Only God establishes the terms of true worship. This includes worship. By beginning with the doctrine of scripture, rather than the doctrine of God, or with the reality of the Christian experience as do some other confessions, the Westminster Confession is clearly concerned that the source of authority in the Christian religion be not compromised. By contrast, the Thirty-Nine articles of the Church of England commence with a declaration of the doctrine of the Trinity, moving to Christology, the Resurrection, and the Holy Ghost before discussing the sufficiency of Scripture. Cultural critics who discuss how modern culture differs from premodern cultures are almost unanimous in concluding that the modern social order has a radical dehumanizing effect.
Modern culture is suicidal because it is deicidal and anthropocidal.
Our contemporaries no longer believe that nature has any light. Perhaps one reason for this is the uncomfortable fact that, as the divines understood, one does learn a lot about God from the light of nature, including that he deserves to be feared, praised, and served. Human societies, pagan and Christian, were once unanimous in their convictions that children obey and respect their parents, that sexual adventurism be stigmatized and punished by the community, and that public displays of blasphemy were not healthful. Our society, among others, no longer gives consent to these expressions of what might be called natural virtue. Writing in the seventeenth century, the Westminster divines could never have predicted how inhuman some human societies would become.