Related articles and links |  1 of 6

With regard to the use of alcoholic beverages, my practice and teaching are those of total abstinence. This stand is based on biblical principles, but I am free to confess that it is not based on biblical precepts or biblical practice. Both the Old and the New Testaments enjoin moderation rather than total abstinence. How then can one describe one's position as biblical if it goes beyond the Bible?

An analogy is to be found in the case of slavery. Nowhere in the Bible is the institution condemned, and from the time of the patriarchs to Philemon the worthies of both dispensations owned slaves. Many of the injunctions addressed in the New Testament to servants, according to the older versions, are correctly directed in the Revised Standard Version to slaves. The defenders of slavery in the South before the war made out a very plausible case from the Bible. Thereupon the Quaker historian Henry C. Lea satirized their plea by making an equally good case in all apparent seriousness for polygamy, which was practiced in the Old Testament and nowhere expressly forbidden in the New Testament. Yet few in this land today would fail to agree that Christian principles require alike the emancipation of slaves and the abandonment of polygamy. Similarly one may argue that Christian principles call for abstinence from intoxicating beverages.

Yet an exegesis which deduces from Christian principles a position at variance with early Christian practice may well appear strained. This is the old question of the spirit against the letter, the question whether the Bible is a code of laws or an enunciation of principles. The Old Testament itself discloses both views. The Pentateuch is the Torah, the Law, whereas Jeremiah called for a New Covenant graven not on tables of stone, but on hearts of flesh. Judaism tended, however, to forget the prophets and to build up the law as the only feasible focus for the religious life of the people. Christianity rebelled against the legalism of Judaism. Jesus transgressed the laws of the Sabbath and Paul declared the law to be abrogated. But legalism crept speedily again into Christianity. The precepts of Jesus were treated as legal demands and the Church in the Middle Ages built up so many regulations about holy days and clean and unclean foods that Christianity had come to resemble closely the Judaism of Jesus' day.

The Reformation was another revolt. The rules were abrogated, but the cycle recommenced. The Bible was so potent a weapon in combating the church that it soon came to be seated in a position of rigid authority. The first stage was to say that whatever the Bible did not prohibit might be allowed. The second was to say that whatever the Bible did not enjoin must be rejected. And the third was to say that whatever the Bible at any point enjoined must be reinstated. Hence in some quarters the restoration of polygamy and in Puritan England the revival of a rigid Sabbatarianism. The final stage in biblicism was not openly recognized. It consisted in imposing upon the Bible a meaning which would justify current practices actually adopted on nonbiblical grounds. For example, George Fox refused to lift a hat as a mark of deference to persons in authority. His real motive was social equalitarianism, but when challenged for a biblical warrant he replied, "Shadracb, Meshach and Abednego were cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace with their coats and their hose and their hats on."

More insidious has been the use of this method by the temperance reformers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to wrest the meaning of Scripture in order to find in it an explicit warrant for their practice. Since several words, used in the Hebrew and in the Greek of the Old and New Testaments, describe drinks of juice, the assumption has been that some referred to fermented and some to unfermented beverages and that wherever a drink was commended or not condemned, it must have been nonalcoholic.

next page... |  1 of 6

share this page

April (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44