Adiaphora

Adiaphoron (/ædɪˈæfərɒn, ædiˈæfərɒn/;^[1][2] plural: adiaphora; from the Greek ἀδιάφορον (pl. ἀδιάφορα),

meaning "not different or differentiable")^[3] is the negation of διαφορά diaphora, "difference".

Christianity

In Christianity, adiaphora are matters not regarded as essential to faith, but nevertheless as permissible for Christians or allowed in the church. What is specifically considered adiaphora depends on the specific theology in view.

Lutheranism

See also: Law and Gospel and Antinomianism § Lutheranism

The issue of what constituted adiaphora became a major dispute during the Protestant Reformation. In 1548, two years after the death of Martin Luther, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V tried to unite Catholics and Protestants in his realm with a law called the Augsburg Interim.

PURITANISM

The Westminster Confession of Faith, a confession of faith written by the Puritans, which after the English Civil War was rejected by the Anglicans, distinguishes between elements or acts of worship (worship proper) and the circumstances of worship. The elements of worship must be limited to what has positive warrant in Scripture, a doctrine known as the regulative principle of worship. In this framework, the elements of worship have included praise (the words and manner of music), prayer, preaching and teaching from the Bible, the taking of vows, and the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, while the circumstances of worship have included the building and its necessary furniture and the time of day for worship.

Latitudinarianism in Anglicanism

Latitudinarianism was initially a pejorative term applied to a group of 17th-century English theologians who believed in conforming to official Church of England practices but who felt that matters of doctrine, liturgical practice, and ecclesiastical organization were of relatively little importance. Good examples of the latitudinarian philosophy were found among the Cambridge Platonists. The latitudinarian Anglicans of the seventeenth century built on Richard Hooker's position, in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, that God cares about the moral state of the individual soul and that such things as church leadership are "things indifferent". However, they took the position far beyond Hooker's own and extended it to doctrinal matters.

See also

• Evangelical counsels – Chastity, poverty (perfect charity) and obedience
• Heterodoxy – Opinions or practices which vary from official positions
• Ikhtilaf – Scholarly disagreement in Islamic law
• *Lex orandi, lex credendi*. – Principle of the relationship between belief and prayer in Christian tradition
• Mubah – Islamic jurisprudential term denoting an action that has no specific ruling, similar to the Stoic meaning of Adiaphora
• Orthodoxy – Adherence to the actual accepted belief, especially in religion
• Modern Stoicism – Philosophical system
• Theologoumenon – Statement lacking doctrinal authority