# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1859_S72
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

72 Extracts from Fr. Balduin's Tractatus De casibus conscientiae.

or ἀνάθεμα, which is the very harshest church penalty. By it, those who
obstinately err in doctrine, or who by gross sinning give offense and show
no improvement, nor any hope of improvement, are excluded either from
partaking of the Holy Supper or from the office of sponsor [godparent],
and this is called the lesser ban; or else they are excluded also from a
particular church and from all fellowship with the godly, and this is
called the greater ban. In the lesser ban, a godless and impenitent
person is told privately, either in church or at home, that he is held
unworthy to enjoy the goods of the church until he recognizes his error
or his sin and earnestly amends his life. But in the greater ban, the one
who is judged worthy of this sharper penalty is publicly named from the
pulpit, the wrath and disfavor of God are announced to him, and it is
declared in the name of Christ and the church that this impenitent
person is given over to the devil, cut off from the church as a rotten
member, and unworthy of the fellowship of the godly, and that he must
also be shunned until he shows clear signs of repentance.

The ban, then, is a penalty not for every sin, but either for an obstinate
error in doctrine, or for some other gross crime, such as adultery,
manslaughter, greed or usury, or similar sins, in which no sign of true
repentance is visible.

The ban is rightly retained in the church, because Christ describes it
for us in Matthew 18:15: "If your brother sins against you, go and reprove
him between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your
brother; if he does not hear you, take with you one or two more, so that
every matter may be established on the mouth of two or three witnesses.
If he will not hear them, tell it to the congregation; if he will not hear the
congregation, let him be to you as a heathen and a tax collector" — that
is, let him be excluded from your entire fellowship. So Paul excluded the
incestuous man at Corinth, 1 Corinthians 5:4, and likewise Hymenaeus
and Alexander, 1 Timothy 1:20; he also urged this severity upon the
congregations, saying: "If anyone does not obey our word, note that one
by a letter, and have nothing to do with him, that he may be put to
shame," 2 Thessalonians 3:14; and again: "A man that is a heretic avoid,
after he has been admonished once and again, and know that such a one
is perverted and sins, being self-condemned," Titus 3:10-11.

In the early church the use of the ban was conscientiously observed.
Thus Ambrosius put the Emperor Theodosius under the ban, as related in
Theodoret, Book 5, chapter 18; likewise the private secretary of Stilico,
as Paulinus testifies in his Life of Ambrosius; Fabianus, the Roman
bishop, banned the Emperor Philippus, as Eusebius writes in Book 6,
chapter 34, of his Church History; Innocentius banned the Emperor
Arcadius together with his wife Eudoxia, as stands in the canon law,
dict. 96. And that even now...