Confessor
Puritan Board Senior
I know I have not posted here in a while, but I have a question which can probably best be answered by those here. I think this might have been answered a while ago, but I honestly cannot remember and just spent some time looking.
Given EP, are uninspired songs permissible in any circumstances at all? Here's my line of thought: If the singing of uninspired worship songs were always an act of worship (private worship, at least), then the RPW would be in force, in which case an uninspired worship song could never be sung.
For example, would it be permissible for a Christian rock band to have a concert with a song that glorified God? Or that would constitute worship, and therefore be a violation of the RPW?
Or as another example, what if a guy was in his car and decided he wanted to sing, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"? Would that constitute worship?
The only solutions, it seems, are to affirm that non-psalm worship songs are universally sinful, which is hard to swallow, or to make a sufficient distinction between corporate and private worship. The latter is usually done by appealing to the RPW with respect to liberty of conscience: ecclesiastical authorities may not bind the consciences of laymen to perform religious actions not authorized by Scripture. In this case, with the ecclesiastical authorities absent in private worship, the RPW would not be in force. But of course the problem with this is that the RPW is never presented as applying only to corporate worship -- the liberty-of-conscience argument is usually placed as an addendum to the argument from the equity of the second commandment. And therefore private and corporate worship cannot be sufficiently separated to allow for the use of uninspired songs anywhere, at all.
I would appreciate hearing your collective wisdom on this, where I might have gone wrong with this reasoning, where this might have already been addressed, etc.
Given EP, are uninspired songs permissible in any circumstances at all? Here's my line of thought: If the singing of uninspired worship songs were always an act of worship (private worship, at least), then the RPW would be in force, in which case an uninspired worship song could never be sung.
For example, would it be permissible for a Christian rock band to have a concert with a song that glorified God? Or that would constitute worship, and therefore be a violation of the RPW?
Or as another example, what if a guy was in his car and decided he wanted to sing, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"? Would that constitute worship?
The only solutions, it seems, are to affirm that non-psalm worship songs are universally sinful, which is hard to swallow, or to make a sufficient distinction between corporate and private worship. The latter is usually done by appealing to the RPW with respect to liberty of conscience: ecclesiastical authorities may not bind the consciences of laymen to perform religious actions not authorized by Scripture. In this case, with the ecclesiastical authorities absent in private worship, the RPW would not be in force. But of course the problem with this is that the RPW is never presented as applying only to corporate worship -- the liberty-of-conscience argument is usually placed as an addendum to the argument from the equity of the second commandment. And therefore private and corporate worship cannot be sufficiently separated to allow for the use of uninspired songs anywhere, at all.
I would appreciate hearing your collective wisdom on this, where I might have gone wrong with this reasoning, where this might have already been addressed, etc.