Politics & Power Quote by John Frame

Frame pulls off a neat rhetorical feint: he asks you to be stricter and freer at the same time, then dares you to notice that the tension is the point. “More conservative” here isn’t a vibe or a political badge; it’s a boundary-setting move. He’s staking worship to a single jurisdiction: “God’s commands in Scripture” as the only legitimate rule. That’s the classic Reformed instinct to treat worship not as a creative arts program but as a regulated practice, accountable to an authority outside the congregation’s tastes.

Then he swivels to “more liberal,” and the word is deliberately provocative. He’s not softening the first claim; he’s insulating it. Once Scripture is the rule, there will still be disagreements about what Scripture permits, requires, or exemplifies. Frame’s “liberal” is a plea to lower the temperature on those downstream fights. The subtext is pastoral and political: churches split over instrumentation, liturgy, dress, frequency of communion, the choreography of reverence. Frame wants to call those battles what they often are - boundary anxieties dressed up as fidelity.

The line also reveals a strategic context: he’s speaking to “students of Christian worship,” the people most tempted to turn preferences into principles. His two-part demand keeps institutional authority from metastasizing. Leaders can’t smuggle in man-made rules under the banner of “reverence,” and iconoclasts can’t smuggle in novelty under the banner of “freedom.” The liberty he defends isn’t libertinism; it’s restraint about policing what God hasn’t unmistakably policed.