# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 12 21_S1007
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

7

That 3 Moses 18, 20. has such an interpretation, which extends further than the words read, becomes wholly beyond doubt by the following two reasons. First, it would annul the wisdom and perfection of God, so richly revealed in the Old as in the New Testament, if where there is one and the same cause there should absolutely not subsist the same provision of the law; from this rule, which is as certain beforehand to Scriptural theology as in arithmetic that twice two cannot be five, God would depart, if His law were to be understood in such a way that marriage should indeed be forbidden to the persons enumerated by name, but not to those not named, although these and those stand in the same degree of kinship. And secondly, from the opposite view arise the most absurd consequences, namely that many marriages, e.g. between a grandmother and her grandson, between a grandfather and his great-granddaughter, etc., (even between a father and his own daughter?) would have to be admissible, the shamefulness of which an inward natural sensibility yet asserts among most heathen, which stays away only in men in whom the impulse of conscience no longer stirs and the voice of the light of nature gradually falls silent. Against an objection raised here and there, the great Martin Chemnitz, so free from scholastic-philosophical perversity, has happily defended these principles, whom then most of our theologians, also John Gerhard, have followed. Only the scrupulous Philip Jacob Spener, so inclined to scruples, made among the more eminent teachers an exception to this again, the first to do so.

Chiefly it was 3 Moses 18, 18., which moved the latter, in a violent dispute which arose among his colleagues over the marriage of an otherwise respected theologian with two sisters, one after (not beside) the other, as Lutheran princes had already done earlier, in the mildness of his disposition to remind them that such a marriage does not by any express word of God become an unlawful one. Although now, consistently, according to the above, this cannot be approved, yet we may, for the sake of the analogy of Scripture, well grant him that the aim of the divine Spirit in the passage aforementioned was directed preeminently to forbid the children of Israel, who might appeal to the example of their forefather Jacob, simultaneous marriages with two sisters, and that for a similar reason the partial repetition of v. 9 in v. 11 was directed against Abraham's example (1 Moses 20, 12.), whose kind of marriage was less common among the nations than that between stepbrothers and stepsisters of one common mother. In general, the customs of the Orient, more or less current among us, decide why in Scripture the marriage cases of certain persons of the same degree are not specially designated, because for some the opportunity lay nearer than for others, as for example by an old law the nephew, if his father was no longer living, received his father's brother's widow into the inheritance, but not the widow of his mother's brother, who belonged to a wholly different family; likewise an unmarried aunt stood less remote from domestic living together than a niece.

natural individuality of man is the ground upon which grace erects its spiritual edifice. Thus we must reckon the apostle Paul and John, Luther and Melanchthon to the twofold tendency of the first class, the apostle Peter, the longsuffering Bugenhagen, however faithfully devoted to Luther, and others more to the second, to the third row the apostle James, whose apparent leveling of faith was to balance the dead antithesis that had crept into the Church, and among others the Brunswick Superintendent and co-author of the Formula of Concord, Martin Chemnitz. In wonderful, infinite variety these gifts are in the realm of nature and of the Spirit that sanctifies, now limited, now heightened, now modified.

One has attempted, in order to be able to survey the forbidden degrees more easily and with sure sight, two chief kinds of reckoning. The one is peculiar to the old Roman civil law, and stands in every European land-law where the corpus juris Rom. is valid, though here and there with additions or diminutions according to the special observances of each country; in all probability it is also laid at the foundation in the United States. The other way of calculating the degrees of kinship is that of the canon or old papal law, which in Lutheran countries also was formerly retained for all matrimonial causes (i.e. legal cases which arise on account of the contracting or dissolution of marriages, and therefore fell within the province of the Consistories — disputes, e.g., about the dowry, the education and maintenance of the children, inheritances, etc. are not matrimonial causes, belonged before the civil courts). (One of the most important consequences, by the way, of the custom of leaving the cases of marriage and divorce to ecclesiastical courts might be this, that a Catholic sovereign was not empowered to decide in matrimonial causes of his Protestant subjects; for the Consistories were to be in the original sense the old presbyteries of the Church, in which the secular ruler, as especially fitted for external church government, if he namely belonged to it, should have in person or through his minister nothing more than the presidency.)

In the civil law it is constantly said: As many generations as there are, so many degrees of kinship there are also. In the canon law, on the other hand, this rule holds only in the direct ascending or descending line; for the two collateral lines one has two special rules, the one for the equal: As far as the persons are removed and stand apart from the common stock, so far or by so many degrees do they stand apart from one another; the other for the unequal lateral line: By as many degrees as the most remote person is removed or stands apart from the common stock, by so many degrees do both persons in question stand apart from one another. According to the canon and the civil law Jacob is removed from Terah in the direct line by three degrees, for there are three generations; on the other hand, in the equal lateral line Laban is related to Jacob according to the civil law in the sixth degree, according to the canon law, however, only in the third degree; and in the unequal lateral line Laban is related to Abraham according to the civil law in the fourth degree, to Isaac in the fifth degree, according to the canon law, however, to both in the third degree. The latter way retains at least this advantage, that it is more logical; for that Jacob and Laban are related only in the third degree follows from the general principle: Things which are connected with one and the same third are also connected among themselves as with the third; and if Milcah, Haran's daughter, is in the second degree of the family, but Nahor in the first, then Nahor and Milcah cannot be related to one another in the first degree, otherwise the person more removed from the stock, Milcah, would be more nearly related to the other, Nahor, than to the ancestor Terah; consequently they are related to one another in the second degree, as the canon law teaches. In affinity this counts three kinds: 1) when by means of one single person the blood relatives of the one party become relatives by marriage of the other, 2) when by means of two, 3) when by means of three the affinity arises; e.g. Ishmael's wife was Rebekah's sister-in-law in the second kind by means of the two brothers. The rules now which held for consanguinity at the Lutheran Consistories were also observed in affinity; in the direct ascending and descending line marriages are forbidden to infinity, and in the lateral lines they are so as often as the one party is removed only one single degree from the common stock. The second and third kind of affinity lay no hindrances in the way.

Since it must rightly be of concern to the Christian to obtain a clear insight into these apparently intricate relations, it is most advisable to comprise all that is forbidden by divine law in the following four provisions: I. In the direct ascending and descending line all marriages, to infinity, if such a case were possible, are contrary to the law of nature and therefore to be called incestuous. II. In the equal lateral line only the marriages between brothers and sisters, brothers- and sisters-in-law of the first kind, and stepbrothers and stepsisters; but nowhere in God's Word are forbidden marriages between children brought in, where neither father nor mother is common, e.g. if Sarah had been begotten by Abraham's stepmother with a stranger, her first husband — and between cousins. III. In the unequal lateral line, if the one person is removed from the common stock by only one degree, God has no pleasure in the marriage of the latter with the others to infinity of the line, because those, from the relation of the parents to the children