“I will not urge anyone to conform to the Puritan style of worship or to any other style…Rather, I shall present the regulative principle as one that sets us free, within limits, to worship God in the language of our own time, to seek those applications of God’s commandments which most edify worshipers in our contemporary cultures. We must be both more conservative and more liberal than most students of Christian worship: conservative in our holding exclusively to God’s commands in Scripture as our rule of worship, and liberal in defending the liberty of those who apply those commandments in legitimate, though, nontraditional ways.”[1]
The book is primarily targeted towards conservative Presbyterians who hold a more strict interpretation of the “regulative principle” than Frame does. While remaining committed to his reformed evangelical Christian tradition and addressing the arguments of his critics within Presbyterianism, Frame also provides a brief Biblical theology of worship and a ministry philosophy that would help many evangelical Christian worship leaders do a scriptural reevaluation of how their own church worships.
In his first chapter, Frame outlines “basic principles” for Christian worship that are also biblically, theologically and philosophically sound. Worship is to be 1) God-centered, 2) Gospel-centered, 3) Trinitarian (worship of the Father, in the name of the Son, by the Holy Spirit), 4) Vertical and Horizontal (“Loving God involves loving our neighbors as ourselves”[2]), and 5) Broad and Narrow (I Corinthians 10:31teaches that, broadly, all of life is worship. Hebrews 10:25 also commands believers to gather together regularly for worship in the narrow sense.). These principles are a very helpful primer for thinking theologically about worship.
In practice, Frame’s reinterpretation of the regulative principle leads him to give the following answer to the question of what ought to be on a worship leader’s “to do list” for a service.
“The answer is not terribly hard to find. It is simply to obey everything that God says in Scripture about worship – to follow the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27; compare Matt. 4:4). God reveals to us general principles, such as I Corinthians 10:31. But he also reveals many relatively specific principles, such as James 2:1-4, where we are told not to discriminate in worship against people with poor clothing. Where specifics are lacking, we must apply the generalities by means of our sanctified wisdom, within the general principles of the word. Where specifics are given, we must accept them and apply them even more specifically to our own particular situations.”[3]
Thus, on his worship “to do list” he includes: greetings and benedictions, scripture readings, preaching and teaching, prayer, song, vows, confession of faith, sacraments, church discipline, collections/offerings, and expressions of fellowship. Yet Frame holds that to require that each of these be present in every service goes beyond the requirement of scripture.
“Scripture gives us not definitive list of “elements” that alone must be present in the “official” service. But it does tell us to avoid practices and attitudes that compromise the scripturally defined purposes of the meeting.”[4]
While he acknowledges that Christian worship contains elements both of God’s speaking and of the congregation’s responding (reminding us that salvation is by grace, by God’s initiative, and that our obedience is a response to that grace), Frame does not propose that the Christian worship service be structured as a dialogue because “there is no neat division in worship between some events at which God speaks and others in which we respond.”[5] The freedom allowed by Frame’s interpretation of the regulative principle is seen here as he concludes “there is no passage or principle in Scripture that dictates on invariable order of events in worship,” and asks “every biblical doctrine is involved in each of the others; why should we not explore the biblical paths from one to another in many ways, in many orders, from many directions?”[6]
However, like many of our Presbyterian friends, Frame corrupts the ordinances of worship through practicing infant baptism in worship because he underestimates the importance of believer baptism for upholding the ideal of a regenerate visible church. Frame asserts the following in his chapter “God Speaks to Us: The Word and the Sacraments”: “Receiving baptism and the Lord’s Supper unites one with Christ, his church, and his purposes.”[7] Because of the importance of faith in a sinner’s justification (cf. Romans 4), it is most reasonable to argue that an infant cannot receive baptism by faith, and therefore that the practice of infant baptism is less than fully biblical. Frame acknowledges that he does not enter into a full argument for infant baptism, and because he does not provide adequate scriptural support for infant baptism, he would have been better off not raising the subject at all. In the second point of his argument, Frame asserts that the “essence of baptism” is placing the name of God upon the person and identifying the person with God and with the covenant people. If that is true, in what sense was his earlier statement about a person uniting with Christ and his church a true statement? The Bible clearly speaks of our union with Christ by faith (Romans 3-6, Galatians), not baptism. Furthermore, the Presbyterian position is inconsistent in its approach to the sacraments. If baptism can be rightly administered to infants, what reasoning keeps small children from taking the Lord’s Supper before giving evidence of their regeneration? Frame and the Presbyterians fail in upholding biblical worship through continuing this tradition of infant baptism and constructing an extra-biblical theology of a “covenant family”. What is more, the witness of the universal church is compromised and lacks credibility as a result of their ecclesiological decisions, because this practice underestimates the importance of believer baptism and church discipline (which prevents people from taking the Lord’s Supper when the have not given evidence of being born again) in upholding the ideal of a truly regenerate visible church.
While that harsh critique is justified, the book is not “all bad”. In his concluding chapters on “Music in Worship”, Frame offers sound advice to “budding theologians” as they critique the music of their church.
“When hymns in new styles violate theological norms, however, the proper response is not to abandon the new style, but to produce (or edit) hymns in that style that are biblically sound. We should also try to be reasonable and fair in our evaluation of the theological content of hymns, in the following respects: (a) We should remember that hymns are poetry, not prose. We should not insist that a hymn state doctrines in perfectly literal terms. (b) It is wrong to insist that a hymn say everything about a particular topic. Scripture itself, in individual passages, does not meet that requirement.”[8]
Frame concludes the book with a helpful description of the process of planning and leading a worship service at his church in
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