Wine Diatribe

Dear Fellow Seminarians:

I am probably one of the weakest in our class regarding background information. Yet, listening to these lectures has blessed me with a most felicitous unending impetus to acquire more knowledge of the historical context from the time of Jesus' Earthly ministry. In other words, I'm dying to get on with the study of the historical context ... um, while at the same time, I need to abide by my promise to my penurious wife that I will buy no more texts until we get to America 22nd April -- lest we get incur the 35-dollar cost for shipping each text to South Korea, higher than Amazon's cost to ship to other cultures. Hence, I would appreciate any websites that you, my peers, can recommend, having used them enough to know they are based on inerrancy and plenary scholarship.

I do know that just in my short life, I have borne witness to wide distortions in my ability to understand things when perceiving them from a different time period. Poetry I wrote thirty years ago is unrecognizable by me, as if it came from a different person's pen. I even wish now that I had known to take both Greek and Hebrew courses prior to beginning this class in hermeneutics, for which I yet five weeks into the course harbor this inexplicable urge to spell as "Hermaneutics."

I have little to add (and forgive me if the brunt of what I give is preaching to the choir or beating a dead horse for you), but would like to repeat and add to some of what Dr. Akin said in one of his chapel sermons and in one of his lectures (lecture 13 if the numbering is the same on the lectures Distance Learning sent me... a fact I have come to doubt in my class notes versus lectures confusion).

Wine:

Wine is not the same animal today, but a horse of a different color. No one seriously argues you cannot infer the proscription against other mind-altering drugs (from Ephesians 5:18), but people still feel content to drink a little wine here and there, with their meals (yes to be sure, pinky extended, as is de rigeur among those in the know), elegant surroundings, fine music, and feel cultured, but astonishingly, not remiss in any moral manner, rather, resting smugly confident on their cursory, "ahistorical" readings of:

1. Titus 1:15 ( To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted.) and

2. 1st Timothy 5:23 "Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.." (Maybe I am wrong, but to me that sounds medicinal, and specific to the individual, Timothy. I don't have frequent illnesses. I am 49 and I bike to work every day, 35 minutes each way. Exercise, as I see it, is not only generally good for my health, but as well, may indeed undergird the buttress the fortuitous constitution which permits me to consume together with my burgeoning brood a bag of corn chips galore at times with a certain measure of impunity.J)

I have read that wine was mixed with water long ago. Also, wine was not fortified, leaving it with a lower percentage of alcohol, even before it was commonly cut with water. Taking that and the obvious fact that distilleries abounded not 2000 years ago into consideration, I still recognize family and community structure as being the most salient differences affecting alcohol consumption. Please bear with me, as I clearly recognize my argument is not so scholarly, and largely conjectural, seat-of-the-pants, with me weighing in as an upstart armchair anthropologist.

Without birth control families were larger on average. Without political correctness people could be nosier, and social norms, including shame, could be more freely exercised to curb unwarranted behavior. Yes, older pariahs probably did not care so much anymore what society thought of them, and were somewhat tolerated in the community, but I bet a huge majority of teens more likely toed the line, lest they lose all opportunity of securing a decent marriage. If they had had distilled alcohol then, I feel sure elders would have instated a social control system with women leading enforcement, to the effect that children could only taste a smidgeon, and then only on holidays.

Teens could not lock themselves in their rooms, or sneak out to an unknown section of the city to purchase illicit goods at a convenience store. When I had but one child, I was more doting, and less likely to counter an aberrant tendency. The more children you have, the more natural immunity you get from spoiling one child. Back when families were larger, fathers would break a door down if they suspected something amiss, say some nefarious under-aged drinking were afoot. Today, nuclear families are smaller, grandparents do not live with their grandchildren (losing one more source of wise monitoring), and teens have much more (too much I think) unmonitored independence to make choices about alcohol.

Even not considering alcohol, teens are apt to make some really stupid choices at times, left utterly to their own devices. That is just part and parcel with being a teen. It goes with the territory. I'm sorry, but I believe teens need no better than today's low level of adult monitoring in their daily lives about like I need another hole in my head.

BIGGEST CULTURAL DIFFERENCE:

But the biggest difference I see is in the mega-marketing campaigns that multinational brewers are able to throw in our faces through TV, movies, and other mass media. Mass media did not exist back then, so small groups who wanted to make a buck on any product just did not have anything comparable to the marketing tools and reach that we have today, meaning they had incredibly less incentive to invest much time and resources in putting together such incredibly luring advertisements.

If, 2000 years ago, a bunch of scantily clad girls came dancing into my home for 30 seconds in a dynamically, well-rehearsed show revolving about the singular purpose of getting my children to start drinking their kind of alcohol once they come of age, while I hope I would not kick them to the curb, I would definitely have a problem with that. Today, such invasions are a culturally accepted piece of cake.

What's more, who is to say that the average Joe father may actually want to see the girls dance about in his living room, safely ensconced on the screen (Hey, it's not his fault they suddenly popped up on a family friendly program, is it?), dressed no more fully than Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, and think it worth the risk to just let the TV continue droning on.

Young people (say, 10 to 25) may well sport the quintessential stage of human beings most worthy of meriting the dubious dubbing "Most Impressionable," and a TV cannot be accurately described as any less than an incorrigible invasion of the sanctity of one's home. Neither are modern day working mothers at home so much anymore, to censor and then censure TV commercials. There is a huge cultural difference in marketing, and we ignore that at our peril.

The greater the cultural difference, I say the more prudently we should rely upon the principal of inference to reasonable caution regarding proscription of dangers to sin.

Thirty seconds of Superbowl ad time went for about three million dollars this year. I saw one article which calculated that as a deceptively great deal, with the actual value being perhaps ten times that, considering the value of residual presence on the web, beyond the one shot performance in "real time," when all eyes are glued to the TV.

Many young people cite the great correlation recent medical research shows for reduction of dementia and stroke and longer life associated with moderate alcohol use, and this is true. But what is often left out of news reports of this sort of research is the ineluctable fact that regular aerobic exercise still contributes considerably more to maintenance of the ole noggin than anything else, producing new brain cells, reducing stress and thus and such.

But, I realize, exercise lacks pizzazz; it is a tough marketing ploy to position the act of huffing and puffing about your neighborhood for thirty minutes at the crack of dawn each day as an electrifying alluring trend that you just must get involved in, and pay the latest rates.

Love, Nathaniel

In the final analysis, no, I would not require a teetotalers' alcohol abstinence pledge from members in order to join my church, but everyone there would know just how stupid I think it is to not speak out, but to sanguinely (and tacitly in one's tepid passivity) pay lip service to the current social norms which casually permit the college drinking culture to flourish as it does, wherein 1 in 12 who take their first sip become alcoholics. That is just plain stupid. By what noble metric do you calculate the lost value of one life destroyed by alcohol?

Beer Stinks. Rebekah Faith Wright Hampton, on old Baptist Mountain lady from Boone, NC, a dear friend of mine, with whom I used to sit and while away the afternoons (when perhaps I should have been studying better on my MBA course) in her government subsidized apartment above The Curiosity Shop, across the street from The Jones House, once told me when I asked her what she thought about beer, "For all I care, they can just put it back in the horse!" Amen to that. She's got my vote for mayor, or University president. Only, she has passed on to be with her Heavenly Father about eleven years ago. She was not educated past about middle school, but she left me with many kernels of wisdom.

Note: I feel quite differently about the consideration of allowing the medically approved (in each case) allocation of one glass of 6-8 percent wine for lunch each day in an old folk's home. This would be for people who were already moderate drinkers when they came into the home.