Devotional 122: The Perpetuity of Vows: No Human Authority Can Dispense

The Confession Read

No man may vow to do anything forbidden in the Word of God, or what would hinder any duty therein commanded, or which is not in his own power, and for the performance whereof he hath no promise of ability from God. In which respects, popish monastical vows of perpetual single life, professed poverty, and regular obedience, are so far from being degrees of higher perfection, that they are superstitious and sinful snares, in which no Christian may entangle himself.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 22, Section 7

Introduction

When Martin Luther stood before the Emperor at Worms in 1521, the world knows what he said: "Here I stand; I can do no other." But fewer know what he did in the months that followed. Excommunicated by the pope and condemned by the empire, he was hidden away in the Wartburg Castle under the protection of the Elector of Saxony, and there, in the solitude of that hilltop fortress, he wrote a treatise whose title no publisher would have called a bestseller: De Votis Monasticis, "On Monastic Vows." What moved Luther to devote his pen to this subject when the whole Reformation hung in the balance? Because he knew from the inside what our Confession declares from the outside: that the vows which bound him to a cell, to a cowl, and to a lifetime of celibacy were not cords of devotion but "superstitious and sinful snares, in which no Christian may entangle himself." Luther had been an Augustinian monk for fifteen years. He had taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience with every ounce of sincerity he possessed. He had fasted, scourged himself, kept the canonical hours until his body broke under the discipline. And yet, looking back from the far side of the gospel's liberation, he could see what he could not see while he was still inside the snare: that none of those vows had been commanded by God, that each of them presumed a power the creature does not possess, and that the whole system rested upon the lie that there are two tiers of Christian devotion: one for ordinary believers who marry and earn wages and raise children, and another, higher tier for those who renounce all three. The Reformation was, at its deepest level, a recovery of the truth that the ground is level at the foot of the cross, and that the only vow God accepts is the one that binds a man to the duties He has already commanded, in the strength He has already promised. Our Confession has now reached its closing word on the subject of vows. Sections 1 through 4 taught us what an oath is and how it must be taken; Section 5 equated the vow with the promissory oath in the care and faithfulness it demands; Section 6 directed the vow to God alone and described the believing, willing, grateful heart from which it must arise. Now Section 7 turns from the positive shape of the lawful vow to the negative: what may a man not vow? The answer comes as a three-part test, and then — because the Divines were not writing abstract theology but shepherding souls who lived in the long shadow of Rome — it comes as a particular application to the monastic system that had multiplied such unlawful vows across Christendom. The section is at once a fence and a diagnosis: a fence to keep the conscience from bondage, and a diagnosis to expose the spiritual disease that confuses superstition with sanctity.

Scripture Foundation

The three-part test that opens this section is not an invention of the Assembly. It is drawn directly from the Scriptures, and each of its three prohibitions can be traced to a clear biblical source. The first is the simplest and the most fundamental: "No man may vow to do anything forbidden in the Word of God." At Sinai the Lord gave a command that governs everything that follows: "What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it" (Deuteronomy 12:32). The will of God revealed in Scripture is a perfect boundary; everything inside it is safe, and everything outside it is forbidden. A vow that binds a man to something God has prohibited, to steal, to lie, to commit adultery, to worship an idol, is no vow at all, because a sinful promise imposes no obligation. The Divines have already taught this principle in Section 4: "It cannot oblige to sin." Now they apply it to the vow, and with good reason, for the history of Israel is strewn with men who bound themselves to wickedness and called it devotion. The forty men who "bound themselves under a curse" to kill Paul were vowing earnestly, but they were vowing murder, and no earnestness can sanctify what God has condemned. The second prohibition is more searching, because it does not concern things that are plainly evil but things that are otherwise lawful when they become a hindrance to duty. A man may not vow "what would hinder any duty" commanded in the Word. Our Lord gave the definitive example of this principle when He rebuked the Pharisees for their tradition of Corban. "Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition," He said. "For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother. . . . But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free. And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother; Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition" (Mark 7:9-13). The man who dedicated his goods to the temple by a vow was not vowing something sinful in itself: giving to God's house is a good thing. But when that vow became a device for evading the duty to honour his parents, the apparently pious act was unmasked as a piece of heartless hypocrisy. The test is not the outward appearance of the vow but its actual effect on the duties God has already laid upon the conscience. A vow that makes a man less attentive to his wife, less present to his children, less diligent in his calling, or less useful to his neighbour, is a vow he had no right to make, however spiritual it may look. The third prohibition touches the limits of the creature himself: no man may vow "which is not in his own power, and for the performance whereof he hath no promise of ability from God." Solomon saw the folly of this long ago and gave the warning in words that tremble with solemnity: "It is a snare to the man who devoureth that which is holy, and after vows to make enquiry" (Proverbs 20:25). The image is of a man so eager to vow that he swallows the holy thing whole, like a starving man gulping down food, and only afterward asks whether it was lawful or even possible. But by then the snare has closed around his foot. The vow that lies beyond a man's power is not an act of devotion; it is an act of presumption, as though a crippled man should vow to run a race he has no limbs to run, or a man born blind should vow to describe a sunrise he has never seen. The Apostle Paul, writing under the Holy Spirit, drew the sharpest line of all against the kind of vow that presumes to forbid what God has given and command what God has never required. "Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth" (1 Timothy 4:1-3). The language is so severe that we are tempted to soften it, but Paul will not let us. The Greek verb translated "giving heed" is prosechontes, which means to devote one's attention, to hold the mind toward something with settled intention. These are not casual errors but deliberate attachments. And what are they attached to? "Seducing spirits and doctrines of devils": daimoniōn, demons. Paul traces the teaching that forbids marriage and commands abstinence from foods not to an excess of piety but to the pit. The conscience that embraces such teaching is not tender; it is kekaustēriasmenōn, seared with a hot iron, branded like the flesh of a slave until all feeling is gone. A man with a seared conscience can forbid marriage and imagine he is serving God, when in truth he is serving the very spirits from which Christ came to deliver him. This is the deepest diagnosis the New Testament offers of the monastic impulse, and it explains why our Confession speaks of "sinful snares" rather than mere mistakes. A system that for centuries forbade its priests to marry, commanded its religious to abstain from meat on fast days, and elevated all of this as a "higher perfection" was not merely misguided; it was fulfilling, down to the last detail, the very prophecy the Spirit gave to protect the church from error. There remains a fourth text that gathers the whole section into a single beam of apostolic clarity. Paul, writing to the Colossians, asks a question that cuts through every pretension of will-worship: "Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men? Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh" (Colossians 2:20-23). The term Paul coins here — ethelothrēskeia, will-worship — is one of the most pointed words in the Greek New Testament. It names a religion that a man has chosen for himself rather than received from God, a devotion that rises not from the command of the Almighty but from the will of the creature. And Paul says that this self-chosen religion has three marks that should make every believer wary: it has a show of wisdom, it traffics in humility that is not real humility, and it neglects the body in ways God never ordained. The monastery, for all its outward severity, displayed exactly these three marks: it looked wise, it wore the costume of humility, and it punished the body with rigours Scripture never commanded. And Paul's verdict is blunt: it has "not any honour," no value, no worth, against the indulgence of the flesh. The will-worshipper imagines he is conquering the flesh by his abstinences, but in truth he is feeding the deepest flesh of all: the pride that makes its own ladder to heaven.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly gathered in the Jerusalem Chamber in the 1640s, they were not debating monastic vows as a distant historical curiosity. England had only recently emerged from the shadow of the medieval church, and the monasteries, dissolved under Henry VIII a century earlier, were still a living memory. More than a memory, in fact, for the Council of Trent had reaffirmed the validity of monastic vows in 1563, and the Counter-Reformation was building its new religious orders with fresh energy. The Divines were writing for a church that needed to know, with clarity and conviction, why the Reformed faith rejected what Rome declared to be works of supererogation, acts that went beyond the requirements of the law and earned a treasury of merit for the saints. The three-part test at the head of this section is therefore applied with surgical precision to three specific vows: "perpetual single life, professed poverty, and regular obedience." These are the three "evangelical counsels" that medieval theology had elevated above the Ten Commandments, the three vows that defined the religious life. The first, perpetual single life, forbids what God has not forbidden, for marriage is "honourable in all, and the bed undefiled" (Hebrews 13:4), and Paul's counsel to the unmarried is not a command but a gift, with the explicit warning that "if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn" (1 Corinthians 7:9). To take what Scripture offers as a gift and turn it into a universal prohibition, binding upon all who would pursue the highest holiness, is to teach for doctrine the commandment of men. The second vow, professed poverty, goes further still, for it not only forbids what God permits — the owning of property, the earning of wages, the stewardship of goods — but actually hinders duties that God commands. A man who has taken a vow of poverty cannot provide for his family, cannot give alms from his own substance, cannot practise the hospitality that is a qualification for the eldership. The vow has made him less capable of obeying God, not more. The third vow, regular obedience, delivers the conscience of one man into the hands of another, binding him to obey a superior in all things lawful and indifferent, as though the voice of the abbot were the voice of God. But no man may abdicate the stewardship of his own conscience, and no institution may stand between the soul and its Maker. The Divines' language, unsparing as it is, is not the language of contempt but of pastoral urgency. They call these vows "superstitious and sinful snares" because they have seen what they do to souls. A snare, in the world of the psalmist, is the hunter's device: a loop of cord hidden in the grass, invisible to the bird until it is already caught, springing shut the moment the foot touches it. The monastic vow, the Divines are telling us, is just such a device. It presents itself as the path to perfection, the narrow way that climbs above the common duties of the Christian life, and the eager young man or woman, burning with love for Christ and longing for a deeper devotion, steps into it willingly, only to find that what was promised as freedom is in fact a lifelong bondage to rules God never made, to a yoke that neither the apostles nor the early church ever laid upon the necks of disciples. The tragedy is not that these souls were insincere; it is that they were sincere, and their sincerity was exploited by a system that had forgotten the sufficiency of Christ. Yet the Divines are not merely tearing down; they are guarding. The three-part test is given as much for the Protestant as for the papist, for the tendency to invent vows that God has not commanded is not confined to any one communion. The evangelical who vows never to speak to a certain person again, the young Christian who vows to read the whole Bible in a month, the grieving soul who vows to spend every waking hour in some religious exercise; each of these may be stepping into a snare without knowing it. The test remains the same: Does Scripture forbid it? Does it hinder a commanded duty? Is it within my power, and have I a promise of God's help? A vow that fails any of these three tests is not a step toward God but a step away from Him.

Theological Depth

The Reformed theologians who came after the Assembly did not leave this section as an isolated polemic; they embedded it in a larger doctrine of Christian liberty and the sufficiency of Scripture. John Jewel, the Elizabethan bishop whose Apology of the Church of England did more than any single book to define the Reformed position against Rome, understood that the controversy over monastic vows was finally a controversy over the finished work of Christ. Jewel argued that the monk who vows perpetual celibacy, poverty, and obedience is implicitly denying that the righteousness of Christ is sufficient for him, for he is seeking a righteousness of his own through the renunciation of things that Christ never commanded him to renounce. To Jewel, the monastic vow was not a path to higher perfection but a detour around the cross, a way of earning by self-denial what can only be received by faith. The monk who fasted and kept vigil and slept on a board was not drawing nearer to God than the ploughman who worked his field and said his prayers and loved his wife; he was, in fact, in danger of drifting further away, because he trusted in his renunciations rather than in the Renunciation that was made once for all on Calvary. Jewel's argument, delivered in the clean, forceful Latin that made his Apology a defining Protestant book of its generation, set the terms for everything that followed: the Reformation did not abolish the monastery because it hated devotion, but because it had recovered the gospel in which all true devotion begins and ends. William Gouge, who sat in the Westminster Assembly and whose annotations on the whole Bible would shape the piety of English Puritanism for a century, applied the teaching of Colossians 2 with the methodical care that was his hallmark. Gouge fastened upon Paul's term ethelothrēskeia, will-worship, and drew out its implications with a thoroughness that leaves the reader nowhere to hide. Will-worship, Gouge taught, is any religious practice that a man devises out of his own mind and then imposes as though it carried divine authority. It has three distinguishing marks, all drawn from the apostle's catalogue: it wears a show of wisdom that is not true wisdom, it parades a humility that is not true humility, and it punishes the body in ways that God has never prescribed. The man who abstains from marriage or from meat under the impression that such abstinence makes him holier than his neighbour is practising will-worship, however ancient the tradition and however many saints have gone before him. Gouge was not a man given to rhetorical excess, but on this point he was unyielding: the only worship God accepts is the worship He has commanded, and everything else, however splendid in appearance, is an intrusion upon His prerogative. The vow that springs from will-worship is not an offering but a trespass. Charles Hodge, whose three-volume Systematic Theology would become the standard text for generations of Princeton students, took up the passage in 1 Timothy 4 and gave it the full weight of his exegetical rigour. Hodge noted that Paul does not treat the forbidding of marriage and the commanding of abstinence from meats as minor errors that can be overlooked in view of the larger devotion that inspires them. On the contrary, Paul traces them to their source, and that source is demonic: "seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils." Hodge was not given to hyperbole, and his careful qualification is worth weighing: the men who taught these doctrines were not themselves devils, but their teaching originated from the same spirits that oppose the gospel and enslave the human conscience. Every system that adds to the commands of God, whether it forbids what God permits or permits what God forbids, is serving, whether it knows it or not, the purpose of the enemy of souls. Hodge applied this with characteristic sobriety to the whole history of the monastic movement, and his conclusion was that the church had been warned in advance. The Spirit spoke "expressly," clearly, so that when the forbidding of marriage arose in the third and fourth centuries, the faithful could recognise it not as a new ascent of piety but as an old heresy wearing a new face. The Confession's language about "snare" was not a late invention; it was the echo of an apostolic alarm that had been sounding since the first century. But the theologian whose witness presses upon this section with the most personal weight is not a theologian at all in the academic sense; he is Luther, the former monk, whose De Votis Monasticis is the testimony of a man who had been inside the snare and had been delivered from it. Luther's argument is simple and searching: a monastic vow is invalid from the start because it is made under the false premise that there are two classes of Christians, and that the higher class is attained by renouncing things that Christ never commanded anyone to renounce. Luther had been taught that his baptismal vows were insufficient for a truly devoted life, and that the religious vows were a second baptism that washed away the stains the first had left. But when the gospel broke upon him, when he understood that "the just shall live by faith", he saw that the monastic vow was an insult to his baptism, as though what God had done in the laver of regeneration needed to be supplemented by what man could do in the chapter house. Luther did not leave the monastery because he had grown weary of devotion; he left it because devotion had been redefined, and the only devotion that pleases God is the devotion of faith working through love in the station to which God has called a man. The farmer in his field, the mother in her nursery, the magistrate on his bench, and the pastor in his pulpit are all, in Luther's recovered vision, living the life of Christian perfection, because the perfection Christ demands is not the renunciation of created goods but the sanctification of them by the Word of God and prayer. A vow that separates a man from the duties of his calling is not a higher calling; it is a desertion. Between them, Jewel, Gouge, Hodge, and Luther give us the full theological architecture behind the Confession's compact sentences. Jewel anchors the argument in the sufficiency of Christ's righteousness; Gouge exposes the psychology of will-worship that makes men prefer their own commands to God's; Hodge traces the doctrine of enforced celibacy to its demonic source and shows that the church was warned of it from the beginning; and Luther bears personal witness that the snare is real, that thousands of sincere souls have been caught in it, and that the gospel alone has power to set them free. The Confession's teaching on vows is not an appendix to its doctrine of worship; it is the application of the gospel to the conscience, and the gospel applied is always liberation.

Puritan Application

First, learn to test every vow, even the private resolutions of your own heart, by the threefold rule this section lays down. The question is not whether a vow feels spiritual or whether others have made the same vow before you. The question is whether Scripture permits it, whether it helps or hinders your commanded duties, and whether you have any warrant from God to think you can keep it. The young father who resolves, out of zeal for his soul, to rise at four every morning for two hours of prayer may find within a week that he is irritable with his children, short with his wife, and drowsy at his work. His vow, made with the best intentions, is hindering the very duties God has given him as a father, husband, and labourer. His zeal is real, but his vow was undiscerning, and the remedy is not to redouble his efforts but to repent of the vow and return to the duties God actually assigned him. A great deal of Christian misery would be avoided if believers would simply ask, before making any resolution, the three questions this section requires. Is it forbidden? Does it hinder? Is it in my power? The Spirit who inspired the Confession is the Spirit of wisdom, and He does not lead men into snares. Second, beware the persistent temptation to invent a two-tier Christianity. The monastic system was built on the assumption that some Christians are called to ordinary obedience and others to a higher perfection, as though the commandments are for the common believer, while the counsels of poverty, celibacy, and obedience are for the spiritual elite. This assumption did not die with the dissolution of the monasteries; it lives on whenever a believer imagines that the pastor is holier than the plumber, or that the missionary has attained a degree of devotion the shopkeeper cannot reach, or that the life of visible renunciation is inherently closer to God than the life of faithful, cheerful stewardship. The truth our Confession guards, and which Luther recovered at such cost, is that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. The calling to which God has called you, whatever it is, is the arena of your sanctification. The mother changing diapers, the accountant checking ledgers, the student writing papers, the deacon visiting the sick: each is pursuing the perfection Christ commands, which is not found in renouncing the gifts of creation but in receiving them with thanksgiving and using them for the glory of the Giver. Do not let anyone, however pious, persuade you that you need a second-tier vow to be fully devoted to Christ. Your baptism was sufficient. Third, receive with thankfulness the liberty Christ has purchased for you, and refuse to let that liberty be stolen by the commandments of men. When Paul says that those who forbid marriage and command abstinence from meats are teaching doctrines of demons, he is not speaking with rhetorical excess; he is naming the reality that every addition to the commands of God is an assault upon the liberty of the sons of God. The Christian is free to marry or to remain single, free to eat meat or to abstain, free to own property and to use it for the kingdom, because Christ's finished work has sanctified all these things. A system that takes what God has left free and binds it with chains of obligation is not leading men to holiness; it is leading them back to bondage. Guard your liberty jealously, not as a licence for the flesh, Paul is careful to say that, but as the atmosphere in which grateful obedience breathes. The man who feels free to marry is the man who can marry "in the Lord" with joy and not with guilt. The man who feels free to earn and spend is the man who can give generously and not grudgingly. Liberty is not the enemy of devotion; it is the soil in which true devotion grows. Fourth, when you do make a vow — and the Scriptures encourage vows made lawfully — make it for the right reasons and with the right limitations. A lawful vow strengthens the soul in duties it already owes; it does not invent new duties out of the imagination. The psalmist's vow to keep God's righteous judgments was the clasp of a covenant already written on his heart; it did not create a new law but sealed the old one with a fresh resolve. When you vow to give a certain portion of your income to the church, or to spend a certain hour of the day in prayer, or to abstain from a particular indulgence for a season, you are not ascending to a higher plane of spirituality; you are simply fastening your obedience more tightly to the points where your flesh is prone to slip. And remember the wisdom of the Confession's closing clause: the vow extends only "so far and so long as they may fitly conduce thereunto." A vow is a servant, not a master; a means, not an end. The moment it ceases to help, it has no further claim upon your conscience. This is not laxity; it is the sanity of a faith that trusts the wisdom of God more than the earnestness of man. Fifth, and finally, let this section drive you back to the vow that God Himself has made. We have spent seven studies examining the oaths and vows that men make to God, but the Scriptures never let us forget that the only vow that ultimately saves is the one God made to us. When the writer to the Hebrews speaks of "the immutability of his counsel," he is speaking of a God who bound Himself by an oath so that we might have strong consolation. The Lord Jesus, in the upper room, did not ask His disciples to vow their loyalty; He knew them too well for that, and within hours they would all forsake Him. Instead He gave them a covenant, sealed in His own blood, that depended not on their faithfulness but on His. Every lawful vow we make is a response to that prior and greater vow, an echo of a promise that was spoken before the foundation of the world and that will hold when heaven and earth have passed away. The snare of the unlawful vow is that it puts man's promise where God's promise alone can stand; the freedom of the lawful vow is that it rests upon a covenant that cannot be broken, and offers back to God nothing but what God has first given.

Prayer

O Lord our God, whose commandments are perfect and whose promises are sure, we bless Thee that Thou hast not left us to the devices of our own hearts but hast given us Thy Word to be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. Forgive us for the many times we have made vows in our own strength, promised what we could not perform, and bound ourselves to duties Thou didst never require. Forgive us for the pride that imagines we can rise above our brethren by renouncing gifts Thou hast declared good, and for the folly that mistakes the commandments of men for the wisdom of God. Deliver us, we pray Thee, from every snare of will-worship, and grant us the discernment to test every resolution by the perfect rule of Thy Word, that we may neither add to Thy commands nor diminish from them. Teach us to use our liberty not as an occasion for the flesh but as the glad occasion for thankful obedience in the calling whereunto Thou hast placed us, whether that calling be great or small in the eyes of the world. And above all, fix our hearts upon the vow that Thou Thyself hast made, the everlasting covenant sealed with the blood of Thy dear Son, in which alone we have peace, assurance, and a hope that maketh not ashamed. We ask all this in the name of Him who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now set down at the right hand of the throne of God, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.