Anglican & Reformed RP

(With a nod in the direction of John Frame's excellent article...)

The common perception is that there is a stark and unbridgeable difference between Anglicanism and Calvinism with regard to the Regulative Principle of Public Worship, but this need not be so. This shows how some Puritans could for a time continue to operate within the Church of England. Anglicans are generally thought to hold that “what is not forbidden is permitted” in public worship whereas the Reformed tend to think that “what is not required is forbidden”. This thesis argues along with John Frame that a form of the Regulative Principle can be retained and (going further than Frame) that it is compatible with Anglicanism, once it is realized how God regulates public worship, and indeed the whole of life. Once one is committed to the sufficiency of Scripture and sees the whole Bible as regulating by examples and patterns rather than just by New Testament commands, one has moved significantly from some strict and narrow Reformed understandings of the Regulative Principle. If there is no neutrality, the Bible, rightly understood, must tell us how to make all decisions, including those about public worship and sometimes using sources and instruments other than Scripture itself (such as tradition, reason and experience). Calvin was willing to appeal to “natural reason”, for example, in arguing that prayers should be in a language people can understand. This is consistent with the Reformation principle of the supreme final authority of Scripture which should not be absolutised into a crude form of sola scriptura, as if nothing else need be considered. If Scripture gives examples of men rightly inventing festivals (such as the Feast of Purim in Esther 9) and encourages the making of wise decisions, one has embraced both a form of the Regulative Principle and of the Anglican principle.