When Christian culture succeeded to the place once held by that of Rome, the Christian biblical worldview, now no longer a private or minority sectarian point of view, became the basis of Christian society. Until the world should come to its appointed end and Jesus return to rule it himself in glory, the best that Christians could do with their unexpected inheritance of temporal power was to order that society according to biblical principles. That goal is perhaps best expressed in the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer of the Sermon on the Mount, which both anticipates the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth and also proposes how to manage until it comes. When Christians pray “…Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven…” they mean to keep their anticipation of the future high, but rather than wait for the society of heaven and the rule of God, they seek to establish here on earth as much of that divine society as possible, so that, in Augustine’s revealing phrase, earth becomes but a “colony of heaven.”
It is thus from an unexpected and extended possession of temporal power that Christians adapt their vision of heaven and rule of God to a vision of earthly society; and in that heavenly vision transferred to earthly geography, the Bible, for Christians, plays an enormous role, for it contains the powerful examples of ancient societies that professed to follow the Lord and then did not. The historical books of the Old Testament, with their accounts of the flawed kings and kingdoms of Israel, were a vivid lesson in civics. God would dwell among and bless his people, but only if they followed his commandments and respected his demands. Indeed, the notion of a Messiah, one who would come in glory to reign in equity forever, was increasingly thought to be dependent upon the moral and spiritual perfection of the people to whom he was to come. The Messiah would come when the world was fit to receive him. The delay in his coming was therefore not an arbitrary capriciousness, but a sign that the work of human improvement, the colonization of earth after the heavenly model, still remained to be done. In this spiritual ambition with its enormous social, political, and cultural consequences, the Bible comes to play a very significant role, and thus its interpretation and application become ever more important.
The image and ideal of Christian society, a heavenly vision mediated by the priests, sacraments, and traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, was at the center of medieval Western civilization. When they were once taught to us all, courses in Western civilization were essentially courses in the integrating force of Christian theology upon civil society: Gothic architecture, the writings of Dante, and the theology of Thomas Aquinas were all saying and doing and meaning the same thing, as part of the same plan.
Protestants and the Book
Protestantism was by no means a repudiation of that plan; in fact, it regarded itself as restoring the purity of the vision by recovering the place of the Bible in defining and ordering it. Those who credit the Protestant Reformation less to Luther’s piety and German nationalism and more to the mechanics of Gutenberg’s printing press are nearer the truth than we might wish. It was the invention of printing that enabled the results of biblical scholarship, and generations of furtive translations of the sacred text into popular language, to be placed into the hands of people other than theologians and textual experts. Thus, William Tyndale, who has been called the father of the English Bible, could, before his death in 1536, say in his Remarks to a Learned Man, “If God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of scripture than thou doest.”
For Protestants, what the priests and the sacraments and the magisterium of the Roman Church had not yet achieved, and could never achieve—the kingdom of God on earth and hence the coming to earth of the kingdom of heaven—the Bible, when rightly understood and applied, could. Interest in the Bible and in its translation was not academic, an enterprise of pure scholarship; it was the potent union of piety and politics designed to hasten the day when, as is written in Revelation 11:15, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.” This phrase is recognizable from the “Hallelujah Chorus,” centerpiece of Handel’s Messiah.
Thus, the private and subversive book moves to the center of the public stage, its meaning, if not clearer, then certainly more accessible by the translation of the text into the language of the reader. Readers of the English Bible continue to have a difficult time with the notion that they are reading a book not written by or for them nor in their own language, and so, conveniently, they forget that inconvenient fact. The task of reading scripture has always been to attempt a reconciliation between what is particular and peculiar to the time and place of its writing and what is universally applicable beyond the bounds of time and place, and beyond circumstance and culture. This task, always difficult, is made even more so when the biblical culture and the culture in which the Bible finds itself are far removed from one another. One can appeal, as Christians often do, to the unchangeable character of God, and the fundamental human condition, as two fixed realities. That is a convincing argument, and yet it has to be qualified by the fact that the apprehension of that unchangeable character of God and the understanding of that fundamental human condition invariably change and are subject to change. Human beings may be universally and always flawed; and yet the expression and the context of those flaws are subject to the changing circumstances of our history and culture.
In trying to make sense of scripture, as we have said before, it is difficult enough to understand what the text meant “then,” in the period in which it was first written, to say nothing of what it means “now.” The meaning is naturally tied up with the writer’s intention, and with what the listener could reasonably be expected to understand. That interpretation itself is no easy task, and all of the linguistic tricks in the repertoire of the scholars will not make it any easier; and then to that task comes the additional responsibility of questioning whether we hear it or read it in the same way, and if, in fact, we are meant to.
Beyond “Original Intent”
Some schools of thought argue that the only important thing to know is what scripture meant then—the school of “original intent,” with which the confederates of Edwin Meese approached the United States Constitution. Find out what they meant, and do it or follow it. Anything else is tampering with the text and its intention. Other schools argue that while it may be interesting to know what scripture meant and what was intended and what was heard, it is far more critical to ask, in light of that knowledge, what it can and does mean now. If scripture is a living and not a static text, we must determine in what ways it can, and possibly cannot, speak to its present hearers and readers. Interestingly enough, while these positions would appear to be quite opposite, what they have in common is a reverence for the Bible that requires them to find a way to respond to it, for the sanction of the Bible is essential to the legitimacy of both schools of thought. Where the Bible is taken most seriously, the struggles for the rights to its interpretation will be the keenest. Thus it is no accident that in America, where the Bible remains at the center of cultural discourse after nearly four hundred years of Christian civilization, the battles for the Bible and the culture of which it is so significant a part remain so intense, so unforgiving, and as relevant as the next election.
The Bible does not make this appropriation of itself an easy thing. It is full of hard texts that either do not easily translate themselves into the contemporary view of the world, or if they do, and in fact are too clear, create a form of cultural dissonance that is in itself problematic, and even destructive. Some of the hard texts are hard because they are difficult to understand, others are hard because they might represent points of view at odds with our conventional wisdom or with other parts of scripture, and still others are hard because they may demand too much of us. The hardest part of any exercise in applied scripture is to determine the relationship between what we can see developing as biblical principles, and what are clearly biblical practices, some of which i
n fact may be at odds with those principles. When we are tempted in frustration to argue that the Bible isn’t consistent, we must of course remember that the Bible wasn’t set out to be a textbook of morals and philosophy and political economy. That is a burden we have placed on it, quite foreign to its nature; and while it is true that, as Emerson says, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” we all know that inconsistency is a flaw only in the constrained world of logic, and that we nevertheless, as perhaps too tidy-minded men and women, want to find some larger light by which to read and appropriate scripture to our own circumstances.
In this section of the book I will look at some hard texts that embrace many of the issues I have just discussed, and look at them in what I would call their public or civil context, the degree to which the readings of scripture either lead to or reflect policies that have an enormous significance for the public life we share together, and, as well, for the public repute of the Bible itself. Let me begin with a relatively benign, though by no means irrelevant, case of hard texts and changing times, from which I hope to derive a principle that will allow us to look more closely at more pressing and contemporary issues. Let us look now at the hard texts and changing times concerning the issue of temperance.1
The Case of Drink
“Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler; and whoever is led astray by it is not wise.” (Proverbs 20:1) This was the text used by the man from the Temperance League when he visited my Sunday school class of prepubescent boys nearly fifty years ago. Prohibition as a national policy had been dead twenty years, but with the Baptists among whom I was brought up, drink was still irrigation for the fields of sin. We were encouraged to “vote dry” in the annual referendum on the sale of alcoholic beverages in our town, grape juice was still the drink of choice in the celebration of the Holy Communion, and the young, especially the boys, were given early and routine lectures on the evils of drink. It was for just such a purpose, to terrify us, that we boys were treated to a demonstration by the temperance lecturer. On the platform he had put a jar of what he said was alcohol, and into the jar he dropped a large beefsteak. Instantly the alcohol stripped the flesh from the bone, and while we stood there amazed, the lecturer told us that this was what drink would do to our bodies and sin to our souls. He then cited Saint Paul: “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.” (I Corinthians 3:16–17)
Allowing this to sink in, he then passed out cards with these verses printed on them, and we were invited to “take the pledge” against drinking by signing the card and pledging abstinence, and to pray for those who drank. There was no doubt in our minds that the Bible was against drink. There was even a section on temperance among the Responsive Readings from Scripture in the back of the New Baptist Hymnal; and in the Baptist Church covenants, in which members pledged their Christian duty to one another, among the promises made was this one: “…To abstain from the sale and use of intoxicating drinks as a beverage.”
This appeal to the young to take the pledge was an old and approved tactic in the American crusade for temperance, and it was based upon the sound, but decidedly un-American, Jesuit principle that the moral foundation inculcated in the young before the age of ten would form the principles of the adult for life. It did not matter that they were abstaining from something that they had not yet had. The pledge was part of the moral armor with which the evil darts of Satan could be withstood. The text for this endeavor came from Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” From the first third of the nineteenth century, young American Christians, mostly Protestants, were invited to join the growing temperance movement by “enlisting” in what its founder, a Presbyterian minister, Thomas Hunt, called the Cold Water Army. Thousands sang the army’s anthem:
I do not think
I’ll ever drink
Whiskey or gin,
Brandy or rum,
Or anything that
Will make drunk come.
Girls as well were encouraged to stave off drink and to reform their male friends with the line “Lips that touch wine will never touch mine.” By the close of the nineteenth century most people of Protestant America’s churches, with the notable exception of the Episcopalians, who were referred to by their abstemious critics as the “Whiskey-palians,” had substituted the unfermented juice of the grape in their sacramental usage. Indeed, the considerable fortunes of the Welch grape juice empire were founded in part upon the successful production and marketing of a cheap and nonalcoholic grape-juice substitute for the Lord’s Table, first in Methodism, which embraced total abstinence with enthusiasm, and then throughout American Protestantism.
Temperance also played an ugly role in America’s rising anti-Catholicism and chauvinism in the closing days of the nineteenth century. The fact that the Roman Catholic mass featured wine, although the people as yet communicated only in one kind, the wafer, fueled the perception that the Church of Rome and its growing immigrant constituency was fundamentally alien and dangerous to the American way. Few arguments against Catholic immigrants, and against the Irish in particular, were more repeated than were the claims that they were habitual drunkards who would live at the charge of the general welfare, and because of their enormous capacity to reproduce would forever be a burden upon the pure and reformed native stock. When James G. Blaine of Maine, in a remark that cost him the presidency, called the Democrats the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” prejudice and morality were efficiently combined.
What Does the Bible Say About Drink?
Paradoxically, the Bible proved to be a rather shaky platform upon which to base a campaign against drink. Despite the unfortunate and vivid instance of Noah’s drunkenness in Genesis 9:20–27, and the terrible consequences that befell his second son, the cursed Ham, no doctrine against drink can be found by precept or example among the writers of the Old Testament. It is difficult to reconcile a biblical argument against drink with the hospitable sentiments, for example, of Psalm 104, which praises God who “…dost cause the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the heart of man…”
The New Testament is no more helpful. The first miracle attributed to Jesus is the one he performed at the wedding at Cana, as recorded in John. There he turns water into wine, and a very good wine at that, to replenish that which had run out. The miracle is one of blessing and abundance, the sign of which is wine, which in the formula used in the Christian Eucharist must now be understood as the gift of God for the people of God.
Jesus ends his earthly life at a Passover seder, which Christians refer to as the Last Supper. It is impossible to imagine that so fundamentally Jewish a celebration of hospitality and the providence of God would be celebrated with anything less than the best wine available. Saint Paul, in giving practical advice to his young apprentice Timothy, tells him, “No longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.” (I Timothy 5:23) His pastoral advice to Titus is to bid the older women of the Christian community “to be reverent in behavior, not to be slanderers or slaves to drink….” (Titus 2:3)
The ambiguous witness of the Bible created a problem for the temperance movement, which required the sanction of the Bible for its moral position on alcohol. The temperance advocates were thus forced to a series of ingenious interpretive or exegetical devices if they were to maintain the authority of scripture together with their reformist principles, chief of which was what we would call today “contextuality,” or “situationalism,” which is that the context or situation in which the Bible appears to permit the social use of alcohol must be understood, and indeed understood as significantly different from our own time. We know more about the dangers of drink than did our biblical predecessors, and
thus if they knew then what we know now their position would agree with ours. If Jesus had known of the evils of drink as manifested in industrial Western society, he would not have been so free with his transformation of water into wine. Everything that the Bible describes is not necessarily to be permitted or approved of. The patriarchs, for instance, practiced polygamy and required circumcision. Christians no longer approve of the one nor require the other, but the authority of scripture is not compromised. So goes this argument.
Another argument was an ingenious, albeit tedious and ultimately unconvincing one, that there were in fact two kinds of wine of which the Bible spoke: an intoxicating one that was generally condemned and presumably was that which Noah drank, and an innocuous one not unlike Welch’s formula, which taken in moderation was that which Jesus himself used and which was familiar to the early Christians. Nineteenth-century biblical scholars who were also devoted to the cause of temperance found the two-wine theory necessary not only to advance the social reform cause of temperance but to preserve the moral reputation of Jesus. One such critic, Moses Stuart, was an ardent advocate of the two-wine theory, for, as he wrote, it would be “impossible to suppose the wine fermented and yet leave the character of the holy Savior unscathed.”
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