# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1875_S9
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 9 —

and let himself be driven out of the country for it by the Crypto-Calvinist government of Anhalt.

Adiaphora [Mitteldinge, "middle things"] we call those which God has "neither commanded nor forbidden" (Formula of Concord, Article X); but they are so in every case only in the abstract sense. In particular cases it may then no longer be left to freedom to act this way or that, namely when love is injured, as the Apostle has in view when he says: "I have power in all things, but it is not expedient in all" (1 Cor. 10:23). A concrete case of this we find in the life of the Apostle Paul. He had Timothy circumcised, in order to take him with him on his apostolic journey, out of regard for the weak Jews, because this stood within Christian liberty. But when a party arose with the teaching that one must pass through the Jewish church in order to arrive at the Christian, that for the attainment of salvation not only faith in Christ was necessary but also the observance of the chief laws of Moses; when these troublemakers appealed to the fact that Paul, for the sake of the weak, had had Timothy circumcised, so that he must now also, consistently, have Titus circumcised, then Paul did not yield to them for even an hour and did not let Titus be circumcised. How far a Christian has his liberty in adiaphora and yet can be bound in regard to the use of it, Luther shows when he once says: "Between you and your God your freedom is full and round, but between you and your neighbor you have no freedom at all. Faith makes you lord over all things, love makes you servant to all." The freedom of a Christian in adiaphora relates only to the conscience and not to the outward act. The Christian is by no means a free man in relation to his neighbor, but a servant. A free adiaphoron one should be ready to forgo for the neighbor's sake, as the Apostle says in 1 Cor. 8:13: "If food makes my brother offend, I will never eat meat again, so that I may not make my brother offend"; but while one forgoes it out of love for the neighbor's sake, one must also know that it is free. The adiaphora themselves are not subject to change; they remain what they are; but the use of them is not always free. No creature can make laws to bind consciences; God alone can. And it is not to be expected of God that he will set up a new economy and forbid something free, as in the Old Testament; in the New Testament we have an immovable kingdom. Nor can the church make any such conscience-binding ordinance. Its duty and task is to make people blessed. How does it fulfil that, if through its ordinances it throws stumbling blocks in the souls' way? Its ordinances may therefore have been good and wholesome under certain circumstances, which must be changed in other times; for to make ordinances that are good and wholesome at all times, that can be done by God alone.