Full Contact Christianity

Many common beliefs are basically unsupportable, and spread for sociological reasons totally unrelated to the merits of the idea. For example, the initial spread of Darwinism and the current scientific establishment’s death-grip on the neodarwinian synthesis both rather obviously owe their success less to their ability to answer the relevant questions, and more to the sentiment that “we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” The calumny that Christmas, Easter, and Halloween are pagan holidays repurposed by the church likewise flourishes because of an unwitting alliance between 18th-century French intellectuals and present-day evangelicals drunk on father-hatred. The odd notion that anybody thought the earth was flat in the days of Christopher Columbus is another. There are plenty more.

Mostly such ideas die when the sociological reasons fade. No longer in the grip of a passion that makes them want it to be true, reasonable observers note that the evidence was never all that good, and move on with their lives. One such idea, mostly dead but occasionally flourishing in out-of-the-way corners of the church, is the notion that wine in the Bible was really just grape juice. Now, as I say, this notion is mostly (and deservedly) dead, but occasionally it comes up, to the detriment of poor folks who are ensnared by it and therefore miss what the relevant passages are actually saying. I’d like to help administer the coup de grace. Hence this post.

It will help to know at the outset that there are a handful of biblical words that are translated “wine.” The common Hebrew word is yayin. That’s what Noah got drunk on when he had too much in Gen. 9:21, for example, and what was prohibited to the priests on duty in Lev. 10:9, but you’ll also find it offered to the Lord as a drink offering in the firstfruits offering (Lev. 23:13) and the twice-daily ascension offerings (Num. 15:1-16). There’s also a Hebrew word for new wine (Heb. tiyrosh). Likewise, there’s a common Greek word for wine (oinos) and another for new wine (gleukos). It’s possible to get drunk on both gleukos (Acts 2:13) and oinos (Genesis 9:21, 1 Sam. 1:14-15, Isa. 29:9, 49:26 in the LXX, the Greek Old Testament, and Eph. 5:18, Rev. 17:2 in the New Testament). This to say, there is no biblical word for “grape juice that’s nonalcoholic.”

Do you wonder why? I did too, many years ago, so I did a little research. As it turns out, this is one of those cases where we are the weird ones. Before 160 years ago, nobody really needed a separate word for grape juice, because what we think of as “grape juice” today was basically impossible. You know that cloudy stuff you find on grape skins? That’s yeast. It’s literally impossible to make grape juice without introducing yeast cultures to it; fermentation begins the moment the skin of the grape is broken. (A wise man might take that as a particularly broad hint from a loving God; as we will see, some men took it as a challenge.) In a warm climate like harvest-time Israel, freshly-stomped grape juice was already fermenting as it ran into the buckets and was poured off into new wineskins (Luke 5:38-39). That’s why there are passages that talk about getting drunk on new wine.

Now, there was a way to stop the process, and they sometimes used it. Yeast feeds on sugar, but high concentrations of sugar inhibit or kill yeast, so if you boil the juice down into a syrup, the yeast can’t grow. So you can store the syrup without it fermenting, and then add water to reconstitute the juice when it’s time to serve it. Easy, right? However, this process also had problems: while yeast can’t grow in the syrup, various molds and bacteria can, and will spoil it entirely. You have experienced this yourself if you’ve ever had a batch of homemade jam go bad on you.

So how did we come to think of (nonalcoholic) grape juice as a thing? To answer that question, I need to introduce you to Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist minister, doctor, and dentist serving in Vineland, NJ. Born in Glastonbury, England, in 1925, Dr. Welch emigrated to the States and became involved in the poorly-named Temperance movement. The teetotaling Temperance advocates (then and now) face a very serious problem in the church service: it’s difficult to maintain that wine is evil when you’re simultaneously serving it at the Lord’s Table…and they were! Remember, grape juice as you and I know it today did not yet exist.

Some Temperance churches would fresh-squeeze grapes when they were in season and serve the juice before it had time to ferment; some would refuse to serve communion at all when fresh grapes were unavailable. Others, not content to ban the sacraments most of the year, resorted to recipes that involved procedures like boiling raisins to make a kind of tea, or mixing raisin puree and water. The more extreme Temperance advocates would serve water at communion in order to avoid serving anything that might be alcoholic. But most churches simply continued serving wine; that’s what the Bible said to do, and the alternatives were both unappealing and nonsensical. The 1864 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church pointedly nixed the alternatives, recommending that “the pure juice of the grape be used in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.”

Enter Dr. Welch, who served his church as the communion steward. In 1869 Dr. Welch, working in his own kitchen, successfully applied the (then-new) techniques of Louis Pasteur to sterilize grape juice, killing the yeast so it wouldn’t ferment in the bottle. He served it in his church, and advertised Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine to surrounding churches, but garnered little interest. For four years, he continued to produce a small quantity of his Unfermented Wine for a few local churches that used it, but it never really took off, and so he quit. Two years later, his son Charles Welch took up the cause, convincing him to start again. Charles advertised Welch’s Grape Juice heavily, and by 1880, the Methodist Episcopal Church had begun to require serving unfermented juice wherever practical. Charles went on to launch multiple advertising campaigns, extolling various (and dubious) health benefits of grape juice and even serving it at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Growth was explosive; Charles would move the business to a factory in New York to keep up with the demand. The rest, as they say, is history. Today you can buy Welch’s grape juice in any grocery store, and most American evangelical churches think of it as the default choice for communion.

But is it? Scripture is quite clear that what’s in the communion cup is oinos, and it’s equally clear that oinos is something one can get drunk on. It’s not grape juice. And why should it be? Scripture repeatedly presents wine as a blessing from God (Gen. 27:28, Psalm 104:15, Prov. 3:10, Ecc. 9:7, John 2) a suitable sacrifice (Lev. 23:13, Num. 15:5, 7, 10), and part of communion with God (Deut. 14:26). Scripture presents the lack of wine as either a form of fasting (Num. 6:2, 20, Jer. 35) or a curse from God (Isa. 24:7, Jer. 48:33).

The New Testament pointedly tells us not to judge one another in matters of food and drink (Rom. 14, Col. 2:16), which means that we are free either to drink or to abstain. Timothy had evidently chosen to abstain; at a certain point in his life, Paul told him to start drinking a little for his health (1 Tim. 5:23).

So how shall we then live? Today, we live in the world Welch made, and you can have your pasteurized grape juice in communion year-round. If that’s your conviction (or your church’s practice) then drink your Welch’s with gladness and simplicity of heart. Nothing could be less fitting than turning the feast of unity into an occasion for division. By the same token, barring medical necessity, if the church you’re part of (or visiting) serves wine, drink your wine with joy and thanksgiving; taste and see that the Lord is good! In any case, don’t seek to bind other’s consciences on such matters; no less an authority than Paul himself tells them not to listen to you (Col. 2:16-17).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 8th, 2024 at 6:09 am and is filed under Dust and Breath Anthropology, Ecclesiology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.