Alcohol & the Church (Part 2)

Southern Baptists are conservative Christians, and conservative Christians take very seriously the profound significance of God's Word, the Bible. Indeed we believe the Bible to be our ultimate authority for faith (spiritual belief) and practice (ethical behavior). 

These assumptions, coupled with our understanding of biblical inspiration popularly known as "inerrancy" remain fundamental to biblical interpretation. In fact, sober hermeneutics (the science of interpretation) becomes a non-negotiable enterprise to all conservative believers. Why? If the Bible is God's Word written, then it becomes incalculably necessary to ensure we interpret His flawless Word as accurately as humanly possible. And, while no guarantee exists that fallible human beings may interpret the infallible Scriptures with infallible results, we nonetheless both openly welcome and enthusiastically pursue sound hermeneutics designed to expose fallacious interpretations of the Word of God.

So, what does hermeneutics have to do with what the New Testament says about wine and wine-drinking? I think Robert H. Stein, a senior professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, ably answered this question in a short article published in Christianity Today several years ago entitled "Wine-drinking in New Testament Times" (June 1975). At the time, Dr. Stein was serving as associate professor of New Testament at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minn. 

Stein explains the role sound hermeneutics plays not only in understanding what the Bible would say about wine-drinking, but also what role sound hermeneutics plays in answering what the Bible says to us about any subject today. He writes: "The basic principle of hermeneutics.... is that the question 'What does it [the Bible] mean for us today?' must be preceded by the question 'What did it mean for them yesterday?'" In other words, it becomes next to impossible to discern intelligently what God says to us now without first grasping what the text originally meant when written thousands of years ago to a people living in a culture far removed from ours. Such caution applies whether we are speaking of wine-drinking or any number of behaviors we could name.

Dr. Stein moves on to consider the ancient practice of wine-making, including its preservation and consumption. Interestingly, Stein playfully asks rhetorical questions from his reader's standpoint: "Is he going to try to tell us that wine in the Bible means grape juice? Is he going to try to say that the wine mentioned in the New Testament is any different from the wine bottled today ...?" Stein answers, "no and yes: No, the wine of the Bible was not unfermented grape juice. Yes, it was different from the wine of today." (For the record, the reader needs to understand that while I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Stein's profound contribution toward and historical analysis of wine-making, preservation, and consumption in general, there exists evidence not covered by Dr. Stein which led me personally to believe that the varieties of wine in the ancient world did, in fact, essentially include what the professor called "unfermented grape juice," a subject I pursued in a book-length monograph.)