# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1878_S47
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 47 —

should indeed not be entered into, but which, once entered into, do not make a union incestuous and a non-marriage; hence, after such marriages have already been consummated, they need not necessarily be dissolved but, if the persons concerned repent, are to be tolerated. Thus J. W. Baier writes, for example: 'Among those marriages entered into in forbidden degrees this distinction seems to apply, that some are to be dissolved absolutely, others, after being visited with a fitting penalty, can be tolerated. To be dissolved are, namely, those on which God in Leviticus 20 has expressly set the death penalty, because they are so shameful and abominable that it would be wrong if the supposed spouses remained in them. To these belong the marriages of blood relations and relations by marriage between persons descended from one another in the direct line, and blood relations in the first degree of the collateral line, of which also Carpzov in his Jurisprudentia consistorialis, Book 2, Def. 99, holds that for the sake of the extraordinary and terrible scandal that they give they are to be dissolved. Although those unions are called marriages only by virtue of an ambiguity in the word marriage, since in them there is no marital and indissoluble bond. To be tolerated are those on which Leviticus 20 has not set the death penalty, for example those contracted and consummated in the second degree of the unequal collateral line in blood relationship, and those in the second degree of the unequal collateral line in affinity. For in these cases the spouses seem, through the laws contained in Leviticus 18 and 20, to be left in the marriage entered into and consummated and to be subjected to the fitting penalty of the authorities, with the threat of childlessness. That toleration, however, on the part of the church and the authorities, is not the same as a dispensation in the proper sense from the legal prohibitions of Leviticus 18 and 20. For a dispensation is properly an acquittal from the law with regard to its binding force in the things which it commands or forbids. But the church and the authorities, in tolerating or not dissolving those marriages which God has not commanded to be dissolved, do not thereby declare themselves free from the law that forbids those marriages, and leave it in its force.' (Loc. cit., § 29.) To the question: 'How is it to be handled when persons who by the Scripture cannot marry one another have married de facto (in fact) and possess the marriage?' the Electoral Saxon Consistory, among others, once replied, according to Dedekennus, as follows: 'This question is very often sent to the consistories, above all from foreign lands. But we are not now speaking of those who practice incest outside a betrothal, but of those who, perhaps in foreign places, have themselves joined in marriage. As a countess has, in facie ecclesiae (publicly before the congregation) and in the presence of her friends, had herself married a short time ago to her deceased lord's (husband's) brother. Likewise,