28. Baptists and Drinking, and Other Tribal Absolutes

The Christian Statement

Every Christian tradition has developed a set of cultural standards that function, within that tradition, as markers of faithfulness but that are not clearly mandated by Scripture. The Baptist tradition's near-absolute prohibition on alcohol consumption is perhaps the most well-known in American Christianity - a standard rooted in the nineteenth-century temperance movement and now treated in many Baptist communities as if Jesus Himself had taught it.

Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding. Paul told Timothy to drink a little wine for his stomach's sake. The Psalms praise wine as a gift of God. The New Testament's concern is not with alcohol but with drunkenness - a significantly different standard than prohibition.

The problem is not that a community chooses to abstain from alcohol as a practice. The problem is when the community treats its abstinence as the biblical standard and communicates, explicitly or implicitly, that Christians who drink are less faithful than those who do not. This produces the stumbling block: the person who discovers that the absolute prohibition is a cultural standard rather than a biblical one may conclude that other positions held with similar confidence were equally constructed, and lose confidence in the tradition's ability to distinguish what the Scripture actually teaches from what the tradition has decided the Scripture teaches.

The principle generalizes: every tradition has its tribal absolutes. Contemporary Christian music versus traditional hymns. A specific dress code. A specific political affiliation presented as the Christian one. A specific homeschooling or private schooling conviction. A specific economic conservatism or liberalism dressed in theological language. Each of these, when elevated to the level of essential doctrine or faithfulness-marker, becomes a potential stumbling block for anyone who examines the claim carefully and finds it less scripturally grounded than they were told.

The disciple's responsibility: distinguish consistently and clearly between what the Scripture requires and what the tradition has concluded. Hold the first with full conviction. Hold the second with appropriate humility. And never communicate to a person that the failure to embrace a cultural standard is equivalent to the failure to embrace the Gospel.

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