RP

That's the Regulative Principle (of Public Worship), not recieved pronunciation.

If anybody knows the first English use of the phrase in this way (or a foreign language equivalent) by the way, I'd love to know. The great Miss Wendy Bell, the college librarian, Revd Michael Del Rio MTh and the ABTABL emailers and I tried to find out once but didn't get very far.

There's been some discussion of RP on Daniel Newman's blog but as the trail is quite old, here are some expanded thoughts:

Reading John Frame on the Regulative Principle of Public Worship seems pretty essantial to me.

http://www.reformed.org/misc/index.html?mainframe=/misc/frame_regulative_principle.html

So properly understood we're saying that the regluative principle of the whole of life is valid and bibliacal though the reformed scholastics may have erred by (1) applying it in a special narrow sense to public worship and not to other things (e.g how we dress and what we eat) and (2) treating what the Bible taught too narrowly (e.g. not taking into account what the Old Testament tells us about public worship and God's love of special feast days, neglecting examples and images in favour only of explicit NT commands).

Also, the Westminster Confession and Directory are useful on all this, aren't they, in suggesting a kind of distinction about accidence (e.g. what time on Sunday morning we meet) and essence (we must meet on the Lord's Day morning, ideally early). I forget if those are their terms. The church has authority to make semi-binding rules for a time on the accidents but not to change the essence (e.g. she can't abolish Bible reading or sermons in favour of meditation on poetry but she can say that people who read the Bible in oublic must not wear shorts).

Frame has a further distinction between elements (e.g Bible reading and singing) and mode (e.g. how loud and what instruments) which all helps.