Here is Augustine addressing the issue of what we would call the regulative principle of worship.
Augustine (354-430): Well, it’s easy enough for me, I think, to speak about it to Christians; God is to be worshiped in the way he said he was to be worshiped. I mean, if Christians ask me how God said he was to be worshiped, I don’t put out my own words, I just read out the book which they undoubtedly submit to in virtue of their faith; they are not permitted, after all, to have doubts about the divine scriptures. God also wished to have written down how he wished to be worshiped; what he wished to be written down, he wished to be read out, and he gave such a peak and pitch of authority to this writing that he placed all authors of any other books under its feet.
There have been people, after all, who wrote whatever they liked as they liked; have any of their books been placed on such a peak of authority that the world responds to them by saying “Amen”? When I have to deal, perhaps, with someone who hasn’t submitted to the authority of our books, and who argues with me and says, “It was human beings who wrote these things for themselves,” what am I to do? How are we to prove that these writings are divine? John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., ed., The Works of Saint Augustine, Newly Discovered Sermons, Part 3, Vol. 11, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P., Sermon 374.10 (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1997), p. 398.
Augustine (354-430): Well, it’s easy enough for me, I think, to speak about it to Christians; God is to be worshiped in the way he said he was to be worshiped. I mean, if Christians ask me how God said he was to be worshiped, I don’t put out my own words, I just read out the book which they undoubtedly submit to in virtue of their faith; they are not permitted, after all, to have doubts about the divine scriptures. God also wished to have written down how he wished to be worshiped; what he wished to be written down, he wished to be read out, and he gave such a peak and pitch of authority to this writing that he placed all authors of any other books under its feet.
There have been people, after all, who wrote whatever they liked as they liked; have any of their books been placed on such a peak of authority that the world responds to them by saying “Amen”? When I have to deal, perhaps, with someone who hasn’t submitted to the authority of our books, and who argues with me and says, “It was human beings who wrote these things for themselves,” what am I to do? How are we to prove that these writings are divine? John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., ed., The Works of Saint Augustine, Newly Discovered Sermons, Part 3, Vol. 11, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P., Sermon 374.10 (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1997), p. 398.
