Audio only:
Joe responds to common objections to alcohol that some Christians make, and cites history and the Bible to show that moderate drinking is ok.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Is it okay for followers of Jesus Christ to drink alcohol even in moderation? Broadly speaking, Christians fall into two camps. Those who say moderate drinking is okay as long as you don’t get drunk and those who say Christians should never drink alcohol. So should we preach moderation or should we preach tea totalism that is total abstinence with a capital T? Now, if you are pro- moderation, the case might seem clear. Didn’t Jesus turn water into wine at the wedding feast of Cana? Doesn’t he use wine at the last supper? So maybe you’re wondering why that case isn’t convincing to tea totalers, or maybe you’re on the other side. Maybe you’re wondering how in the world Christians can possibly defend alcohol given how many lives is destroyed. In this episode, I’m going to do my best to present what I see as the strongest case against moderate drinking, the strongest case in favor of tea totalism.
But along the way, I want to show you why I don’t think even that stronger case works. Now, I’m going to be looking at real arguments made by people like the assemblies of God, General Presbytery, the one is Pentecostal, David Bernard, many others. But the truth is many of the same arguments get used, whether it’s Pentecostal or non-Pentecostal tea totalers. And the first argument that I think we should address is one that is partially true. That when we talk about wine in the Bible, we should recognize that there isn’t an actual biblical word that just means wine as opposed to grape juice.
CLIP:
The second thing that is important is the word wine. So both in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, the term wine could cover all the juice from the grape, whether it’s fermented or not fermented.
Joe:
So this point, as I said, it’s true, but it’s misleading. The reason it’s misleading is because the reason there isn’t a distinct word for grape juice in ancient Greek or an ancient Hebrew is that grape juice kind of didn’t exist. And I know that sounds really strange, but non-alcoholic grape juice is sort of a 19th century Protestant invention. Now obviously that’s not entirely true. If you chew on a grape, it’s got juice inside. That’s true. But if you crush those grapes and try to make juice out of it and you happen to live in a culture without refrigeration or pasteurization, which was the entire world prior to the 19th century, you know what happens? The yeasts and sugars in the grape combine and within a few days, your juice is fermented into wine. You don’t need to do anything to cause that to happen. In fact, without modern technology, you can’t stop it from happening.
And this, by the way, is what Jesus means when he talks about how putting new wine into an old wine skin causes it to burst because the wine expands during fermentation. Now, that basic biological reality posed a problem for 19th century Protestant prohibitionists and tea totalers who believed that drinking was evil. How could they treat wine as inherently evil and still celebrate the Lord’s supper? Now, some responded to this by refusing to hold communion services outside of the growing season of the grape when they couldn’t get fresh grape juice. Others replaced wine with water and this is still the Mormon practice today. Mormonism arose at this same time in the 19th century American frontier and both the tea total movement and the Mormon movement are kind of arising out of the same influence of prohibitionism and teatotalism. But eventually we do get grape juice and this is particularly a contribution from Methodism.
A Methodist minister by the name of Thomas Bramwell Welch applied pasteurization to grape juice to kill the yeast and then he used the newly invented technology of refrigeration to keep the yeast dead. He initially branded his product as Dr. Welch’s unfermented wine and he marketed it to church groups for church services. But of course we know what today is Welch’s grape juice. But notice both pasteurization and refrigeration are new technologies in the 19th century. And so the idea that people at say a several day long Jewish wedding feast in the first century would have been drinking grape juice the whole time is not just unlikely, it’s basically scientifically impossible. So it is true. There is not a specific word for alcoholic wine compared to non-alcoholic grape juice, but that’s because virtually all grape juice quickly turned alcoholic unless you drank it straight off the vine.
And this is true even if so- called new wine because the term new wine referred to wine that was as much as a year old long after the few days needed for fermentation. Okay. So much for the first argument then. There’s a second argument that Bradley makes and it’s both true and really fascinating, which is that the ancient Jews and the ancient Romans typically would dilute the wine that they drank.
CLIP:
And also if you study the culture of that day, and you can even see this in Homer’s writings, the Iliad, the Odyssey, that when they would drink wine as a table beverage, they would have a big bowl and they would mix the wine with water. So it might only be one part wine and three parts water so that you couldn’t even get intoxicated and even if it was fermented in normal quantities of drinking at a meal, you couldn’t get intoxicated.
Joe:
Here again, what Bradley says is partially true, but his claim is partially exaggerated. I want to start with what he gets right. It was common in the ancient world, not only within Judaism to heavily dilute wine. So a cup would be one part wine to two or three parts water. The Romans talk about this in several places. The Jewish rabbis debate the precise ratios to water down your wine and they explicitly taught that if your wine wasn’t strong enough to be able to be watered down with three parts water, it wasn’t really wine. And so it’s common to hear tea totalers acknowledge this fact but then claim that these wines must have been so diluted that they barely counted as wine or act like you couldn’t even get drunk on them if you wanted to. And that’s simply not true. Norm Geisler, for example, claimed that Jews always diluted wine with about three parts water to one part wine before they drank it in moderation with their meals done in this light form in such moderate amounts with food guaranteed them against the excesses known in today’s alcoholic cultures.
Dr. Charles Quarle of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary asked if New Testament wine is alcoholic. He admits that it is, but claims that the alcoholic content was negligible by modern standards. But of course, if these claims were really true, if the Jews drinking habits guaranteed that they never drank excessively, they never got drunk, you simply wouldn’t have the numerous biblical passages that talk about people getting drunk or warning them not to get drunk. Additionally, by quarrel’s own analysis, diluted wine that the Jews would have been drinking at table on a basically daily basis was probably about 2.7 to 3% alcoholic. Now that’s on the lighter end of light beers. For example, Molson makes a light beer called Molson Canadian 67, that’s 3% APV. So we’re obviously not talking about the disciples slamming shots of hard alcohol or anything like this, but it’s not water either. People can and do get drunk on light beer and it’s not like they were just drinking tiny quantities of it either because the other half of the story is this.
The Romans and the Jews drank way more wine than we do today, at least in the US. And that’s partially because they rarely drink water because drinking water was dangerous. Water regularly was full of dangerous pathogens and diseases, which they didn’t understand well, but they recognized that drinking water could and regularly did kill you. But turning water into wine would literally save your life. Alcohol is an antiseptic, beer and wine are both naturally acidic, which meant that a lot of the pathogens were killed and so alcoholic beverages were much safer to drink than water in regular quantities. That’s partially because they rarely drink water since water regularly was full of dangerous diseases and drinking water could and regularly did kill you.
Turning water into wine on the other hand would literally save your life. That’s because alcohol is an antiseptic and beer and wine are naturally acidic, which means that alcoholic beverages were literally safer to drink than water at least in normal quantities. So let’s talk about quantities here because when we’re talking about the amount that people in the ancient world, whether Jews or Romans or anybody else drank, it can be helpful to have some unit of measurement, particularly when things are different levels of alcohol. And this is where the idea of a standard drink comes in. As the official guidelines point out, there’s about the same amount of alcohol in one beer that there is in a five ounce glass of wine or in a single shot of whiskey. It’s about 14 grams of pure alcohol. So about 12 ounces of Jewish wine, which again, they literally drank like water because they drink it instead of water.
That would be about half of a standard drink. It would be like drinking half of a beer or drinking two and a half ounces of our wine or sipping half a shot of whiskey. In other words, the Romans and the Jews drank a lot more wine, but they drank a lot more of weak wine. So it’s hard to know exactly how much wine we’re actually talking about here. Scholars very to just incredible extremes when it comes to how much wine the ordinary Roman or the ordinary Jew drank and we have very limited resources to know for sure, but here’s what we do know. During a Sabbath year, you were allowed to store up to 15 jugs of wine for the year for your family. Now for a family of four, that would work out to about 75 to 94 liters of wine per person for the year.
Of course, for a family of eight, it would be half that much, 38 to 47 liters of wine per person each year. And we appear to be talking about undiluted wine here, that you would take the stored wine and then you would cut it with water. Additionally, there are about six glasses of wine to a liter. So we’re talking anywhere from about 228 to 564 glasses of undiluted wine per person per year. Of course, they didn’t drink it undiluted, but that’s the amount of alcohol we’re talking about here. Now, of course, when it talks about you’re allowed to store up to 15 jugs, that means this is a maximum. There’s no requirement that anyone or any family is going to drink that much, but we’re talking about a lot of wine nevertheless. By comparison, modern Italians today drink about 53 liters of wine per year, about 318 glasses of wine per person per year.
And that’s the third highest per capita rate of wine drinking on earth after Luxembourg and France. So depending on where we place the numbers in Israel, it seems that they would be close to maybe up there, maybe even beyond that level of drinking. So the problem here is that tea totalers pretend like they’re doing all of this wine drinking and it’s the equivalent to nothing and it simply isn’t. Yeah, it’s true. They drank a lot of water down wine without trying to get drunk, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t drink. It means that they drank moderately. So you might think, okay, it sounds like we actually agree on what the biblical evidence looks like. They drank a lot of low proof, low alcohol, wine. Why not just follow that biblical pattern and allow people to drink moderate amounts of alcohol without trying to get drunk?
But the tea totalers are against that. Lyman Beecher, one of the really influential 19th century preachers against drinking argued that it was undoubtedly certain that habitual tippling, that is frequently drinking small amounts of alcohol, he said was actually worse than getting extremely drunk once a month. But what Beecher condemns is precisely what the Jews, and as we’re going to see Jesus himself and the early Christians did, drinking small amounts of alcohol regularly without intending to get drunk. So I ask again, why not preach moderation?
CLIP:
You say, “What if I drink in moderation and abstain?” Well, there are several problems with that or make sure I don’t get drunks, several problems with that. First of all, even a small amount starts affecting you. So you may not be fully intoxicated, but you are affected and your inhibitions are lowered and for a Christian, that’s a real problem.
Joe:
The general presbytery of the assemblies of God has a position paper in which they likewise claim that drunkenness never has God’s approval and it is always a potential outcome of alcohol consumption. Now the problem with that claim is that if you believe that even a small amount of alcohol is sinfully dangerous, then you cannot excuse the small amounts of alcohol that Jesus and the disciples drank every day. The argument simply doesn’t work. You can’t acknowledge, yes, Jesus, the Jews, the early Christians used to drink small amounts of alcohol daily, but also you’re not allowed to drink even small amounts of alcohol because that is sinful and dangerous. The deeper problem the assemblies of God have, and I think this is often true with tetotalism, is in opposition to the idea of moderation. In their words, the New Testament does not advocate moderate drinking, nor does it explain how one is to know when moderation is being practiced.
There is no universal definition of moderation and thus the term is highly subjective. What one person considers moderate, another may view as heavy drinking. And here’s the thing, they’re right, that’s at least half true. Temperance is hard and in many ways it is subjective to the individual. What is too much for me may not be too much for you. But here’s the thing, that is true in general. That is a fact of life and it’s something that Christianity simply takes for granted. For example, in the New Covenant, Christians are allowed to eat pork, but eating too much bacon is gluttony and it’s dangerous for your health and heart disease certainly kills more Americans than alcohol does or take money. We’re allowed to make money, but the love of money is the root of all evil and craving money has led Christians to wander away from the faith, as St. Paul says in one Timothy.
So when does making money go too far? When does eating bacon go too far? For just about any of the good gifts that God has given us, you could ask the same question because it’s possible we’re going to misuse his gifts or we’re going to overdo the use or we’re going to treat them in a way that isn’t pleasing to him. And so the assemblies of God folks are right here. Moderation is an elusive standard. It requires knowing your heart. It requires being attentive to what God is calling you to. You won’t find a Bible verse that’s going to tell you exactly how much money you’re allowed to make or how much money you’re allowed to spend on your house or on your pleasures. You’re not even going to find one telling you how many pieces of bacon you’re allowed to have at breakfast. Legalism is easier than Christianity.
It gives us simple black and white rules instead of calling us to strive to become more Christlike. The problem is those simple black and white rules are unbiblical. They’re man-made traditions that are contrary to what Jesus taught. And this is true when we’re talking about drinking as well. In Matthew 11, Jesus compares himself to John the Baptist saying for John came neither eating nor drinking and they said he has a demon. The son of man came eating and drinking and they said, “Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” So unlike John the Baptist who ate locust and wild honey in the desert, Jesus attended dinners at which he ate food and he drank alcohol and as a result, he was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. Now obviously as critics are charging him unfairly, they’re doing to Jesus the same thing that Christian tea totalers do today when they treat moderation as excess, but that attack would make no sense if Jesus himself was a tea totaler.
Instead, Jesus himself acknowledges the son of man came eating and drinking. And so if you’re living by a manmade legalism that would treat Jesus himself as a drunkard and a sinner, it’s clear you have gone too far and it’s not just the example of Jesus. The mockers also accused the apostles being drunk on Pentecost, accusing them of being filled with new wine. Now notice that charge wouldn’t make any sense if it was true that either one, the apostles were known tea totalers or two, new wine was unfermented grape juice. And while the charges against Jesus and the apostles were unfair, there admittedly were times that early Christians drank too much. St. Paul rebukes the Corinthians for abuses at the agape meal and he says that in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal and one is hungry and another is drunk. In other words, they’re not sharing what they have.
Everyone is eating and drinking what they brought. So some people are eating and drinking to excess while others are going hungry. Now if Paul was a tea totaler, you would expect his objection here would be not that people are overdoing it on the food and drink, but they shouldn’t be drinking at all. But instead, listen to what he treats a problem here as. He says, “What? Do you not have houses to eat and drink in or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?” But why would it be humiliating for a Christian and Corinth not to have wine unless it was normal and expected that they should have wine when they’re having a common meal. And of course you have examples like the Wedding Feast of Canine, which Jesus turns water into wine. Now, tea totalers will typically argue that Jesus must have really turned water into grape juice.
CLIP:
And when you look at Jesus turning water into wine, he created … That was a creative miracle. So you would think probably he created fresh juice. Afirmented wine is a process of decay. So do you think God created something that was decayed or do you think God created something fresh and God doesn’t tempt anyone so do you think God was deliberately creating a strong alcoholic beverage so people would get drunk?
Joe:
But as the archeologist Megan Broshi points out in his book Breadwine and Scrolls, the ancient Jews were well aware that wine when properly stored, improves with age and they regarded new wine as inferior and even unwholesome when compared to older wine. You don’t have to take Brochi’s word for it. Jesus himself says in Luke five that no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, for he says the old is good. So let’s ask the same question Bradley asks, “What kind of wine would Jesus offer? Would he give good old wine? Would he considers good or would he give grape juice, which was regarded as inferior new wine?” Well, I don’t think we have to guess. We can remember the steward’s remarks at the wedding feast of Cana after tasting the wine that Jesus made. He said, “Every man serves a good wine first and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine, but you have kept the good wine until now.” That tells us two things.
First, that Jesus’ wine is superior, thus clearly not dealing with new wine or grape juice and second, that Jesus is serving this wine to people who’ve already drunk freely in the Stewart’s words. That doesn’t mean that they are drunk, but it does mean they’ve had enough to drink over the course of this lengthy feast that they’re now less likely to notice the subtle differences in the qualities of wine, which is why you can get away with serving some lower quality wines at this point. Now, Bradley asks if this means that Jesus was deliberately creating a strong alcoholic beverage so people would get drunk. The answer to that is no. Jesus would not have made a product that would be detrimental to the wedding guests. But look, obviously Jesus isn’t trying to get people drunk. He’s not enticing them to sin. But if your argument is that God would never create something people could use to get drunk, where do you think alcohol comes from?
The whole point of temperance in moderation is that God gives us good gifts, but he gives them to us knowing that we can use them well or we can abuse them. So the idea that God would never give us a gift we might misuse or overuse is literally contradicted by the whole order of creation. And of course, there’s the last supper. Now, the last supper takes place in the spring and the wine harvest in Israel’s typically from July to October. So when we read that Jesus and the disciples have wine at the Passover meal, there’s just no question that this is new wine grape juice. So it’s beyond question that Jesus and the disciples and the early Christians drank and indeed that they drank enough that they were accused at times of being drunk. So okay, how do tea totalers respond to what appear to be these perfectly clear passages showing that Jesus, the apostles, and the early Christians sometimes drank alcohol?
Well, partially they respond by pointing to Old Testament passages that prohibit drinking in specific contexts.
CLIP:
There are admonitions in the Old Testament. Kings are not to drink wine. Of course, I’m sure they breached that, but that was what they were instructed because it would alter their judgment. Priests were not to drink wine as they ministered. And so the Nazarites, people who had a vow of separation. Well, the relevance of that is in the New Testament, all of God’s people are supposed to be kings, priests, and separated ones. So even taking the Old Testament, which was not the fullest statement of the subject, but if you followed that principle, God’s people today would abstain.
Joe:
But surely, even these very bits of biblical evidence point in the precisely opposite direction. The phrase the exception proves the rule gets misused a lot, but what the phrase is meant to mean is this. Take, for example, you don’t know if you can park in a certain spot, but then you see a sign that says no parking from 4:00 to 6:00 PM. Now it hasn’t said that you can park the rest of the time, but you reasonably can conclude from this exception you can’t park from 40 to 60 PM, that there is an implicit rule that the rest of the time you can park there. Well, something similar is true here. If God wanted none of his people to drink ever, he could have said that. If God wanted to forbid an alcohol entirely to priests and the kings, he could have done that, but he doesn’t do anything like this.
Instead, he gives particular exceptions in which alcohol is forbidden in specific context. So for example, priests are not allowed to drink on the job. God doesn’t bar them from wine or from strong drink entirely. He simply forbids them from drinking when they’re about to go to the tent of meeting the tabernacle of Moses. And it’s true. There are those like Samson who were avowed Nazarites and who were not allowed to drink alcohol, but they also weren’t allowed to even eat grapes and they weren’t allowed to cut their hair. Clearly these are not models that all Israel then or all Christians today are called the follow. And that was precisely the point. The whole point is that the Nazarites do something strange to set them apart from the rest of the people owing to their vow. And as for Proverbs 31, when Bradley says kings were instructed not to drink wine, that is pretty misleading because they’re not being instructed by God.
Rather, King Limul gets these instructions from his mom. Now leaving aside whether the king’s mom giving counsel to her son is the same thing as a command of God for all Christians. I think the deeper issue is this. It’s simply a misunderstanding of Proverbs 31. When the king’s mom says it’s not for kings to drink wine or to chase strong drink, let’s say drink and forget what they’ve decreed, the early Christians rightly recognize that she was clearly talking about drinking so much you get drunk. Now taking that passage as kings are never allowed to drink wine, even in moderation would create biblical contradictions because we have clear evidence to the contrary. To give just one example, the prophet Nehemiah brings wine to the king in Nehemiah too. So the proper understanding is the one the early Christians had. So for example, there’s an early Christian text called the Apostolic Constitution, which scholars date to sometime in the 300s and it quotes Proverbs 31, and it argues that this applies to presbyters and deacons and indeed to all Christians that we should all follow the instructions Limio’s mom gives in Proverbs 31.
But the text makes very clear that this does not mean that Christians are not to drink at all. And it says that would be to the reproach of what God has made for cheerfulness. If that line doesn’t make sense, we have to go back to the Old Testament. In Psalm 104, the Psalmist praises God for giving grass for the cattle, but also forgiving wine to glad in the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, right to strengthen man’s heart. Now notice wine is not just given for bear sustenance. It’s not just given for its antiseptic purposes or its medicinal value. Rather, wine is also given as a sign of God’s love for us. He wants us to be happy and wine gladdens our hearts. So the early Christians rightly recognize that treating wine this gift from God as if it were sinful is in essence to reproach what God has made for cheerfulness.
Instead, Christians must not be disordered with wine. The text cites to Ephesians 5:18, drink not wine to drunkenness or in modern translations, do not get drunk with wine for that as debauchery. But we actually see this principle of moderation taught in many places. One of my favorite is actually Sierra Act 31. And I realize that book is no longer in most Protestant Bibles, but it was in the Bibles of the early Christians and it was an important biblical text. Many Jews, even well after the time of Christ, argued was inspired. And the teaching in Syrac 31 is very clear, wine drunk in season and temperately is rejoicing of heart and gladness of soul. Wine drunk to excess is bitterness of soul with provocation and stumbling. And that’s a clear teaching that the early Christians recognized and proclaimed. Even prior to the legalization of Christianity well before the 300s, we have plenty of Christian writings on the topic of drinking and they’re clearly teaching that moderate drinking is fine, but the drunkenness is sinful.
In contrast, tea totalism is rare and seems to have been largely confined to the gnostic heretics, particularly a sect of gnosticism called Aquarianism, which actually replaced wine with water in their false lord supper. But okay, in all of this, I haven’t addressed what is arguably the strongest argument in favor of tetotalism, which is just a kind of common sense argument. What about all of the damage caused by the abuse of alcohol? Because it’s true. The abuse of alcohol has led to a tremendous amount of damage in our world today, and this is true in the recent past as well. The reason 19th century American Protestants began to teach teatotalism wasn’t because they discovered some new biblical text, it’s because they just had a common sense kind of reaction when they saw the damage that excessive drinking did in their own frontier societies. Those old stereotypes about bar fights and drunkenness at Old Western saloons are rooted in real life things that happened and there was real damage drunkenness did to communities and to families.
But even here, even in the face of such evils, it’s worth pointing out that the biblical principle of moderation works better than ineffectually preaching tea totalism. Prohibition famously was a failure, led to the flourishing of organized crime rather than solving the problem of alcohol abuse. On the other hand, countries that drink frequently in small amounts like Italy, which I mentioned before, fare far better. According to the World Health Organization, the prevalence of alcohol use disorder in the Italian population is only 1.3%. In America, 13.9%. So America has more of a culture of teatotalism. It has tougher drinking laws. It has a higher drinking age. It has stiffer punishments for drinking when you’re not allowed to, and yet it also has 10 times the rate of problematic drinking, but it’s more than that because even when you look just amongst Italians, the kids who grew up drinking wine with their families were the ones least likely to develop harmful drinking behaviors later in life.
So whether you’re trying to understand the true biblical teaching on drinking or whether you’re just trying to figure out which approach works best in society for fighting the scourge of alcohol abuse, the answer is the same. It’s the gospel principle of moderation, not the unbiblical legalism of tetotalism. No, okay, two final things. Number one, if you are helped by episodes like this, I invite you to join my Patreon over at shamelessjo.com. There’s a lot of bonus content, great group of people there. Number two, understanding the rise of tetotalism fully requires in part understanding the strange place that was this 19th century American frontier, because it turns out it was a breeding ground not just for tetotalism, but for a lot of strange religions and beliefs from the Mormons to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And I actually take a closer look at that background in another episode in which I’m exploring yet another strange 19th century American phenomenon, seven day Adventism.
So if you want to know more about that, I encourage you to check this video out right here. For shameless popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.