as under Popery.
This was what Knox and others saw in 1552 when they argued that if such ceremonies as kneeling were retained there could be no consistent stand against Popery, for Catholics could say, “The profit that cometh of your kneeling is nowhere in God’s Word expressed, but only in the imagination of your own brains . . . wherefore our ceremonies ought equally to remain with your kneeling.”47
2. Christian liberty cannot be preserved without the maintenance of the regulative principle, “seeing Christian liberty expressly exempteth us altogether from obedience to men’s laws not warranted by Christ’s Word, Gal. 5:1; Col. 2:20.”48
3. The opposition expressed against the regulative principle is not without significance. For while some good men were found in opposition to the Puritan position, the generality of those who contended against the principle in the Elizabethan period and later too, often showed a desire to restrict Scripture rather than be restricted by it. John à Lasco, the Polish Reformer who was in England in Edward’s reign, wrote a lengthy letter to Cranmer on the regulative principle in which he says near the close: “Now indeed for a long time I have hoped, and now ardently hope, to see the reasons and testimonies out of the Scriptures by which you think your opinion can be defeated. For who would not willingly embrace those views which carry less reproach rather than those which we see obviously load a man with hatreds and malice and suspicions of various kinds.”49
In later years men who held the regulative principle were frequently to be harried and persecuted by the less spiritual successors of Cranmer and Ridley, while Catholics and godless parsons were left in peace.
4. The regulative principle is essentially a uniting principle amongst Christians, for as far as it is truly applied, it puts away all man-appointed practice and promotes a common concern to give allegiance to Scripture alone. Far from being a divisive principle, says Owen, “it is easily demonstrable that without the admittance of it, as to its substance and principal end, all peace and agreement among churches are utterly impossible.”50
While it was not given to Christians of the Presbyterial and Independent persuasions in the seventeenth century to conclude all the difficulties connected with a scriptural Church polity, their common acceptance of the regulative principle led them to a wide measure of agreement on many issues which would otherwise have been impossible, and there is good reason to believe that with an adherence to the same principle Christians may yet be given further light on Scripture to bring us through the hazards which troubled the Puritan movement in the 1640s.
5. While the regulative principle will always arouse controversy in this world, its main force is not to make men controversialists but God-fearing. Man’s life is not, says Cartwright, “as the days of an oak,” it is but a mere mortal span shut in by the narrow boundaries of birth and death. We are not here then to spend our brief lives in a strife of words; but if we profess this principle, we must look to God alone, stand in awe at His Word, serve Him in obedience to His statutes, and pray that as His “commandment is exceeding broad” so may we by Christ’s Word dwelling richly in us, be taught an increasing conformity to all His revealed will. For “Then shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect unto all thy commandments” (Ps. 119:6). This was the essential spirit of Puritanism: may God restore such grace to His Church today!