As a minister and college prof, I've often been asked advice on drinking.
And I sometimes am put in a tough position in responding. For example, A few years ago I was on a panel discussing "good decisions" out in front of Spring Break. Alcohol was a major topic. At the time, according to the Student Handbook, no student, even those of legal drinking age, was allowed to drink alcohol, on or off campus. Obviously, there was no way to enforce this policy. Yet we knew that plenty of students would be drinking over Spring Break. Hence the need for the panel. But how were we to address this reality? Because if we openly admitted the reality of students' drinking this admission would seem to condone violating the code of conduct in the Student Handbook. That is, if you said, "Hey, we know many of you are going to drink, so if you do here's some advice ..." you would be seen as encouraging rule-breaking, or at least going easy on it. So how do you give helpful and realistic advice while simultaneously supporting the prohibitions in the Student Handbook? It's tricky, and for most of the panel we just dodged the issue. Toward the end of the panel, noticing that we had said nothing remotely helpful other than "Don't drink. It's against the Handbook" I took the microphone and said "Listen, if you do drink, be smart. Don't get drunk. Particularly around strangers. Just drink one beer and nurse it through the night". This comment -- if you drink, nurse it -- caused a bit of a stir, but many students seemed to appreciate it. It was some sensible advice inserted into what had been a moral vacuum.
It seems to me that so much Christian advice wrestles with this dilemma. Alcohol is one example. Sex is another. So how do I think we should go about constructing genuinely Christian advice about drinking?
First, it's a pretty tortured reading of the NT to argue Jesus didn't drink. There's no injunction against drinking in Paul or the other epistles. Early Christians kept the wine flowing at Communion and Love Feasts.
So complete prohibition -- abstinence of imbibing any alcohol -- won't work on biblical grounds. In fact, I argue that prohibition isn't Christian.
The issue comes down to a simple one: Are Christians moral or are we virtuous? That is, do we construct a set of rules or are we more concerned about constructing character?
That's a real question for ethics. Because I think so much of the moral vacuum in which we find ourselves as Christians is our own doing. We've reduced "being Christian" to a set of intellectual affirmations and moral rules. Among them, no drinking alcohol. We make the argument, of course, on grounds of purity or holiness. Thing is, those are precisely the grounds Pharisees and Gnostics use.
Instead, the New Testament is concerned to shape the moral character of the disciple, one who chooses and acts responsibly and wisely. This is why I say alcohol is less an issue of prohibition for Christians than it is one of self-control.
Romans 14 is the key text for my argument here.
Sure, it may be the responsibility of individual Christians to abstain. Maybe they lack the discipline of self-control with alcohol. Or maybe (as was the common ground for the early Temperance Movement) they lack economic self-control and spend all their money on booze. But those are issues of individual self-control, not the evil of alcohol itself.
That's why I think Paul never made a rule like the college one above. One of the marks of self-control is restraint where we need it, without complete restraint in everything. It isn't Christian to be a teetotaler. It's pharisaical!
When we give up something -- meat or sex or alcohol -- it isn't because there's something wrong or evil in them. We give them up for a reason. And that reason is discipleship.
If we begin looking down our noses at those who do, we've lost the discerning spirit of Jesus and embraced the enslaving spirit of the Pharisees. That's the problem with beginning the argument with holiness.
If we begin instead with virtue, we begin to see that alcohol is a part of God's good creation. We should enjoy it, responsibly. With discernment.
GK Chesterton once said, "The brevity of the Ten Commandments is evidence that God permits far more than he forbids". And he's right. That the Scriptures no where prohibit alcohol should give teetotalers pause.
I cringe at Christians making simplistic, legalistic requirements for good reason. I don't think it's Christian.