The Calvinist International
Anyone familiar with the Simpsons’ Groundskeeper Willie, knows that old-fashioned Presbyterians did not celebrate holidays. Even Christmas was seen as illegitimate, and Christmas was not celebrated in early Puritan America. This stance has given way pretty decisively, and in the present day, the overwhelming majority of even conservative Presbyterians think Christmas is at least permissible. […]
Having now given a rather critical picture of the modern liturgical movement and the state of our actual knowledge regarding the “catholic tradition” and the worship of the early church, the question could be asked about what rule we now have left. Are we supposed to simply go back to the, now itself old-fashioned, evangelical […]
Explaining how a principled Reformed person ought to think about the question of formal liturgy, Carl Trueman says: The difference is not between churches who have liturgies and churches who do not; it is between churches who have intelligent ones that are theologically informed, which they acknowledge and upon which they reflect, and those who […]
There is much more to be said about Zacharias Ursinus’s view of adiaphora and worship. Our previous post on the issue was widely read, but it did raise a number of important questions. The most interesting is in regards to Ursinus’s relationship to the so-called “regulative principle of worship.” To allow for man-made “ceremonies” in […]