Protestantism was separated into the Lutheran and Reformed traditions from its beginning, the most visible difference manifesting itself in corporate worship.
Lutherans held to the normative principle, teaching that anything not forbidden in Scripture was appropriate in the worship of God. The Reformed taught that anything not found in Scripture by precept or example was forbidden in worship, which came to be known as the regulative principle. This became the dividing line between Puritans and the rest of the Church of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Puritans were happy with the English Reformation in terms of doctrine, but thought it maintained far too much carryover from its Roman Catholic past when it came to the look, feel, and experience of worship. For the church establishment, these were indifferent matters.
To the Puritans, however, they were idolatry.
Thus, civil war ensued, both figurately in the Church of England starting in the 1550s and literally in the nation of England in the 1640s. Puritanism had exhausted itself as an ecclesiastical movement within the Church of England by 1662 when the “Great Ejection” saw the last of the Puritans pushed out of their pulpits and the established church altogether.
But there were offshoots who considered themselves part of the Puritan tradition and continued to apply the regulative principle in their churches—namely, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Particular Baptists. They wanted the legitimacy of the Puritan heritage, which is illustrated by the fact that the Congregationalists and Baptists adopted verbatim the Westminster Confession of Faith, the most Puritan of creeds, in their Savoy Declaration and The Second London Confession respectively. They only adjusted those elements of polity and administration of the sacraments, which were practiced in the context of the local church’s gathered worship.
It was regarding the latter that Baptists proved themselves to be the purest of the Puritans.
The Second London Confession on baptism, chapter 29, paragraph 2, reads, “Those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to, our Lord Jesus Christ, are the only proper subjects of this ordinance.” And paragraph 4, “Immersion, or dipping of the person in water, is necessary to the due administration of this ordinance.”[1]As we commonly speak of it today, this requires believer’s baptism by immersion.
While there is little by way of precept in the New Testament concerning the mode and subjects of baptism, an abundance of apostolic example is present. The only explicit examples of Baptism found in scripture are of believers by immersion, which is key when it comes to the regulative principle.
Theologizing, inference, and implication takes us back into the realm of the normative principle.
Dissenting denominations that emerged in the seventeenth century (and their evangelical heirs today) have a rich history of striving to apply the regulative principle to the structure of the church and practice of worship. The conviction that God has not left his people to guess how he is to be worshiped is one that would be extremely healthy to recapture and robustly apply.
[1] Available at www.the1689confession.com