Worship in Spirit and Truth

Rating:
Summary: Overall my favorite on worship
Review: If you are familiar with John Frame, you know that he is one of the best Christian theological writers around. With degrees from Princeton and Yale and thirty years of teaching at the seminary and graduate level (Westminister Sem. and Reformed Sem.), he is a very sharp guy and a deep thinker. But his talent comes in the way he is able to synthesize difficult concepts and place them in accessible and easily understood language.

This is one of his best books. In fact, it is my favorite single book on worship. He is coming from a Reformed perspective, with a commitment to the regulative principle of worship. But he has an openness whihc enables him to see beyond the social accidents of his tradition and go back to Scripture for correction and guidance. He is able to sort out what is inconsistent in his tradition with the main impulses that have driven it. he also is good at sorting out the modern equivalents to ancient Biblical directives.

Thsi book discusses the proper elemenst of worship, various styles, and content. It is always fresh, accessible, challenging, and insightful, even when you disagree with the author. I highly recommend it.

If you are looking for other approaches somewhat at varience with Frame, you might try: Terry Johnson (more rigid), Hughes O. Old (more liturgically rich; extremely good), or Robert Rayburn (a generation older and sometimes wiser).

Rating:
Summary: Overall my favorite on worship
Review: If you are familiar with John Frame, you know that he is one of the best Christian theological writers around. With degrees from Princeton and Yale and thirty years of teaching at the seminary and graduate level (Westminister Sem. and Reformed Sem.), he is a very sharp guy and a deep thinker. But his talent comes in the way he is able to synthesize difficult concepts and place them in accessible and easily understood language.

This is one of his best books. In fact, it is my favorite single book on worship. He is coming from a Reformed perspective, with a commitment to the regulative principle of worship. But he has an openness whihc enables him to see beyond the social accidents of his tradition and go back to Scripture for correction and guidance. He is able to sort out what is inconsistent in his tradition with the main impulses that have driven it. he also is good at sorting out the modern equivalents to ancient Biblical directives.

Thsi book discusses the proper elemenst of worship, various styles, and content. It is always fresh, accessible, challenging, and insightful, even when you disagree with the author. I highly recommend it.

If you are looking for other approaches somewhat at varience with Frame, you might try: Terry Johnson (more rigid), Hughes O. Old (more liturgically rich; extremely good), or Robert Rayburn (a generation older and sometimes wiser).

Rating:
Summary: Insights on music are worth the price of the book
Review: Where John Frame's book proves especially helpful is in the area of music within Christian worship. Certain churches have found themselves in literal battlegrounds over music styles. Frame reminds his readers that when the focus moves away from the center-God-and focuses on something that is not-musical styles-then the church has lost something vital. Frame's insights on the use of music in worship makes this a worthwhile read.

Rating:
Summary: Insights on music are worth the price of the book
Review: Where John Frame's book proves especially helpful is in the area of music within Christian worship. Certain churches have found themselves in literal battlegrounds over music styles. Frame reminds his readers that when the focus moves away from the center-God-and focuses on something that is not-musical styles-then the church has lost something vital. Frame's insights on the use of music in worship makes this a worthwhile read.

Rating:
Summary: Worship in Spite of the Truth
Review: Worship in Spite of the Truth.


Unfortunately in this book, Professor Frame frames his discussion of the reformed doctrine of worship with a rhetorical rubber hammer. As such it is nothing but one big extended session of begging the question in nicey nice tones and oodles of extraneous Scripture reference. He can't see the tree, never mind the forest, for all the bugs on the bark. But he does accomplish a few things of note.

One, he completely divorces the term "the Westminster Standards" from its original definition, which included the Directory for Publick Worship and the Form of Church Government, along with the Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. That way he can castigate the supposed extraconfessional strictures and burden of guilt of Puritan worship on modern presbyterianism, such as the Directory which really only further sets forth the practical implementation of the elements of worship in Chapt. 21:5 of the Confession.

Two, he completely ignores the distinction of "good and necessary consequences" found in the Confession 1:6, which is critical to the presbyterian and reformed understanding of the Second Commandment as opposed to Three, the strictly literal take on the commandment that he advocates. All Frame can say is that the Second Commandment only forbids gross idol worship and nothing more. "(T)he second forbids the worship of and god (even the true God) by means of idols (pp.37.38)." Yet the proof texts for the Regulative Principle of Worship - "Whatsoever is not commanded - explicitly or implicitly - in Scripture, is forbidden in the worship of God " - in Chapt. 21:1 of the Confession include the Second Commandment.

Even further, the Larger and Shorter Shorter Catechisms on the Second Commandment are only too explicit re. the RPW and his ommission of their statements only too obvious in his restricting the commandment to gross image and idol worship alone. In other words, the omission of good and necessary consequences is fundamental to his fundamentalist take on the Second Commandment contra the Confession and Catechisms and the subsequent omission of the commandment from his exposition of the doctrine categorically decides the question to his competence on the question. In the negative. Decidedly.

Four, he will redefine the "circumstances concerning the worship of God. . . common to human actions and societies (WCF 1:6)" so that five, in the end his doctrine/definition of worship- he wants to substitute "applications" for the "elements" of worship - can be considered faithful "to the general rules of the word, which are always to be observed." But in that his applications seem to be only a confused combination of circumstances and elements, the water is only further muddied.

All in all, not a bad days work for just a few little errors. Yet like those who have gone before him, Jordan and Poythress, and those who have followed him, Horne, Schlissel, Leithart and Gore, Prof. Frame merely demonstrates his incompetence to profitably discussing the confessional doctrine, never mind substituting something in its place, in that again, he can't/won't even give us the correct confessional definition.The regulative principle of worship is the good and necessary consequences of the Second Commandment. "Whatsoever is not commanded - explicitly or implicitly - in the Scripture, is forbidden in the worship of God" as set forth in the Confession and Catechisms of the Westminster Standards.

Even further, let the reader beware. If John Owen, a Puritan who helped write the congregationalist version of the Westminster Assembly's Confession of Faith ten years later in 1658, could say that all occasions of false worship follows upon the ignorance, neglect or weariness in the exercise of true faith in divine worship (Works 5:437), it ought to be no surprise that some of those who have attacked the reformed doctrine of worship these days on various trumped up and supposedly "covenantal" grounds, are now also attacking the doctrine of justification by faith based on the same type of shallow and superficial arguments and misrepresentations. Frame so far, is merely part of the assault on the worship of the reformed church, while others like Schlissel have gone on to assault the gospel of the reformed church in espousing NT Wright's gospel.