Lutheran Worship and the Confessions: Adiaphora Bounded (Part 1)

Returning again to the book Lutheran Worship: History and Practice, published in 1993 by Concordia Publishing House (CPH), over the next few days I am going to draw from Chapter 2 of this work, entitled “Corporate Worship of the Church,” in which there are two essays of interest: “Worship and the Community of Faith,” by Roger D. Pittelko, and “Liturgy and Evangelism,” by Kurt Marquart. In both of these essays, the authors address the popular abuse of the term adiaphora as it is employed by modern pop-church innovators with respect to worship practice.

For the uninitiated, the use of the term adiaphora in theological contexts is a reference to the liberty which the Church enjoys in matters neither commanded nor forbidden in the Scriptures. Many aspects of public worship fall into this category, as the Lutheran Confessions inform us (and I quote from my Reader's Edition of the Book of Concord):

...[W]e believe, teach, and confess that some ceremonies or Church practice are neither commanded nor forbidden in God's Word, but have been introduced for the sake of fitting and good order. Such rites are not in and of themselves divine worship (FC EP X [3]).

We believe, teach, and confess that the churches of God (in every land and at every time according to its circumstances) has the power to change worship ceremonies in a way that may be most useful and edifying to the churches of God (FC EP X [4]).

For the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree about the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. It is not necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies instituted by men, should be the same everywhere (AC VII [2-3]).

But are these isolated statements representative of the balance of testimony contained in our public Confession regarding worship and adiaphora? Is there more to it than this?

Among advocates of the Church Growth Movement (CGM) within Lutheranism in America, these are usually the most celebrated and lingered-over Confessional statements regarding worship. It is on the basis of these statements that the rites of divine worship are seemingly regarded by them as little more than wide-open green-fields terminating somewhere on the horizon where they meet the bright blue sky -- that is, regarded by them as little more than unfettered freedom. This is a problem, because there is, indeed, more to it than just this:

Today [these isolated statements are] often misunderstood as liturgical carte blanche, and cited in support of license and chaos. The founding fathers of the Missouri Synod evidently understood the matter quite differently. The original synodical constitution made it a part of the “Business of Synod” to “strive after the greatest possible uniformity in ceremonies.” This “desired uniformity in the ceremonies [was] to be brought about especially by the adoption of sound Lutheran agendas (church books).” All this grew out of serious theological concerns:


Furthermore Synod deems it necessary for the purification of the Lutheran Church in America, that the emptiness and the poverty in the externals of the service be opposed, which, having been introduced here by the false spirit of the Reformed, is now rampant.

All pastors and congregations that wish to be recognized as orthodox by Synod are prohibited from adopting or retaining any ceremony which might weaken the confession of the truth or condone or strengthen a heresy.*


In other words, so-called “indifferent” matters, or adiaphora, are not absolutely but only relatively indifferent. They are indifferent in the sense that the New Testament has no divinely instituted ritual law, like the Levitical. The external divine institutions – Baptism, the Holy Supper, and the preaching ministry within one priestly and royal people of God – require that many particular decisions about time, place, and manner be taken in Christian wisdom and love. The fact that such decisions are not divinely prescribed does not make them unimportant.

Marquart, K. (1993). Liturgy and Evangelism. In F.L. Precht (Ed.), Lutheran Worship: History and Practice (pp. 62 – 63). St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House.

In our day and age, the term indifferent is often used synonymously with the term adiaphora. This is unfortunate, since in today's dilapidated English, the term indifferent is often understood to mean “it doesn't matter.” The fact is, issues of Christian liberty are indeed issues which matter, and which matter very deeply. In the selection above, Kurt Marquart attempts to make this obvious. He is not without Biblical foundation. In 1 Cor. 10:23, the Bible states, “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not.” The context of this statement is freedom in practice. As St. Paul demonstrates in this section, use of adiaphora ought to be thoughtfully calculated, as it otherwise stands to harm fellow Christians, damage the reputation of the Church, and interfere with Her work in the World. Likewise do the Lutheran Confessions, even in the narrow selections quoted above, indicate that the necessity of change in the rites of the Church, when and where it should arise, is predicated on that which is most edifying to the Church.

Church Practice communicates – the founders of the LCMS understood this. As a result, Church Practice is a herald of of our Confession. Moreover, Church Practice teaches – and insofar as it teaches, we are called to be vigilant over our freedom and diligent to exercise it in a way that best teaches the whole counsel of God.

The wisdom collected over two millennia in the New Testament Church has handed to the modern Church the benefit of a proven, cross-cultural Liturgical Practice that transcends the ages, which centers on Christ and the Holy Spirit's work through the Means of Grace, and broadly represents and teaches the doctrines of Scripture in ways that the narrow evangelical considerations of today cannot: the historic Liturgy is not only evangelical, but orthodox, apostolic, and catholic. The series on the Lutheran Liturgy, recently posted on this blog, is proof positive of this fact.

Tomorrow (or the next day, as time permits), I'll post more from the Lutheran Confessions and draw upon the essayists in Lutheran Worship: History and Practice, as they address the issue of Worship Practice and give balance to the favored quotations of CGM advocates.





*[quoted by the author from Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly 19/3 (October 1946) – LCMS changed the Constitutional article referred to, above (Article III, Par. 5) in 1979].

Lutheran Worship and the Confessions: Adiaphora Bounded (Part 2) -->