What Defines Drunkenness?

A person who grew up in this church recently attended another church in our metropolitan area. While he was there, one of the new friends that he made invited him to come to an event after church with several of the young singles there and serve as the designated driver.

I was just wondering why you need a designated driver to enjoy alcoholic beverages in moderation?

It would seem to me that every Christian should be able to agree that any recreational use of a substance that would result in your being unfit to drive a car would be a sin. But I would love to hear from those who celebrate the recreational use of intoxicants among Christians: Would you mind telling me how I as a pastor can know when a member of my flock is guilty of drunkenness? Or is that none of the pastor's business?

Abstentionists are not invited to participate in the thread. Only those who support the recreational use of intoxicants may post comments.

Quinn Hooks, Legalism, and Alcohol

South Carolina pastor and blogger Quinn Hooks has written an informative post spelling out the tragedy inflicted upon so many lives by Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). FAS afflicts thousands of babies born in the United States each year. A survey by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services found that over half of all American women aged 15-44 admitted to having drunk alcohol during a pregnancy.

Regarding FAS, the Centers for Disease Control reports: “[FAS is] 100% preventable if a woman does not drink alcohol during pregnancy. There is no known safe amount of alcohol to drink while pregnant. There is also no safe time during pregnancy to drink and no safe kind of alcohol.” (see here) In spite of this fact, in one survey 41% of (uninformed?) physicians noted that they advised pregnant women merely to reduce alcohol consumption to no more than three drinks per day.

Nevertheless, no matter what deleterious effects the consumption of alcohol may have on their bodies and their babies, it is important for Christian women to understand and to celebrate their freedom in Christ to drink alcohol, even during pregnancies. The Bible says nothing about abstention from alcohol during pregnancy. Indeed, we know from the Bible that people drank wine at weddings (John 2:1-11), we know that such a wedding was a tradition in which Mary participated (since she appears prominently in the John 2 passage), and we know that Mary herself was pregnant with Jesus at the time of her own wedding feast (Matthew 1:18-25).

Q.E.D. the consumption of alcohol during pregnancy is a biblical and righteous practice, and is even a subtle portion of the Christmas narrative. Mothers who have abstained from alcohol during pregnancy probably need to repent of that abstention. I plan to confront my mother with this sin while home for Christmas. To all of you pregnant Christians out there, bottoms up!

Anybody who says otherwise is just a Fundamentalist legalist, and probably a Landmarker, too!

Obama Solution for Disorderly Conduct

The White House has announced a new proposed solution for dealing with people guilty of disorderly conduct—Get 'em drunk.

That always improves people's behavior, right? So President Obama plans to have Dr. Henry Louis Gates and Sgt James Crowder of the Cambridge PD over to the White House for a brewski. Yeah…that'll help them be more civil toward one another. Who knows? Maybe they'll grab a brew and discuss their view of theology. Maybe somebody in the trio will get saved by the miraculous Holy Spirit power of fermented drink.

In other news, the new Middle East Peace Plan reportedly involves slipping some PCP to Bebe Netanyahu and Salam Fayyad.

Would You Support the Return of Prohibition?

Seventy-five years ago today, Utah ratified the Twenty-First Amendment to the United States Constitution, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment and its prohibition of alcohol in our nation.

(HT: Dallas Morning News)

Occasionally we have a good row in the Southern Baptist blogging world over alcohol, and it seems like it's just been too long. Don't you all miss it? So here goes.

A good many of those who have argued that the recreational consumption of intoxicating liquors ought to be a permissible avocation among Southern Baptists will offer the obligatory: "Now I don't drink myself, and I always counsel total abstinence as the wisest choice, but I just don't think that we can say that the Bible condemns recreational drinking of alcohol." Certainly it is a well-formed line of argumentation for the topic at hand, because a convention of churches shouldn't make rules without some biblical foundation.

A governmental authority, on the other hand, doesn't really need biblical authority to do anything. Government can, and often does, do things simply because they are "the wisest choice." For example, you can't smoke cigarettes in restaurants in Dallas. You can't run up to Walgreens and purchase morphine for home use. You can't drive your automobile down I-35E without wearing your seat belt. None of these laws have any justification whatsoever out of the Bible; they are simply an effort to force people to make "the wisest choice."

So, if we had the opportunity to bring back the Prohibition of alcohol, would you support it? If not, why not. And please try to use the very best in grammar and punctuation in your responses—the drug legalization lobby may want to quote you.

If Moderationists Really Cared about Drunkenness...

The ongoing discussion over alcohol at SBC Today really has legs. The comment count is at 117 and rising. I've contributed a few to that number. One of the comments that I made resonates strongly enough with me that I've decided to make it a post all unto itself, slightly modified and expanded. I've entitled it, "If Moderationists Really Cared about Drunkenness."

Make no mistake about it: Moderate consumption really equals moderate drunkenness. How drunk can I get before I’m “drunk”—what BAC? There’s a conversation that no advocate of “moderation” wishes to engage. If we were encountering people sincerely desirous to avoid intoxication, we would see:

1. A vigorous discussion ongoing AMONG moderationists as to where sinful drunkenness beings. But not only is that conversation not vigorous, it is nonexistent.
2. An extolling of the technology now in place to brew beverage alcohol that is less potent, the better to lessen the risk of drunkenness for those choosing to imbibe in moderation. But that conversation also is nonexistent.
3. Serious preaching against drunkenness from moderationist pulpits. Sadly, neither moderationists nor abstentionists are preaching against drunkenness, which causes me to question the sincerity of both sides. I once put up a post asking about how much preaching my readers have heard against drunkenness in SBC churches. The comments were destroyed when I accidentally deleted my blog, but I can tell you that I heard a lot of crickets. This is the great debate where we roar on the blogs what we dare not squeak in our sanctuaries. I believe a greater responsibility falls upon those who proclaim the virtues of moderation. Bringing people to alcohol without giving frequent warning as to the dangers of drunkenness is like giving a four-year-old a Sigsauer without showing him how to set the safety. The absence of such preaching suggests that moderationists (among many of us) aren't very interested in combatting drunkenness.
4. An effort to differentiate among alcoholic beverages based upon their alcoholic content. Several centuries after the last words of the Bible were penned, mankind learned how to distill alcoholic beverages to make them more effective at making people drunk. Like Pit Bulls bred and trained to maim, these are beverages chemically altered very carefully to make them make people drunker quicker. If moderationists were genuinely serious about avoiding drunkenness, they would be telling people not to drink whiskey or margaritas or mojitos or rum or any other distilled liquor. After all, all of these drinks are foreign to the Bible, are much more alcoholically potent than even modern undiluted wine, and start to cause profound drunkenness right off the bat. Instead of hearing this from moderationists, we hear about how their deacons are making margaritas.

I don’t doubt that our moderationist brethren are opposed to the idea of someone drinking until transformed into a sorry heap of puking flesh perched on a toilet lid somewhere, but I see no evidence of any serious opposition to a little buzz now and then—at least not any opposition serious enough to give rise to any careful thought or action.

The Lighter Side of the Joshua Convergence

If you want a more serious take on the recent meeting in Orlando (which I enjoyed greatly), then look here and here.

As for me, I hope to give a somewhat lighter side view of our get-together.

• The folks who put the meeting together are obviously qualified to run the SBC. How do I know? Becuase in the forty-eight hours before we met, the name changed from "Generation Joshua" to "The Joshua Convergence." Obviously, these guys are well-qualified to direct the Annuity Board/Guidestone/Flintstone, the Sunday School Board/Lifeway/HighWeigh, the Foreign Mission Board/International Mission Board/Extraterrestrial Mission Board, and (my personal favorite) the Domestic Mission Board/Domestic & Indian Mission Board/Domestic & Indian Mission & Sunday School Board/Home Mission Board/North American Mission Board/Norteamericano Mision Board.
• They're Great with Photoshop! I'm sending in a picture of myself to the Joshua Convergence leadership—I want them to do to mine whatever they did to Dr. Emir Caner's! We really would look like younger pastors if we could all get that treatment.
• Local Restaurants Speak Up! The dining establishments in the Orlando area have apparently asked Bro. Anthony George to hold a joint conference with folks who disagree with the Principles of Affirmation—Habaneros apparently sold no alcohol at all to the Joshua Convergence crew and thinks they could achieve higher margins if a more diverse crowd were to attend.

In all seriousness, I was greatly impressed by everything that happened during the meeting. I specifically want to thank the organizers for two things that were important to me. First, I'm glad that we added the statement on identity to the Principles in the eleventh hour. Dr. Caner did a great job preaching to that one, in my opinion. Second, I'm really glad that our forum discussion was open to serious questions about the SBC, but modeled how to conduct them within a framework of gratitude and respect for those who have gone before us.

It was a great event. I'm thankful that I was able to arrange things to go.

By the way...

I have finally caught up, I think, with your comments. If I've missed you, comment again and I'll get back to you. I really do apologize for the rudeness of my recent absence. I shall try to do better.

Poll Results

I'm going to count the massive non-response as people who have never (or at least not anytime recently) heard a sermon preached against drinking.

Would I be accurate in characterizing our little fracas currently ongoing in the SBC as a disagreement between:

• Those who never preach about their opposition to alcohol as a recreational beverage, and
• Those who never preach about their mere opposition to drunkenness

????

And therefore, we are deadlocked in vitriolic battle over that which is important enough for us to spit and fume over in our blogs, but not important enough to mention from the pulpit????

Our First Praisegod Barebones Poll

You know, most of my posts are dissertation-length treatises on something-or-other. This time, I'm going to put up a question and listen for a while.

When was the last time you heard anyone preach in a Southern Baptist church against drinking?

A Theology of the Sin of Drunkenness

Pardon me for intercalating another topic into my response to Reisinger. I'll complete that series in the near future.

Since Greensboro, Southern Baptists have been all astir over the question of beverage alcohol. I am a teetotaler, and I am comfortable with preaching total abstinence. I will say that a commitment to the inerrancy and sufficiency of the New Testament will lead you to ask serious questions about this issue, but for me those questions have been answered. I write as someone who has, in the past, held grave reservations about the traditional Southern Baptist position on alcohol, but who has come back to the view I was taught in childhood.

In fact, I almost was not ordained because of this issue. My ordination council asked me what my thoughts were about alcohol. I told them that I could not make a biblical case for the consumption of alcohol to be a sin, but that I believed the avoidance of drunkenness to be the biblical standard for Christian behavior. Although I have never consumed any alcoholic beverage in my life, for a time I was "soft" on the question of drinking alcohol. And I was so convinced of the truth of my position that I was willing to put my ordination at jeopardy rather than to compromise what I believed to be the biblical message.

I heard several arguments for the sinfulness of consuming alcohol, but they did not convince me. Many of these arguments still do not convince me today. I think it may be important for those who advocate abstinence to acknowledge some of the problems with two of these arguments:

1. The it-is-bad-for-your-health argument. Some tried to change my mind by telling me of the brain cells destroyed by a single drink. "The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit," they said, "and it is a sin to destroy the temple." Well, folks, my temple is destroying itself no matter what I do. I've got bad knees, and every step I take destroys part of my temple. My doctor just got off the phone lecturing me about my cholesterol. I think that I probably am getting too much UVA (or is it UVB) for the health of my skin. And if anything is bad for my health, it is being a pastor. The late nights, stress, constant invitations to eat, etc., are doing horrific things to my temple, yet I know that they are God's will. I've never known anyone to use this argument consistently, and I think we would all be better off if everyone would just lay it aside. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 is about spiritual pollution of the body, not about physical preservation of the body. I'm glad to say that the ablest defenders of the Southern Baptist position have not resorted to this line of argumentation
2. The it-will-hurt-your-witness-or-cause-your-brother-to-stumble argument. I believe that there is some validity to this argument. Think about people like the recently-gone-home Ted Stone, recovered from substance abuse. Certainly to sit down at a meal with Ted and pop the cork out of a bottle of wine would be offensive and unChristian. But in its general application, I have a reservation about this approach. I'm not sure I even know how to articulate it, but I'll try. Most of the people who consider it morally scandalous to consume an alcoholic beverage are people who hold that view because we have taught it to them. Churches like ours were the champions of the Prohibition movement, and prior to the Temperance and Prohibition movements, I find it difficult to document any societal taboos against the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Isn't it an inconsistent logical argument for us to create the situation in which a behavior is scandalous and then use that situation as the primary justification for the initial prohibition? That's a circular argument, isn't it? I think that the burden of proof upon folks like myself is to articulate some biblical argument against drinking modern beverage alcohol in-and-of-itself, apart from its possible effects upon other believers.

So, I reject these arguments, but I nonetheless preach total abstinence from alcohol. Why?

Let me sketch out a line of thinking first, and then I'll try to support it:

1. Nobody anywhere can (with a straight face) deny that the Bible strongly condemns all intoxication.
2. Yet at least some degree of drunkenness starts, from everything I read, with the very first drink of a modern alcoholic beverage.
3. Therefore, even if I can only say that the Bible forbids drunkenness, that is sufficient to keep me from drinking.

Defense

The Bible condemns all intoxication

This entry is going to be long enough. Unless somebody out there seriously wants to dispute this point, I'm not going to bother with presenting the lengthy and conclusive biblical case against drunkenness.

I am very glad to note that even all of those who have opposed the Greensboro resolution have acknowledged the strong, unambiguous biblical condemnation of any intoxication.

Any modern alcoholic beverage causes intoxication with the first drink

I will not subject you to lengthy historical surveys of the development of fermentation, which you can find elsewhere. I'll just point you to a few items of consideration.

1. With alcoholic intoxication, the very first things to go are the things that are most important to the Bible.
   
   Wikipedia defines drunkenness as "the state of being intoxicated with ethyl alcohol to a sufficient degree to impair mental and motor functioning. Common symptoms may include impaired speech, loss of balance, and other effects." According to another Wikipedia article on the effects of alcohol, this kind of drunkenness does not occur until one achieves a blood-alcohol-content (BAC) of 0.1%. But I think it is fair to ask whether the biblical standard for drunkenness is really this low. Is slurred speech or a staggering gait really what the Bible is worried about?
   
   It seems to me that the Bible's greatest judgment against drunkenness is the way that it impairs the decision-making abilities (moral and otherwise) of the person who is drunk. Look at any chart of the effects of alcohol, and you will find that these things, the things that are most important to the Christian, are the very first things to go.
2. One drink of modern alcohol is enough to impair your moral judgment.
   
   But how many drinks does it take for that kind of impairment to start? By the time the BAC reaches 0.03%, a person's moral judgment has been definitely affected enough to be measurable scientifically (see the Wikipedia article on the effects of alcohol). But moral judgment is an item that is difficult to measure scientifically. How bad must it be before a research project can ferret out changes in your moral judgment? Some impairment of judgment occurs at much lower levels than 0.03%. From all I can tell, having done a little research, researchers believe that your moral judgment begins to be impaired with the very first drink.
   
   Some will scoff at this, so just let me point out that I am deriving none of my research from pro-abstinence sources. Wikipedia is not exactly a hotbed of Baptist fundamentalism. The Federal Aviation Administration has made it a crime for me to operate an aircraft if I've had any alcohol at all within the previous eight hours. In their eyes, I'm too drunk to fly after the very first drink. And they are worried about the effects upon coordination and spatial orientation—factors impaired long after my moral judgment is in trouble.
3. The effect of this sin of drunkenness is often more sin, occasionally with long-lasting consequences.
   
   Allow me to present as witnesses the millions of teenaged boys who for generations have known that the best way to bed a young woman is to get her to drink alcohol. I could go on, but I won't.

But why, someone will ask, doesn't the Bible simply condemn the drinking of alcohol? It is a good question, and here are some candidates for answers.

1. The biblical condemnation of drunkenness gives us a platform for preaching against the recreational utilization of all intoxicating substances. If the Bible merely condemned wine, what would we say about marijuana? crack? inhalants?
2. The status of the biblical text allows us to affirm the medicinal benefits of intoxicating substances. Wine is a blessing. So is opium. But both wine and opium can be a curse as well when they are used as recreational intoxicants.
3. Folks tell me that ancient wine was not nearly as potent as modern wine is. I haven't researched that question enough to know how much merit is there. Assuming that 0.01% BAC is more than enough to cause some level of impairment in moral decision-making, I wonder how much ancient wine it would take to reach that level? If it would take more than one or two drinks, maybe that is a good explanation of why you could drink in biblical times without danger of becoming drunk. Again, I need to do more research here, but I'm exploring the rhetorical options.

If you differ with my 0.01% level, I'm curious to hear from those agitating for a different view, at what BAC do you think the sin of drunkenness begins? How many drinks are you advocating to be OK for a serious Christian?

Conclusion

So, I'm not building a hedge around the law here. I just find reasonable evidence to support the idea that many people are drunk in some sense of the word after the first drink. I find no biblical justification for "a little drunk is OK as long as you aren't a lot drunk." Drunk equals wrong. Period. Paragraph.

People will tell you that the number of drinks to cause a certain level of impairment differs from person to person. Maybe I could take two drinks and not be impaired at all. How would I find out? Get drunk a few times and see how much it takes? But surely it is not God's will for me to sin now as research for a plan to avoid sinning in the future!

And if I were conducting this research, how would I know when I was first drunk? Are the early stages of drunkenness even readily perceptible to the drinker, or isn't one of those early effects a kind of euphoria that causes you not to really notice so much that you are getting drunk? The FAA tells us pilots about a similar insidious effect related to hypoxia—one of the symptoms is a diminished ability to recognize the other symptoms.

So, the only solid plan I can conceive of to avoid drunkenness is not to drink at all. I have heard a lot of negative criticism of my position, but I have yet to hear anyone articulate another serious plan (e.g. "Everyone can have a 16oz glass of wine, because that will keep them below 0.05%, which we take to be the threshhold of sinful drunkenness") that gives Christian folks the ability, if they intend to drink, to drink with perfect confidence that they will not at all become drunk. I've placed a high burden-of-proof on my side of the argument, so I do not hesitate to place this high burden-of-proof on folks on the other side. Show us any other way that a person can have confidence that he will not at all ever get drunk.

I mean, that is important to all of us, isn't it?

Irresistible Grapes???

Recently I read an article on Wade Burleson's blog that has to be the most Arminian description of a conversion experience that I have heard in a long time. Credit for a woman's salvation is given to a pastor's decision to drink wine. Somebody told me that this guy is a Calvinist, but I'm really beginning to doubt it.