Why Christians Need a Better Debate About Alcohol

Jim,

The other day you asked me the following questions. Now I’ll answer.

1. The John 2 wine…grape juice?

I believe Jesus miraculously created wine…that was unfermented. Remember Jesus, in the same verse, called unfermented wine and fermented wine by the same name, “wine” (Matthew 9:17 NKJV). I think there is strong evidence to interpret John 2 as being unfermented wine. However, either view, fermented or unfermented, is an interpretation. I have a pretty detailed discussion of John 2 in “Ancient Wine and the Bible.”

2. Possible for someone to drink an alcoholic glass of wine without being drunk?

Depends on how alcoholic and how big the glass.

I suppose so, but I remember a Driving Instructor, who freely admitting drinking alcohol, who said, The first thing alcohol does is affect your judgment. Therefore if you’ve consumed any about of alcohol, you are not qualified to judge whether or not you are able to drive.

Others have observed, If it takes ten glasses for you to get drunk, then at one glass you are 10 percent drunk.

In Texas they advertise, “Buzzed Driving is Drunk Driving.”

3. Would you excommunicate someone from your church if you knew they drank in moderation and in private?

No. Maybe disappointed, but I would not kick him out of the church. A lot of people think abstainers are super strict. We are against the recreational use of dangerous drugs, but compassionate toward those who use them.

We use the old Church Covenant that speaks against alcohol. But we don’t use it to beat people over the head, just to point them in the right direction.

I do not fit into your chart, and am not what you would call a Prohibitionist.

David R. Brumbelow

[David R. Brumbelow]

The Bible describes alcoholic wine in detail and says not to even look at it (Proverbs 23).

Whether you believe Jesus made alcoholic or nonalcoholic wine (John 2) is a matter of interpretation, not you just taking the Bible for what it says. Scripture does not have a word for alcohol. So ancients would describe alcohol by its effects.

More than once the Bible says to be sober (1 Peter 5:8 NKJV; etc.). Many would say you lose your sobriety with the first drink of alcohol. If that is not true, then exactly when do you lose your sobriety?

Many believe you should not use dangerous drugs for recreational purposes, only for strictly medicinal purposes.

Abstaining is wise and prudent.

Advising people not to drink will not work for everyone. But many will take the message of abstinence seriously. Abstinence works every time it is tried.

David R. Brumbelow

Regarding how to define drunkenness, we could, you know, go with what Scripture says about it—that it’s when you get bloodshot eyes, staggering, feeling no pain, and the like, as it says in Proverbs 23, no? Or really somewhere around 0.15 BAC. Scripture nowhere says that one sip makes someone drunk, or even “a little bit drunk”, as I’ve heard at times. If it did, that would be extremely hard to reconcile with Jesus’ making wine at a party where people’s taste was becoming dulled (about 0.05% BAC), not to mention all the other places where wine is spoken of positively, as in Ecclesiastes 9:7 and Luke 5:39.

Really, the very premiss “one sip makes you drunk” verifies what I said about the mandatory abstinence crowd; it tends to result from ignoring positive things Scripture says about wine, or often outright tries to change definitions to twist it. Thanks for confirming this, David!

As I’ve informed David before, Matthew 9:17 is talking about fermentation vessels, which is an odd place for him to use to argue that wine, as it was drunk, was not fermented. That’s why old wineskins would burst with new wine in them—fermentation produces carbon dioxide, which will burst them. Moreover, Scripture uses wine as a metaphor for blood consistently, which implies that most wine drunk by the Hebrews was red. In that case, you would find that the “new wine” put into those wineskins yet contained the skins and pulp.

Great thing to drink, eh? Sorry, David, but Matthew 9:17 does not demonstrate at all that wine, as it was drunk, was often unfermented, but rather suggests the opposite.

Fermenting wine would burst old or new wineskins.

However one interprets Matthew 9:17, the fact remains Jesus referred to unfermented (or nonalcoholic) wine by the name “wine” (oinos).

In ancient times, sometimes the word “wine” was used of nonalcoholic wine (Matthew 9:17; Isaiah 16:11, yayin), sometimes the word “wine” was used of alcoholic wine.

David R. Brumbelow

Isaiah 16:10, that is. Treaders do not tread out fermented, but unfermented wine, or grapejuice. And here this obviously unfermented wine is called by the Hebrew word, yayin.

David R. Brumbelow

When Amos says, “new wine will drip from the mountains” (Amos 9:13) in the context of Israel’s coming restoration and covenant blessings, does anyone here believe this will be unfermented wine? That is, if the wine “back then” was unfermented, but now it isn’t, does anyone actually believe it’ll all go back to unfermented in the millennium?

This is a real question. I really want to know how prohibitionists who rely on various forms of the “unfermented” argument answer this.

[David R. Brumbelow]

Isaiah 16:10, that is. Treaders do not tread out fermented, but unfermented wine, or grapejuice. And here this obviously unfermented wine is called by the Hebrew word, yayin.

David R. Brumbelow

And again, given the preference for red wine in the Scriptures, it would go right into the fermentation vats with the skins and pulp, David, where it would ferment almost completely in the space of a few weeks. You’re once again confusing a metaphorical use of a word for its ordinary meaning, and ignoring what we know of science in the process. Reality is they needed their vitamin C, and they didn’t have Thomas Welch’s process, nor the fuel to run if if they had, nor large food-safe vessels to use for it.

Sure, kids would drink a bit of the must as it came out of the press—Gisele Kreglinger notes precisely this in her excellent book, The Spirituality of Wine. However, sweet must in September is not equivalent to Welch’s grape juice in December or May, and the Scriptures contain precisely zero references to any technique that would allow the Hebrews to have made any significant portion of their grape crop into such sweet beverages. (and scientifically, there’s only one; pasteurization followed by canning or freezing….neither process was known until the 1700s)

As such, those who adhere to Sola Scriptura, the First Fundamental, the perspicuity of Scripture, and consistent hermeneutic and exegetical principles need to abandon the notion that wine in the Bible consistently refers to anything else besides ordinary wine with alcohol. It simply requires too much torture of the text and ignorance of history and science.

Or, put more bluntly, if I want wishful thinking and the traditions of men posing as theology, I’ll just cross the Tiber or visit the Great Salt Lake. They do it much better there.

Tyler,

Asis (Ahsis) is used in Amos 9:13 and Joel 3:18. Asis refers to new wine, sweet wine, the juice of newly trodden (or pressed) grapes or other fruit.

Amos 9:13 NKJV (mountains shall drip sweet wine) is simply a poetic way of saying the mountains will drip with the new, fresh, sweet product of productive vineyards.

While I suppose you could interpret it either way, the evidence seems to lean toward just pressed grapes, new sweet wine, or grape juice. Reminiscent of Jesus speaking of not drinking the fruit of the vine again until He drinks it new with us in the kingdom (Matthew 26:29; Mark 14:25 NKJV). Why demand that it be alcoholic?

Again, I do not consider myself a Prohibitionist. I believe it is prudent and wise to abstain from the recreational use of dangerous drugs.

Second, you seem to imply abstainers believe all wine in Scripture was alcoholic. I do not. Much like today - back then some wine was alcoholic, some was not. They had a choice, much like we have today.

David R. Brumbelow

My above comment should read:

Second, you seem to imply abstainers believe all wine in Scripture was nonalcoholic. I do not. Much like today - back then some wine was alcoholic, some was not. They had a choice, much like we have today.

David R. Brumbelow

Regarding Amos 9:13 and Joel 3:18, it strikes me that (a) the genre is poetry, not prose, and (b) the picture of the mountains dripping sweet wine is obviously a metaphor, as mountains do not in general give wine of any kind. So precisely why we ought to impose a literalistic interpretation of a metaphorical passage would seem to ignore basic principles of textual analysis.

But even if it were to be taken literally, everyone who tends grapes knows that grape juice from the vine, or from the mountains, is sweet—the question is how it will be drunk, and the passages mentioned give no hint about that. To establish that, we would go to other passages describing the wine-vats and wine-skins, and how it would “effervesce” there (root word for yayin), and we would infer that the ordinary way grape juice was actually drunk was in the form of ordinary, alcoholic wine.