# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 12 21_S1008
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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be regarded according to the fourth commandment. IV. In all this respect (I. II. and III.) the same holds of affinity; but for the lateral lines of both, of consanguinity and affinity, in a mitigated measure.

Accordingly, without divine and, in Protestant countries, also human laws being against it, father and son may marry two sisters according to the flesh, or mother and daughter, and conversely, two brothers two sisters or mother and daughter, the sister's husband his brother's wife, but not without necessity his brother's daughter, even the daughter's husband his step-mother-in-law as a relative by marriage of the second kind, etc. Only in such cases as the last, or when the father takes the daughter and the son the mother to wife, it is to be wished that it may not occur, so that neither by chance may propriety and decorum be violated in any way, nor unseemly jests even be occasioned. That already in the ancient Church the marriage between cousins (first at the advice of Ambrose through the Emperor Theodosius), and other such, was forbidden, was promoted by the love for the virgin state and for monastic life in general. Before that the laws must have been far laxer, so that even cases of marriage between relatives by marriage of the first kind could be found; for only at the council at Neocaesarea in 314 A.D., before Constantine attained sole dominion, was a canon established against it, which the Christian emperors then, more and more confirmed and extended, took up into the political law. From the Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore it is evident that about the 8th and 9th century the impediment of kinship already reached to the seventh degree of the civil law. In the 11th the canonical reckoning of the degrees was introduced, and even according to this the impediment was legally assumed to the seventh degree in the time of Pope Alexander III., but in the 13th century was limited by the Lateran council under Innocent III. to the fourth degree, which the Roman Church still observes to this day.

Concerning the Judgment of de Valenti, Hengstenberg, Sartorius, Tholuck and Others.

Under the title: "On the Distress of the Prussian Church" there is found in the journal of Rudelbach and Guericke an epistle, which we intend to communicate in the "Lutheraner" in a full extract. The decided testimony delivered therein is the more worthy of heed, the less Dr. de Valenti wishes to be reckoned among the so-called Old Lutherans. Here we give of it for the present only the following:

Against the Berlin Evangelische Kirchenzeitung edited by Hengstenberg, de Valenti remarks further in particular: "it makes itself and others believe, as though it were called to gather the true disciples and warriors of Christ under its symbol-believing banner and to lead them into the victorious battle against the anti-church and anti-Christian powers of the age." But that no salvation is to be expected from the Berlin evangelical Kirchenzeitung in this struggle, every one sees well who knows the requirements of a genuine confession for the evangelical truth. — Instead of designating the Schleiermacherian heresy, namely, as that which it is, namely the general salt-stupefying element of our time, it quietly suffers it when, e.g., a Sartorius in a diocesan letter of 1842 in its columns sets Luther and Schleiermacher side by side as two "distinguished teachers of the Church." Instead of rejecting with force and emphasis the Hegelian folly, as antichristian as it is blasphemous, it extols, as already mentioned — with Dr. Tholuck — the so-called speculative doctrine of satisfaction and atonement of a Göschel as the dawn of a new day in the revelation-believing theology. Yea, not content with the shameful acknowledgment of such will-o'-the-wisps of a fashionable faith, fluttering and hopping about upon the putrid pool of the crypto-atheistic philosophy of the age, it determines sin itself "not as the act of an individual, but as the absolute act of the eternal Spirit (!!!), which governs God Himself." (1834. No. 2., pp. 12 and 13.)

Finally it is not ashamed, in its struggle against the band of Schleiermacherian world-transfigurers formed against it, to extol the leader of the same as a wise master-builder, who, besides wood, hay and stubble, yet upon a good foundation for his disciples built up so much gold, silver and precious stones, that they should only in this way have continued building, in order to raise themselves above their time just as their master did, so as then to become for their contemporaries the same that Schleiermacher once was for his own, namely a church-light shining far and wide, working in blessing.

What now? Has perhaps Dr. Hengstenberg forgotten, or has he never yet known, that Schleiermacher does not even in earnest believe in the extramundane and supramundane personal existence of God, that therefore the true personal God is lacking in the Schleiermacherian doctrine, that he has denied the fall of Adam, the preexistence of the Son of God, and thus the divinity of Christ, as also His resurrection and ascension, and accordingly Christ as the head of the covenant and of the life of His congregation, both in the state of His humiliation and of His glory; that he further denies the continuing operations of grace of the Holy Ghost proceeding immediately from the glorified Saviour, and puts in the place of them his so-called common spirit, which latter he then commands his disciples to honor as an essential constituent of the divine being, yea as the proper God immanent in the world?

Is it then unknown to Prof. Hengstenberg that Schleiermacher declares the consciousness of sin, therefore repentance, to be an essential part of sin, but sin itself an essential part of the original perfection of man, etc.? But what does all that matter? Hengstenberg gives us hereupon the following symbol-believing (!!) assurance. He admits, namely, that the Schleiermacherian doctrine in itself "has united things quite incompatible, but that such a union of what is contradictory was quite timely (!!!) in the second and to some extent still in the third decade of our century, yea even in a certain sense justified (!!)". According to Hengstenberg, then, what is today soul-murdering lie, wholly contradicting the Gospel, was a few years ago in the Church justified truth, bringing salvation and life. O sancta simplicitas! (Holy simplicity.) What now? If Dr. Hengstenberg acknowledges such a fanatic and arch-sophist, yea such a crypto-atheistic Marcion of our days as a teacher of the Church standing on a good foundation, must not then the war and noise with the Friends of Light, the Rongians, as also lastly with the Schleiermacherian Unionists and Neo-symbolists, in spite of all noisy air-strokes on both sides, nevertheless appear as a mere sham war, while meanwhile the old misery and corruption goes irresistibly forward?

The writer of this therefore protests, both here and on every other occasion, most solemnly against the presumption of the Berlin evangelical Kirchenzeitung, by virtue of which it so much delights to be regarded both by friends and by enemies as the symbol-believing organ and as the confession-faithful martyr and purgatorial sacrifice of our days. It is this neither for the Reformed, nor still less for the Lutheran, how much less for the so-called United Church. Yea, this symbol-believing (?!) raising of the shield of the Berlin evangelical Kirchenzeitung belongs among the most powerful errors of our time, which can be explained only from the understanding, twisted and dislocated in its inner joints of life, of unbelief and of the pious fancy-faith and fashion-faith of our days.

Moreover it is still to be remarked that the faith of true and upright witnesses of the truth, even under these sad circumstances, has not doubted for a single moment of the true help of the LORD. — For the sake of the truth and to the profit of many honest but still weak and short-sighted disciples of Christ let it however be said: Not the cunning and power of the Friends of Light, Communists, Demagogues, etc., but the vanity, blindness and presumption of those who, just as, e.g., also a Dr. Hengstenberg, pass among many sorely blinded pious people, without any ground of truth, as defenders of the Protestant church faith, it is, which we have most to bewail and to lament. — Poor Zion! not thy enemies, but thy false friends, comforters and helpers destroy thee!

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Publisher of the Anzeiger des Westens.