pilgrim people

Many Reformed and Presbyterian churches today include in their liturgies a corporate prayer known as the "Lord’s Prayer" - that prayer which Jesus taught his disciples to pray as recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Both the Heidelberg Catechism and Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms teach the Lord's Prayer as God's prescribed direction for our prayers:

Heidelberg Catechism Q.118: What has God commanded us to ask of him? A: All things necessary for soul and body, which our Christ our Lord comprised in the prayer which He Himself taught us.

Westminster Larger Catechism Q.186: What rule hath God given for direction in the duty of prayer? A: The whole word of God is of use to direct us in the duty of prayer; but the special rule of direction is that form of prayer which our Saviour Christ taught his disciples, commonly called 'The Lord's prayer'.

Some confessional churches even make this a regular part of worship every week. It may be, however, that you have wondered why Protestant churches pray these same words so often. If prayer is to be genuine communication with God our Father, can we really say that praying the Lord’s Prayer every week qualifies as genuine prayer? Won’t this practice lead to a form of cold, dead religion?

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Whether or not prayer is a means of grace is matter that is sometimes debated in Reformed circles, often along so-called "Continental" and "British" lines. On the one hand, there is the Heidelberg Catechism (HC) with its clear statement about prayer being the "chief part of thankfulness which God requires of us" in Q.116. The HC defines prayer as part of our gratitude to God, not a means of sanctifying grace for our faith. For earlier in the Catechism, in Q.65, it specifically asks about the means of grace: "Since, then, we are made partakers of Christ and all His benefits by faith only, where does this faith come from?" A: "The Holy Spirit works faith in our hearts by the preaching of the Holy Gospel, and confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments."

There is nothing about prayer in Q.65. The HC deliberately locates prayer in the "gratitude" section of the Catechism (QQ.86-129), which follows the "guilt" (QQ.3-11) and "grace" (QQ.12-85) sections. Now, this should in no way give us the impression that the HC takes prayer lightly or regards it as unimportant for the Christian.

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Can the precise language of our confessions be improved? John Owen thought so. Evidence of this can be found in the Savoy Declaration of 1658, a confession of which he and his colleague Thomas Goodwin were the principal architects. The Savoy Declaration was essentially a modified version of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), written for the Congregationalist churches and their form of ecclesiology. While several things in the Savoy Declaration may alarm Presbyterians and Continental Reformed believers, two areas stand out as sterling examples of the way good confessional language can be made better (that is, if you believe it is an improvement to add explicit language about the Covenant of Redemption and the imputed active obedience of Christ in justification).

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With the rise of American biblicism and "Scriptura Solo" (in contrast to the Protestant and Reformational principle of Sola Scriptura), came the erosion of ecclesiastical authority. Populist hermeneutics, which promoted the autonomy of the individual conscience, gave way to an anti-clerical, anti-authoritarian attitude. Like creeds and confessions, the value and necessity of well-trained clergymen was challenged. As Hatch points out, a revolution within the church was called for “to place laity and clergy on equal footing and to exalt the conscience of the individual over the collective will of any congregation or church organization.” This was seen most vividly in the renouncement of all institutional forms of church government (including church membership) and the upsurge of untrained preachers and their vernacular style of preaching.

Ironically (and sadly), American biblicism - both then and now - fails to see in the very Bible they tout as their "only creed" the divinely prescribed order of the church and the offices God has given her (Acts 14.23; 20.28; 1 Tim 3; 5.17; Tit 1; Heb 13.17). The canon of Scripture is the means by which Christ shapes his church and exercises his authority over her (Mt 16.19; Tit 1.13; 2.15). This is the very reason for subscription to creeds and confessions; they act as summary statements of biblical truth to keep the church on course and from falling into error.

Yet, in its attempt to free the Bible from the fetters of the traditions of men, American biblicism has actually removed Scripture from its authoritative function. Rather than being guided by the principle of Sola Scriptura, biblicists have been guided by the egalitarian spirit of the American culture. The result has been a Protestantism that "has been pushed and pulled into its present shape by a democratic or popluist oreintation."

Sadly, this continues to be a great problem for the Christian Church in America. Anti-authoritarian attitudes that scorn ecclesiastical offices and church government incessantly prevail. Well-educated and well-trained clergy (both pastors and missionaries) is increasingly becoming a norm of the past. Just as the American biblicism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced self-called ministers who relied completely on their inward call and neglected “almost every ministerial qualification required in the sacred Scriptures,” so too at the present day nearly anyone possessing skills to persuade a crowd and a belief of some personal, inward experience can proclaim himself a minister, set up shop, and often obtain celebrity status...sort of the ecclesiastical version of a garage band. As one of our elders at Christ URC likes to say, it becomes the Church of Frank Sinatra: "I Did it My Way."

Creeds and confessions help curb that sinful spirit of autonomy in each of us. They protect the church from wild-eyed biblicism and privatized religion. They protect us from "Scriptura Solo" while upholding Sola Scriptura. They protect the health and care of the church from American egalitarian ecclesiology.

Sola Scriptura can easily be misunderstood to mean, "me-and-my-own-interpretation-of the-Bible-is-authoritative." The question we must ask is: should the Bible be read and interpreted with the church or apart from the church?

American biblicism answers that question a little differently the Protestant Reformers. The early-American biblicists, for example, demonstrated their misunderstanding of Sola Scriptura by adopting a subjective method of interpretation. Creeds, confessions, and historical theology were thrown out in order to proclaim the primacy of the Bible and re-establish pure Apostolic Christianity. In the book I mentioned in the previous post, Nathan Hatch notes that “[a]ny number of denominations, sects, movements, and individuals between 1780 and 1830 claimed to be restoring a pristine biblical Christianity free from all human devices.”[1] The early-American biblicists held suspect doctrines and systems of theology developed by men, and viewed them as a likely perversion of genuine biblical truth.

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