# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1855_S323
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On Matrimonial Matters. 323

...same degree — this Johann Gerhard has already shown, loc. de conjugio, p. 414: "Luther, some years later, retracted what he had written near the beginning of the Reformation, namely in the year 1522, and traced the Mosaic prohibitions back to degrees [of kinship]. For he writes thus in the book on Matrimonial Matters published in 1530: 'As for kinship and the members of relationship, my lesser counsel would be that one should abide by the civil laws' — (these forbid marriage with a wife's sister, reckoning it equal to the first degree of the collateral line in consanguinity, according to the rule: whichever blood relations are forbidden to marry one another are likewise forbidden to take each other's spouses in marriage —) 'and in his Swan Song, the exposition of the first Book of Moses, on the 20th chapter: If we now follow this understanding (namely, that we hold Sarah to have been Haran's stepdaughter, in that, since he died before his father Terah, Sarah was brought into Terah's house and raised there, and was therefore called a daughter of Terah), then the dispute is already settled as to whether Abraham could have taken his brother's daughter to wife; for that one takes his brother's stepdaughter to wife was not forbidden in the Law. Now, however, had Luther still held the opinion that it was not forbidden in the divine Law to marry a brother's daughter — the prohibition applying only to persons, not to degrees — then it would not have been necessary to devise a fitting answer concerning the marriage of Abraham and Sarah. Luther's later writings therefore correct his earlier ones. Yet it is to Luther's credit that he arrived at the notion that only the persons named in Leviticus might be forbidden, by way of the examples of the patriarchs, etc.'"

*) Note 1. This same theologian, whose work is a treasury of true dogmatic developments, adduces a goodly array of great and excellent teachers of the Church, all of whom, with good standing, upheld the rule — especially against the Papists — that in the divine Law it is not the persons but the degrees that are forbidden, loc. cit., de conjug., p. 410ff., 415. To these he adds Spener's Theological Opinions, part II, p. 539, and several more, indeed the whole theological faculty of Wittenberg. Compare the saying of Basil the Great: Ex eo, quod scriptum est, non temere colligendum, quod scriptum non est [From what is written, one must not rashly infer what is not written]; and the axiom of civil law: Argumentum a contrario sensu non procedit, quum inde sequitur absurdum [An argument from the contrary sense does not hold, when an absurdity follows from it]. Nor can it be understood otherwise, since Leviticus 18:6 clearly and plainly states the foundation from which everything that is to be reckoned as incest must be derived. That this is implanted in the natural conscience of man, and that it stirs and must stir itself, through inward feeling, against such marriages — supported more or less by echoes and traditions of divine revelations among the Semitic peoples — is proven by God's judgments upon the heathen nations who sinned in this matter (v. 3, 24ff.), as well as by the fact that it has by no means been abolished in the New Testament. But whether all such marriages, without distinction, are to be dissolved again once contracted, on this point our theologians are divided, some answering the question in the affirmative, others (together with the imperial laws, in certain cases) denying it for the two collateral lines — excepting, as goes without saying, those marriages