I was never personally close to Professor Kurt Marquart, but I loved him on account of his clear, unabashed teaching of Holy Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions. He was also a kind man with a towering intellect, wonderful sense of humor, and a genuine attitude of humility. As I’ve watched from afar the seminary evolve over the years since receiving the M.Div. there (1997), and particularly since Prof. Marquart’s death, I am concerned that we have lost more than a great teacher. We lost a vital part of our confessional conscience.
As we have been studying the Formula of Concord at Immanuel on Sunday mornings, I’ve been working my way through an old CPH book entitled A Contemporary Look at the Formula of Concord. With what delight did I see that my old professor had written the chapter on FC X, regarding church practices and adiaphora. Here is a snippet that is even more pertinent now than when he wrote it:
It would be wrong to infer from [FC X's evangelical principle], for instance, that ceremonies and liturgical forms simply don’t matter, and may be left to proliferate–or stagnate!–like weeds or Topsy! The technical term “indifferent things” for adiaphora was never meant to suggest “indifference” in the popular sense of boredom, contempt, or carelessness. The Formula of Concord nowhere retracts the Augsburg Confession’s considered judgment that “nothing contributes so much to the maintenance of dignity in public worship and the cultivation of reverence and devotion among the people as the proper observance of ceremonies in the churches.”
The a-liturgical orientation of our modern Reformed-pietistic environment moreover jumps only too easily to the conclusion that Article X simply consigns everything liturgical to the realm of adiaphora, so that as long as Word and Sacraments still come to expression somehow, all outward arrangements are free and “indifferent.” That too would be a grave misunderstanding. The term adiaphora applies only to that strictly circumscribed area of external details neither commanded nor forbidden in God’s Word. In no way does FC X abrogate Article XXIV of both the AC and the Apology, in which the Lutheran Church officially confesses its doctrinal stand on the nature of Christian worship–including such concrete particulars as the divinely given relation between preaching and the Sacrament (Ap XXIV, 33-40, 71-72, 80, 89), and the “right use” of the historic Christian “mass” (AC XXIV 35 German; Ap XXIV 99) or the “liturgy” (Ap XXIV 79-81) or the “Eucharist” (Ap XXIV 74-77, 87). It would be a reductionist fallacy to confuse all such deeply theological issues with mere adiaphora.
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