A Theology of Wine

My granddaughter bought me a history book for my birthday: The History of the World in 6 Glasses.

Its about the beverages that have shaped civilization: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and coke.

The book is funny, informative and easy to read. It tells the story of how the world's various civilizations have marked their territory with their favorite beverage and continue to do so today.

I was surprisingly touched by the chapters on wine. They helped me make important spiritual and theological connections between what I was reading in this book and in the Holy Scriptures.

I thought some of my friends might enjoy hearing what I learned.

First, this book tells us something we already know: that the various people who lived around the Mediterranean were (and most still are) members of a wine culture. It is not surprising then that wine is repeatedly mentioned in scripture. However, some of the cultural and social elements that developed around wine in the ancient world may be surprising, especially to people who do not come from cultures in which wine is important.

Here are a few particularly fascinating tidbits.

 * The author, Tom Standage, says that for centuries, only the wealthy could afford wine. Peasants drank beer or mead. (A preference for either beer or wine still tends to be a hint of one's socio-economic origins, or at least the socioeconomic origins of his ancestors.)

 * As time went on, inferior wine became available to the lower classes. Roman soldiers for example, drank posca, a sour wine that was turning to vinegar and which constituted much of their wages.

* At a feast, guests from higher classes got the best wine, those from lower classes were given poorer quality wine.

* Wine was nearly always mixed with equal parts water, or with even more water if it had been fortified for shipment. Since most people drank a lot of wine, the addition of water helped maintain moderation. There was another reason however: Greeks believed that wine was a gift from the gods.  Only a god could drink pure wine without suffering bad effects. For a human to drink pure wine was an act of hubris. Because water was a symbol of humanity, adding it to wine was an act of humility and piety; a recognition that one understood his place in the universe.

These few facts about the role of wine in the ancient Mediterranean world sheds light on the New Testament passages involving wine.

For example, consider the Lord's first miracle: turning water into wine. Could it be a statement about how Jesus viewed social stratification? After all, he offered good wine to everyone. Even the servants at the wedding got the good stuff. This reading on the Lord's miracle would be consistent with the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount, at least as Luke records it: "blessed are the poor."

Now, think about the Roman soldier who offered the dying Lord the poor wine he had received as wages. The Lord refused the wine, perhaps not with disdain after all, but in the same spirit with which David refused the water his soldiers brought to him. He was grateful  for the offering but also showed his respect for the cost of the offering.

As for the water and blood that flowed from the Lord's side, I offer lyrics from an old Latin hymn:

"Cuius latus perforarum aqua fluxit et sanguine." (From whose side water flows together with blood.")

Think about what the apostle John says about the Lord's wounded side, or, perhaps, about his incarnation, or, even more likely, about both.

"This is He who came by water and blood; not  by water only, but by water and blood"  (1 John 5:6)

Recalling how wine in the New Testament so often symbolizes blood (John 6, for example) and the reference to the Lord's wounded side becomes a hint about how we should view Jesus as both human and divine. Just as wine mixed with water acknowledges humanity's place in the universe, so the incarnation of God reveals that divine life has been offered to us through the flesh of Christ.

There are too many theological implications surrounding the role of wine in the New Testament to explore in a blog. However, consider Paul's rebuke about how communion had gone wrong, in 1 Corinthians 11. He is upset that SOME were getting drunk while others were going away hungry. His rebuke is not so much about people getting drink, although that is certainly condemned here and throughout Scripture, but about why Christians would tolerate a community in which some were getting plenty while others were getting nothing.

The apostle James makes the same point: that churches must not give preferential treatment to the wealthy. This too is a reference to the wine drinking gatherings of Greco-Roman culture, where one's socio economic level determined whether he got the best seat at the table, and the best beverage attached to that seat, or received something inferior. At the Lord's table, everyone was to receive the same quality of treatment -- symbolized by the same wine at communion.

These idea about wine culture derive from what I have learned about how early Christians -- as well as others in the classical age -- invested their written language with many layers of meaning. Origin, in the third century, wrote extensively about this. So he is an important teacher for anyone wanting to understand how the early Christian writers, including the New Testament writers expressed their faith. Early Christians' interpretation of scripture derived from the Jewish form of exegesis, and this habit continued through the first few centuries of Christian history.

We sometimes miss a lot of data by merely acknowledging the obvious and clear meanings of scripture.  Allegory and metaphor has sometimes been misused to make scripture mean whatever a writer wished it to mean.  Nonetheless, early believers read scripture with all other scriptural passages in mind, and with an awareness about how other passages in the Bible suggested meaning for all other passages. This manner of reading was the habit of many if not most early Christians and so offers valuable information to those who study scripture about how past generations read the scriptures.

Of course, this form of exegesis should be use to hint at, rather than to conclusively determine, layers of meaning that a text may contain beyond the obvious.

When we read about the Lord's wounds in the Bible, 'side' means 'side.' However, in the continual self referring language of biblical discourse, 'side' may also bring to mind the fact that Eve was taken from Adam's side. The mixture of blood and water from the Lord's side may also bring to mind how and why ancient people mixed wine and water in the cup. These ideas may also impact one another, as they did for some of the church fathers.

When I read in this book that Greeks and Romans mixed their wine with water, not only as a form of moderation but to acknowledge the difference between the human and divine realms, I lead me to think about how that information might impact the way I read scripture. Given that water and blood came mixed from the Lord's side and, given that in the traditional celebration of Communion a celebrant also mixes the water and wine; given the echoes of the Eden story, in which Eve comes from the side of Adam; it is not a stretch to see why early Christians thought of the church as being birthed from the Lord's side --  through water and blood.

One can read the Bible profitably without understanding any of this.

Still, cultural background matters. Culture influences how scripture was written, how scripture has been translated and how scripture has been, and is, read. If an Evangelical reads a text written in a wine culture through the presuppositions of a movement influenced by the American prohibition, he may distort, or at least obscure, the meaning of what he reads.

Considering any vitally important part of biblical culture -- the role of wine, or of olive oil, or of monarchy, or, most of all, of the self-referring manner in which scripture was thought to echo and answer all other parts of scripture -- can only deepen one's grasp and appreciation for the divine text that has been offered to us through human culture.

The spiritual principle is that 'wine' is mixed with 'water' and then offered to all: in the Cup, in the Book, in the Church, and in the Savior of the world.



     

Why Should We Apologize For Our Faith?

 The Opening Statements for

The National Religious Broadcaster's Conference on Apologetics,

 April, 2013

It is my great honor to open this conference on a subject vital to the future of faith our country. 

I’m sure you are aware that most Christians have no idea what an apologist does, or why what he does is even important.  The first obstacle for caring about what you do may be that so many Christians think an apologist is someone who is out there apologizing for being a Christian. Language has evolved since Christians first began to use the term, and so the original meaning of “apology” has been nearly lost. 

But you know that already.

The main difficulty for the Christian apologist is simply that many believers think your work is not very important.

For several decades, we have been getting better and better at sayin less and less. We are now saying even the relatively superficial things we still say to a population constantly on information overload. To a sizable portion of Americans, thinking deeply about much of anything has become daunting.  

This is true of American Christians as much as for the rest of society. As a result, the content of our faith has been eroding for several decades now.

We need apologists nonetheless, to meet two major needs. We must strengthen the believers’ intellectual structures of faith; and, we must answer the honest questions of globalized, post-postmodern unbelievers. 

The first task is as vital as the second. It will not help to answer the questions of skeptics if Christians remain so unaware, both of their own intellectual heritage and of the major questions of our times.

I realize that apologetics is supposed to be about answering the questions of unbelievers.  When a Christian explains to a Buddhist, or an atheist for that matter, what he believes and why he believes it, he is engaging in apologetics. You are called to equip Christians to do that well. Naturally you want to get on with your work. However, you are increasingly discovering that many believer do not know their own faith and are thus incapable of sharing the faith with others, especially if the questions get too intense.

Explaining the faith to those who already believe is supposed to be the work of catechists.

Unfortunately, catechists are an endangered species, like spotted owls.

A catechist could tech us why ideas like incarnation, sanctification, canon, sacrament and teleology have serious implications for this life and the life to come. If we dont know that, or even know the meaning of such words, we will have little to say to an intelligent Taoist or Marxist. Scientific knowledge alone won't fill the gaps in our witness created by the absence of doctrine.  

What will it matter in the end if, after becoming certain about how human beings arrived on this planet we still do not know why they are on this planet?

How can we be certain that the body of writings we now call the Bible really come from God if we remain uncertain about the role of the human beings who determined the contents of the canon?

How can we speak to the world about redemption if societies in which believers predominate remain as plagued as they are presently by poverty, crime and other kinds of human dysfunction? Sanctification ought to actually occur from time to time, both in individuals and in the societies where believers abound if we expect it to be convincing to unbelievers.

These are internal questions to be sure, questions that require much better answers than we have been giving for several decades. If we have no answers to such questions though, it is difficult to understand what we plan to export to nonbelievers. 

When we turn away from our own house and look around us, we face other challenging issues.  Among these are globalization, a term that describes how representatives of the various human cultures are now scattered throughout the nations rather than concentrated within well defined regions of the world. Globalization, in turn, gives rise to relativism, so that the ethics of Buddhism and Christianity for example, now appear similar even to the followers of these two religions. The radically different principles underlying the two faiths seem irrelevant, perhaps even trivial.  

The basis of morality and law is another serious challenge of our age and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Without a firm foundation upon which to construct theories of politics or jurisprudence; law, ethics, and morality become whatever any particular society at any particular time decides them to be.

Perhaps the greatest challenge we face however is the question of human origins.  Of course, this has been the case for some time. However, the implications of the Human Genome Project has rendered our old issues of fossils, carbon dating, missing links and the like nearly irrelevant. In the light of these recent findings, our view of the biological uniqueness of human beings has been seriously altered. The fact is, all the world’s  species arise from a single language of life. That we share this language of life with roosters and rhododendrons is increasingly disconcerting and dislocating; it raises questions that require theological answers, answers that are both biblical faithful as well as honest.

As more assertive forms of materialism emerge, they give rise both to a newly energized and aggressive atheism and to a seductive all-embracing pantheism.

One of side of our culture tries to extinguish our faith through social pressure and perhaps even persecution.

The other side wishes to absorb us into a globally friendly spirituality in which theology becomes poetry; beautiful statements about ultimate reality that cannot be proved but which may, nonetheless, point to some common human quest for transcendent meaning.

We are here because we care about such issues.

We believe that the creator of the world gave a group of people, the Jews, a set of teachings about the nature of the universe. These teachings reveal how one should live in God’s world. At a certain moment of time, the creator also came personally to our planet. He gave instructions to another group, also Jews, to deliver His teachings to all nations.

These are our claims.

If they are true, then our work is the most important thing in the world. It means we hold keys that can unlock the doors of human meaning and significance.

What a tragedy if, while claiming these things, we fail to study the implications of what they mean to the people of our times, or fail to articulate them well enough so that others can know them.

What a tragedy, if we fail to demonstrate the quality of life that these teachings ought to produce in a people who follow them.

So I thank you for being here today. We are here together in God’s house. We have gathered to ponder and reflect on a great treasure we carry in earthen vessels. We are here to think about how we can deliver that treasure to the household of faith and then God helping us, to the peoples of the world. 

So no, we are not apologizing, at least in the popular way we normally use that word. 

However, perhaps it is time to apologize for not having a clear answer for the faith that lies within us. 

If we can humbly do that, and then if we can move on to equip ourselves and the people of God with credible answers for this challenging hour, then our time together will be most valuable and blessed.

A Songwriter's Prayer

MacKenzie Hollis is a young college woman in our church. She likes to write songs. Fortunately, she’s good at it. It’s not unusual in Nashville to run into songwriters. They're everywhere. Even now, long after technology made geography less important for creating and marketing music than it had been before, people keep moving to Nashville in hopes of launching a music career.

So its not unusual that MacKenzie shared a lyric with me last Sunday, but the interesting thing is why it moved me to write a blog. 

First though, a little background.

Years ago, when traveling to speak somewhere, people would often slip me a cassette as they whispered something like, "would you please get this to Dolly Parton or to Naomi Judd? My niece - wife -- brother -- friend -- writes good songs but needs a break."

I didn't always know what to do with these little pieces of dreams. The songs on the cassette were usually not very good but they carried people's hopes and hope must always be respected. Still, every musician or friend of a musician has had this experience and rarely knows what to do with such awkward moments.

(Terry Blackwood once told me that his career had taught him at least one thing -- that God was not a good songwriter. "Whenever anyone tells me, 'God gave me a song,' I can be sure the world is not going to care much for it.")

When people write a song, they are nearly always convinced that it is a best seller if they can just get it to the right person.

In the days before computer recording programs, studios were expensive. But anyone with cash could get their song recorded professionally complete with orchestras and some great artwork for their record jacket. Luring amateur musicians to record an album was no small part of Nashville industry in those days. I suppose there are still garages all over America filled with those albums.

Alas, the public didn't often agree with these aspiring stars about the quality of their work. Even if the songs or voice had potential, there was usually something lacking that kept that potential from becoming something truly great.

It is hard to express the thrill of starting with a lyric and then watching it make its way through crafting and production to become a great song. But it’s not magic, at least in the way most people think.

C. S. Lewis once said that the difference between a professional artist and an amateur is the amateur's belief that the raw product is the same as a finished product. Amateur musicians, cooks, preachers and writers usually have a genuine natural talent for what they do. Their talent attracts the attention of family and friends because it does seem rather magical.

Sally's little drawing of a dog is impressive because she is only five. If mom and dad (or grandparents, most likely) praise little Sally, she may continue to practice and improve. However, if Sally doesn't get professional instruction from a master, her talent will hit a ceiling. She will remain, perhaps a very good, amateur. She may be inspired and express passion through her art but the product will, nonetheless, have a limited audience.

Inspiration is a vital part of art, though amateurs may not know that professional artists often discover inspiration for their work after, rather than before, they begin it. We all hope we were conceived by people who were at least somewhat inspired about what they were doing at the time. But as every parent will tell you, parenting is about a lot more than begetting. Raising a child is not always as exciting as conceiving one. So inspiration alone cannot create a great work.

Anyway, MacKenzie sent me a lyric. I needed some material and had told her so. A respected Nashville producer had asked me over a year ago to write some music for an album. Now, a concert is coming up -- on April 21st -- and I still don't have all the material together. I pastor a church. I have a family. Its tax time. And there are more excuses if you want to hear them.

Twenty years ago, I was writing songs and getting them recorded. I loved the work and spend many hours each week writing and making demos. Then a bunch of stuff happened. I moved to Phoenix. My children grew up. My pastoral work increased in volume and complexity. Somewhere along the way, my music nearly died. I have written a handful of songs in the last few years, but that part of my life has not received much of my attention.

Then Steve Mauldin asked me to write some songs, do a concert and an album. He asked me to do this because of a sermon I preached about using our gifts for kingdom purposes. He remembered that I had one of those gifts and that I should practice what I preach. I should offer my gifts to further the work of God through our church. (All the proceeds of this project will go for eliminating our church debt so we can get on with the mission.)

I've been trying but there seems to have been obstacles all along the way. Meanwhile, a concert and a recording project is days away. Little by little, I have gathered the material as he has worked hard (and patiently) to bring it together and make it presentable.

So, MacKenzie sent me a lyric. It was already well crafted but she asked for my collaboration to form it into a song. I read it and told her I would work on it. That afternoon, I sat down at the keyboard and played a few chords, singing the words, rearranging them, adding a phrase here and there -- suddenly I knew what the song was. It was a songwriter's prayer:

May my words calm the mind

And my music bring some peace

May my voice be the sound

That will guide a pilgrim home.

Melody emerged, lyrics became prayer, inspiration gave way to crafting and production, and raw product began moving toward becoming a finished product.

There is still much to do, on this song and on others. Some of them are still rough. They are not fully formed, like the world over which the Spirit breathed that was still "without form and void and where darkness moved upon the face of the deep."

Artistry is like that. Potential must be respected but its must also be coaxed out of the formlessness void where we find it if it is ever to become stars, beasts, oceans and fruit. The artist is not certain at first what all is there but he must keep working, crafting, innovating, experimenting until something unexpected shows its self and then takes control.

Of course, when one is preparing a sermon, a hymn or a prayer, he is not only trying to express himself; he is asking for divine grace to create a vehicle that others will use to express themselves. MacKenzie's words brings that longing to a fine point:

Only you can make us whole

O Creator of the soul

But my song can be the start

of the healing of a heart.

I love song writing. I have had the pleasure of hearing some great artists record songs I have written. Songwriting has not been my central focus however, and so I have remained an amateur. I have learned two things though through my limited songwriting career: that the raw product is not the finished product, and, a gifted amateur can participate in creating something truly wonderful if he will allow himself to be guided by those who understand the art better than he.

All but one of my songs have been products of collaborative efforts with people who have studied, practiced and focused their career on music. They helped me take my raw products and made them into finished products.

MacKenzie sent me a lyric. I sang it until a melody emerged that moved me. Then, with her permission, I rearranged some of the lines.  Steve will now do his voodoo and determine the rhythm, instrumentation and all the musical work required to make this song something others can enjoy. At the concert, some of Nashville’s greatest musicians will play what Steve has prepared as I sing.

And then, perhaps, the listeners will join in to make this lyric, which MacKenzie first wrote as a personal reflection, their own heartfelt prayer:    

As I craft this simple rhyme

Breathe your presence through the lines

So this becomes a sacred time

That will make my music Thine.