In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer to tackle a question about the nature of alcohol in Catholic teaching. Joe addresses a common misconception stemming from Proverbs, clarifying the Church’s understanding of wine and its significance, especially in light of the wedding at Cana.
Transcript:
Caller: I am Catholic. This is a question on behalf of my dad.
Cy: Is your dad Catholic?
Caller: No, he is not.
Cy: Okay, then we will permit it. Well, I had to check the rule book, but we will permit this. Kayden, go ahead.
Caller: I think it’s in Proverbs where it says wine is a mocker and strong drink is raging. And so he takes that to mean that alcohol is inherently sinful. And now I’ve explained to him, like the wedding feast at Cana, but he tends to argue that, you know, maybe it was grape juice and not wine.
Cy: What kind of a wedding would that be? Because they didn’t even have refrigerators.
Joe: And in all seriousness, the idea that it was grape juice completely misunderstands the whole history of grape juice. Grape juice was started by Thomas Bramwell Welch. By this I mean there had literally been grape juice before. As in early on, when you squish a grape, you get grape juice, but it ferments very quickly into wine naturally. And Welch used pasteurization, which did not exist in the early church, didn’t exist at the time of Christ, didn’t exist in the Bible times. He used pasteurization to artificially stop grape juice from becoming wine.
Like we don’t realize this today when you go to the store and get grape juice, that is a man-made thing that does not exist like that in nature, except for a very brief point in certain times of year. So you couldn’t have grape juice at the Last Supper, barring a miracle where Jesus turns the wine into grape juice, because by that time of year, all of the grapes would have fermented.
So it’s just not possible to read this as all new wine. You know, and the fact that you have new wine and old wine mentioned in the Bible, old wine was always fermented by definition because there was no way of stopping it. So it’s not until the 19th century that you get Welch and the whole revolution and pasteurizing grape juice to make it not become wine.
So there’s just no reason to read those verses like that. And it’s the same word being used when misuse of wine is condemned and the proper use of wine is praised. So to insist on taking those to mean two different things, whether it’s a positive or negative mention, seems like obviously selective interpretation. Right?
Caller: Yeah, I can see that.
Joe: You know, like all the times where you see people drinking wine and they get drunk, well, then we say, oh, that’s obviously wine. But then there’s times where you’re allowed to have a little wine for the sake of your stomach first. Timothy 5:23. And it’s like, well, no, that’s grape juice. That’s grape juice for your stomach. And there’s no textual reason, no biological reason in terms of the way grapes work, to believe that that is good exegesis at all.
nd I want you to think back to the wedding feast of Cana. If you think Jesus is turning water into grape juice, you’d have to think one of two things. Either one, that the family having the party decided to throw a party and have no wine. They only had grape juice the whole time. Somehow. Or two, that they started off with wine. Jesus then gave them grape juice instead of wine, and they said, wow, every man serves the good wine first. And when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.
That doesn’t sound. Because whatever Jesus is serving at the wedding feast of Cana is better than the stuff they’ve been imbibing with pretty freely.
The final point, I’d say there is, if you’ve ever had grape juice, nobody spends three days drinking grape juice if they’re above the age of seven. That’s just not a real thing. People do that with wine. I’ve never seen anyone who can stomach that much sugary grape juice. And yet that is exactly what we find at the wedding feast of Cana.
Caller: Okay, sorry. I guess I might have missed it. But how is the, like when it says in Proverbs that strong drink is raging? How does that fit in?
Joe: Oh, yeah, because you can absolutely abuse wine. I mean, if you let me find. It’s Proverbs 20. Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, and whoever’s led astray by it is not wise. This is part of several other things you’re supposed to watch out for here.
Good. On verse eight, a king who sits on the throne of judgment winnows all evil with his eyes. Does that mean literally all kings winnow all evil with their eyes? It doesn’t. It’s giving a model, a proverb talking about the order of things. But it’s not literally saying all kings are like this or all people who drink wine are like that. That just isn’t how it works at all.
You know, verse four, the sluggard does not plow in the autumn. He will seek at harvest and have nothing. Are there lazy people who do plow in the autumn? There are. If you plow in the autumn, it doesn’t mean you’re not a sluggard. You might still be. You just knew enough to not starve yourself in the winter.
So it’s not trying to create some sort of moral code without exceptions. And it’s a misreading of kind of the type of genre Proverbs is, where it’s a poetical proverbial type of literature to take that as a universally binding moral code.
And even then, you’ll notice it never actually says, don’t drink wine. Like it’d be so easy for God to outlaw the drinking of wine somewhere in the Old or New Testament. And he doesn’t. He instead blesses wine. He consecrates it. He turns it into his blood. And so he does the very opposite thing of what? Like Protestants of this genre. Not all Protestants. Protestants of this genre are imposing this completely and obviously unbiblical rule that because we can abuse wine, therefore we’re not allowed to have it even in moderation.
But we can abuse anything. People are gluttons. People are sluggards who abuse rest and sleep. That doesn’t mean food or rest or sleep are evils. It just means the good things of the earth have to be used in moderation. And that’s true of wine as well.
Wine was so central to ancient Jewish life that there are three food products, food and drink items that had special blessings. And it was bread, wine, and oil, because those were the staples of the Jewish diet. And at the time, water was often not safe to drink. But alcoholic beverages like wine were much safer. So it made complete sense, even from just the perspective that God loves his people, that wine drinking would be a widespread way of keeping people happy and healthy and the like.
Cy: That unfortunately brings me exactly to the break, so I’m going to have to leave it there. Kaden, I hope that was helpful to you and to your father. We’ll take a quick break. Right back with why aren’t you Catholic? On Catholic Answers Live.