# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1855_S96
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

96

Excerpts as Contributions to Pastoral Casuistry.

The Blessing of Marriage.

1. "Can a minister give the ecclesiastical blessing to those who have joined themselves in marriage in an unlawful manner?"

To this question the old, spirited Strasbourg theologian J. Conrad Dannhauer answers as follows in his Liber conscientiae apertus sive theologia conscientiaria:

"Yes, if they have joined themselves in so unlawful a manner that the promise of marriage is nevertheless valid, provided the fault does not do away with the substance of the matter (si culpa adhaereat substantiae ut accidens — if the fault adheres to the substance only as an accident). For if we deem worthy of the baptismal blessing the children who are stained with the filth of sin, since we consecrate not the sin but the person; if we pronounce the blessing over every other marriage, and even over the begetting of children, although this too is defiled by the plague of sin: why should it not also be permitted to bestow the blessing upon a state, or upon persons — for example, of unequal religion — and upon others in a similar case? Exceedingly harsh is the judgment here of (the Jesuit) Nicolaus Serarius in his Miscellanea concerning the marriage of Catholics with heretics, where he writes as follows: "If a Catholic pastor unites in marriage a couple of whom either both are of heretical faith, or of whom only one of the two is, he sins scarcely at all, unless some higher cause does not at times excuse him." (Tom. I, p. 821.)

2. In a similar case the Leipzig theological faculty decided likewise in the year 1620. It writes: "To the question whether a Lutheran person, entering into matrimony with an obstinate Calvinist person who will not be instructed, may be married and given the church blessing by the ministers — we judge that the answer should be: although it is by no means to be advised that a Lutheran person enter into matrimony in such a manner, since matrimonia with persons devoted to false doctrine and religion seldom turn out well, but rather bring much misfortune with them, as the examples in God's Word show, and especially in the alliance of the house of Jehoshaphat with the house of Ahab, 2 Chronicles 18—22, as is also seen daily before our eyes in experience; nevertheless, if such a marriage should already have been contracted between a Lutheran and an obstinate Calvinist person, a minister could not refuse them the marriage rite and the blessing (since this properly has nothing to do with religion, and the erring person might perhaps still, in time, be won over, 1 Corinthians 7:16)." (See: Thesaurus consiliorum by G. Dedekennus, Part 3, p. 242.)