Quest. CXXXI. What additions or human inventions in or about religion, not commanded in Scripture, are lawful or unlawful?
Answ. 1. These following are unlawful. 1. To feign any new article of faith or doctrine, any precept, promise, threatening, prophecy, or revelation, falsely to father it upon God, and say, that it is of him, or his special word.
2. To say that either that is written in the Bible which is not, or that any thing is the sense of a text which is not; and so that any thing is a sin or a duty by Scripture which is not. Or to father apocryphal books, or texts, or words upon the Spirit of Christ.
3. To make any law for the church universal, or as obligatory to all christians; which is to usurp the sovereignty of Christ; for which treasonable usurpation it is that protestants call the pope, antichrist.
4. To add new parts to the christian religion.
5. To make any law, which it did properly belong to the universal Sovereign to have made, if it should have been made at all: or which implieth an accusation of ignorance, oversight, error, or omission, in Christ and the holy Scriptures.
6. To make new laws for men’s inward heart duties towards God.
7. To make new sacraments for the sealing of Christ’s covenant and collation of his benefits therein contained, and to the public tesseræ, badges or symbols of christians and christianity in the world.
8. To feign new conditions of the covenant of God, and necessary means of our justification, adoption, and salvation.
9. To alter Christ’s instituted church ministry, or add any that are supra-ordinate, co-ordinate, or derogatory to their office, or that stand on the like pretended ground, and for equal ends.
10. To make new spiritual societies or church forms which shall be either supra-ordinate, co-ordinate, or derogatory to the forms of Christ’s institution.
11. Any impositions upon the churches (be the thing never so lawful) which is made by a pretended power not derived from God and the Redeemer.
12. Any thing that is contrary to the church’s good and edification, to justice, charity, piety, order, unity, or peace.
13. Any unnecessary burden imposed on the consciences of christians; especially as necessary either to their salvation, communion, liberty, or peace.
14. And the exercise of any power, pretended to be either primitive and underived, or infallible, or impeccable, or absolute.
15. In general, any thing that is contrary to the authority, matter, form, obligation, honour, or ends of the laws of God, in nature or Scripture.
16. Any thing which setteth up those judaical laws and ceremonies which Christ hath abrogated, in that form and respect in which he abrogated them.
17. Where there is a doubt among sober, conscionable christians, lest in obeying man they should sin against God and disobey his laws, and the matter doubted of is confessed unnecessary by the imposers: so infinite is the distance between God and man, and so wholly dependent on him are the highest, that they should be exceedingly unwilling to vie with the authority of their Maker in men’s consciences, or to do any thing unnecessary which tendeth to compel men to tread down God’s authority in their consciences, and to prefer man’s. Much more unwilling should they be, to silence the sober preachers of Christ’s gospel upon such accounts.
Deut. xii. 32; Rev. xxii. 18; Col. ii. 18, 23-26; Matt. xv. 3, 8, 9; Gal. i. 8, 9; Jer. v. 12; xiv. 14; xxiii. 25, 26, 32; Ezek. xiii. 9, 19; xxii. 28; Zech. xiii. 2-6.
Gal. ii. 5.
Acts xv. 23-25.
2 Cor. x. 8; xiii. 10; 1 Cor. xiv. 5, 12, 26; 2 Cor. xii.
19; Eph. iv. 12, 16; 1 Tim. i. 4.