EDITORS’ NOTE — The following column addresses the resolution adopted at this year’s annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in which messengers expressed their “total opposition to the manufacturing, advertising, distributing, and consuming of alcoholic beverages.”
While the Bible may be subject to various interpretations concerning alcohol consumption (as well as the nature of the beverage consumed), Southern Baptists’ understanding of the issue has been exceedingly unambiguous. In the convention’s history, SBC messengers have adopted more than 40 resolutions on the issue prior to this year — as recently as 1991 and as early as 1886.
Southern Baptists meeting in session have called their brothers and sisters to live “an exemplary Christian lifestyle of abstinence from beverage alcohol and all other harmful drugs” (1984); to recognize alcohol as “America’s number one drug problem” (1982); to “reaffirm our historic position as opposing any use of alcohol as a beverage” (1978); to view “personal abstinence” as the “Christian way” (1957); to express their unceasing “opposition to the manufacture, sale, and use of alcoholic beverages” (1955); to realize alcohol is a “habit-forming and destructive poison” (1940) and the “chief source of vice, crime, poverty and degradation” (1936); and to “reassert our truceless and uncompromising hostility to the manufacture, sale, importation and transportation of alcoholic beverages” (1896).
Resolutions reflect the sense of the convention in session. And while they have no binding authority, they are instructive as to where Southern Baptists have stood on issues at periods in their history.
Though nowhere in Scripture will you find that alcohol consumption is a sin, you do find warnings about its use and abuse.
I agree with my predecessor at The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the late Foy Valentine, who wrote, “Since Noah first grew grapes, made wine, passed out, and brought shame to himself and his family, the human race has been grappling with the moral dimension of the alcohol problem.”
We often abuse the liberty we have in Christ. We mistake it for license to engage, under Christ’s covering, in any behavior. We know the apostle Paul wrestled, as he wrote, “For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do” (Rom. 7:19).
Even those of us who are washed in the blood of Christ still struggle with our sin nature, which pulls us to do, think and say things we know do not honor our Lord. Yet Paul writes, “Those whose lives are according to the flesh think about the things of the flesh, but those whose lives are according to the Spirit, think about the things of the Spirit” (Rom. 8:5).
Does the Holy Spirit desire for us to engage in behavior — sinful or not — that could draw another away from Christ? Of course not. It is on that Scriptural basis — among others — that I contend the Bible has something to say about the consumption of alcohol and other behaviors not specifically addressed.
“The mind-set of the Spirit is life and peace” (v. 6), the apostle Paul continues in Romans 8. I don’t believe there is a need for a foreign substance to achieve peace or relaxation, or whatever state some assert the moderate use of alcohol produces. Can a mind altered by the consumption of alcohol also be under the control of the Holy Spirit?
We are to be transformed people, offering our “bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” This is our “spiritual worship,” Paul writes in Romans 12:1–2.
Alcohol, along with many other things, corrupts our body, and we are not then in control of it to offer it to God — “holy and pleasing.”
While alcohol use can be a stumbling block to the lost, a mind diminished by alcohol can miss a divinely ordained opportunity to share Christ. Valentine wrote, “Alcohol’s drugging, depressing effect reduces mental capacity and thereby deadens moral sensitivity.”
I have enough things in my life that distract me from my calling. I can’t imagine intentionally ingesting a substance that will impair my judgment and further distract me from God’s will for my life.
It appears it does not take much alcohol to impact a person physiologically. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle determined among test subjects that even one “strong drink” could cause a “substantial perceptual deficit.” This “inattentional blindness” in those whose blood alcohol level was less than half the legal limit resulted in them being more likely not to notice an object that appeared unexpectedly in their line of sight (Reuters, “One strong drink can make you ‘blind drunk’,” July 4).
While I believe abstinence has sufficient biblical underpinnings, there are many sociological indicators that say its use is unwise.
An adolescent’s view of alcohol is positively associated with his or her parents’ drinking behavior and attitudes, in the same way a child’s view of prayer and Bible study is impacted by his or her parents.
A study found a few years ago that in homes where the parents were total abstainers from alcohol, 16 percent of the teenagers in the home experimented with alcohol before adulthood. In homes where the parents were social drinkers, 66 percent of the children experimented with alcohol before adulthood.
And a child who drinks before age 15 is four times more likely to develop alcohol dependence, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reports. Also recent studies have shown the alarming extent to which alcohol decimates an adolescent’s still-developing brain and nervous system — far more harshly than it does in adults.
In American society, the human toll from alcohol abuse is staggering. According to a recent USA Today/HBO poll, 20 percent of Americans indicated they “had an immediate relative who at some point had been addicted to alcohol or drugs.” The article, “In Tim Ryan’s family, he is the addict,” in the July 20 issue of USA Today notes, “That translates into roughly 40 million American adults with a spouse, parent, sibling or child battling addiction.”
When you add the millions of children living with addicted parents, you are talking about a devastating problem that impacts the lives of nearly half the people in our nation. Virtually all users of other drugs start with alcohol; that is why it is called the “gateway” drug. The USA Today article quotes Sis Wenger, executive director of the National Association for Children of Alcoholics, as saying, “For every person who’s alcoholic or dependent on other drugs, there are at least four or five people hurt on a regular basis.”
Alcohol use is a matter of personal conviction. It is a matter of making wise decisions that honor God. But for me, there is no debate; alcohol is more often than not a scourge on our society and a disaster waiting to happen for many families. (BP)
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