Juice in the Dock
As we end our exploration into the history and symbology of communion drink, our only remaining task is to summon grape juice to the dock and pump it for answers. Because the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is at the very center of our worship, and because of the Biblical principle that we will emulate what we worship (2 Kings 17:15), it behooves us to view the swap with a quizzical eye and with a mind aware of the importance of symbols. We owe it to ourselves as beings who are walking symbols, who through symbols alone apprehend cosmic realities, and whose mental respiration is nothing but symbol exchanges all day, every day.
It is important to keep in mind what may or may not be at stake. Perhaps the 19th-century divines were right; grape juice is a holier drink and the elimination of alcohol gave America the moral booster shot it sorely needed. Maybe we should thank them for a crisis narrowly averted in the same way we are grateful to Athanasius or Eusebius for defending the nascent church from heresy and demise. On the other hand, maybe juice replaced with a placebo the regular kingdom-reinforcing injections to maintain robust spiritual health.
Regardless of the symbolic discoveries we make in the investigation, one thing can be said for certain: we are stuck with the meaning the symbols reveal. We cannot unsee the meaning of symbols, for good or ill, neither can we shew away the meaningful implications of each on our lives; it is too late. None of us anymore may claim ignorance.
Namers
To compare juice and wine is to contrast Namers – the authorities responsible for choosing symbols specific to the meaning they intend. On the face of things, we are comparing two purpley liquids made from the same berry blood. But buried in the code of each symbol is the meaning intended by the namer, which we drink into ourselves and read with our stomachs.
Biblical authors employ symbols to elucidate spiritual realities; these symbols are like the things that they symbolize. John the Apostle chose gold to help us visualize the streets of heaven because of gold’s known properties – incorruptibility, value, and purity (Revelation 21:21). Will heaven literally be paved with gold? Don’t know. But I do know that it will have these qualities of gold because that is why John chose it as a symbol. Jesus chose wine to illuminate the New Covenant, not because it is literally His blood, but because of wine’s known properties, properties every bit as obvious as gold’s and that had been pulling some serious symbolic cargo in Israel’s cultural history.
By using gold and wine, John and Jesus commissioned symbols that had their toes dug into the earth of human experience and reached up into the heavens to pull down Truth beyond our capacity to understand. Acting as symbol givers, as namers, they chose symbols whose qualities were like the reality they meant to convey to an audience with intimate experience of each symbol. These symbols, as all symbols are, were instructive, describing reality through experiential knowledge of the substance hidden in the comfortable everydayness of a meal.
However, as intemperance rotted holes in individual and civic life, concerns grew that the church’s preaching against intemperance was duplicitous and sought a better representative symbol for the supper. The unfermented juice of the grape was a holier, more perfect symbol for the gravity of the sacrament. Unfortunately, juice was not available most times of the year. Scientific progress had solved the problem of fermentation uncoupling the Lord’s Supper from what was increasingly believed to be a drink of the devil and a hindrance to human progress.
The cultivation of this idea intended no harm to the sacrament. Indeed, as we will see, juice was truly believed to be a better and more perfect representation of the holiness of Christ and the potency of the New Covenant. On the surface, as we have discussed, juice seems a one-for-one swap with wine and has been used by many stouthearted Christians for decades. Today we are inheritors of this tradition and do not give it much thought. However, symbols cannot be swapped without affecting their meaning. That is not how symbols work.
So what does grape juice symbolize? As we ask this question, let’s use the same level of scrutiny, ardor, and depth of thought the Bible exemplifies with wine. Every aspect of the making of wine and its use in Jewish life, from the crushing of the berries to the fermentation, its effect on the body, its triumphant celebration to its fury toward sin, was used to symbolize some aspect of sin, wrath, redemption, and victory. What associations are made with grape juice? Under what conditions was it born? What sorts of ideas were stirred into the cauldron to spice this brew?
And let us not exempt from our scrutiny the decision itself to adopt grape juice, a potent symbol in its own right. Beliefs are always acted out. Symbol choice is a belief-backed action; nothing is a mere symbol. Grape juice is teaching us something about the New Covenant and what it instructs is very different than the lessons of wine. What story is juice telling?
A Gift Returned
Commenting on Paul’s instruction for the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 10:16), John Calvin assented to the symbolic nature of the sacraments while at the same time elevating their importance as an invisible gift:
There is no ground to object that the [Lord’s Supper] is figurative, and gives the sign the name of the thing signified. I admit, indeed, that the breaking of bread is a symbol, not the reality. But this being admitted, we duly infer from the exhibition of the symbol that the thing itself is exhibited. For unless we would charge God with deceit, we will never presume to say that he holds forth an empty symbol. Therefore, if by the breaking of bread the Lord truly represents the partaking of his body, there ought to be no doubt whatever that he truly exhibits and performs it. The rule which the pious ought always to observe is, whenever they see the symbols instituted by the Lord, to think and feel surely persuaded that the truth of the thing signified is also present. For why does the Lord put the symbol of his body into your hands, but just to assure you that you truly partake of him? If this is true, let us feel as much assured that the visible sign is given us in seal of an invisible gift as that his body itself is given to us.
John Calvin, Institutes Book IV, Chapter XVII
Jesus gave us wine as a visible gift of an invisible reality, just as he was a visible gift of an unseen Reality (Colossians 1:15). Through partaking in the symbol, the “thing itself is signified” – a symbol not arbitrary, hollow, or whimsical, for God did “not put forth an empty symbol”. Participation in the gift invites us to experience “the truth of the thing signified” – the New Covenant – that can only be experienced through the gift as given. To change or alter the gift is to obscure this signified truth. Occlusions are introduced into the pristine symbol, not by addition, but by negation, muddling the reality, as poems suffer the loss of meaning when barbarically translated into essay form.
Poetic meaning is communicated most clearly through a picture, image, and metaphor as beauty is grasped more truthfully in a sonnet than in a scientific study. Poems cannot be translated into prose straight across without massacring the meaning. It is like dissecting a cat to find its curiosity. Wine communicates the unutterable. Graciously condescending, it speaks in the clicks and guttural tongue of our fallen and finite souls. Juice is the prosaic diction of the poetic wine. It is a mistranslation; alike in appearance, dissimilar in experience. They may be homonyms; they are not synonyms. They’re is no small difference.
God gave a targeted gift in the sacrament specific to the work of fueling spirits commissioned to disciple nations. A potent souvenir He knew we would need, one which carried the living memory of life and death in its body. Galadriel gifted Frodo the Star of Elendil clairvoyant of the dark and dangerous path ahead of him. Aslan bequeathed Peter a thirsty sword knowing slavering wolves needed slaying. Jesus gave us wine as one of the four weapons, along with bread, water, and the word, to burn in our bellies and intoxicate us with memories of His grace and promise of victory. Substituting juice for wine is no innocuous exchange, as juice was not made with victory and wrath in mind, but in response to caution and consciousness of sin.
Exchanging a gift says something about the giver: either he is unfamiliar with the potency of the gift and the peril of its use, or he misunderstands the needs and dispositions of the recipient. It is true, as Calvin said, that the symbol is not the reality; symbols are never as ‘real’ as the thing they signify. But we would be remiss if we reason from this that the gift of wine as a remembrance is arbitrary and that nothing is lost with juice. Exchanging a 4-carat diamond engagement ring for a cubic zirconia of equal size retains the meaning in synthesized appearance only while diminishing in value the giver, the gift, and the recipient.
Juice Tells the Story of the Overly Wise
Teaching formal logic to my classical conversation students, I took the liberty to suggest we modernize a particular mnemonic devised by William of Shyreswood, a medieval scholar, so the students would more readily memorize it. William had composed four lines of Latin gibberish with a few recognizable names spliced in. The vowel/consonant sequence of these names indicated how to determine a syllogism’s figure and mood and a guide for changing any figured syllogism into its first figure equivalent. As a “fun” exercise, we tried to find words with similar vowels and make a sassy, modern, and memorable version for ourselves from the colloquial relic.
Nope. It was all important, all of it, every last letter, specifically, in its place, in its line. Turns out, if your last name is “of [a place]” chances are you are smarter than 104% of living humans, and certainly smarter than this living human. The letters in each name have a specific place, function, and meaning succinctly tying together concepts across the spectrum of formal logic. Furthermore, centuries of logicians have cherished this mnemonic to help them make sense of formal logical principles. So my proposed amendment was like the guy who struggles through a game of checkers offering some “helpful suggestions” to improve upon 4-D chess. When I realized this was the case, I bashfully confessed to the class my hubris in thinking I was way smarter than I was. It is best to eat crow while it is still warm.
Attempting to make things easier and more applicable to modern minds, I didn’t attenuate the memory device so much as leave it broken and quivering on the floor. Intending to help them remember everything, I only succeeded in a dancing mockery of established, deep, and wise logical principles. It is now a mnemonic device to assist me in recalling my foolish twaddling.
Human wisdom glitters and philosophies flicker with truth, but worldly prudence runs cross-grain to the cut of the Bible. Seeing the Word of God through our human perceptions, instead of understanding our human perceptions through faith in the Word, is destined to overshoot the landing zone of God’s wisdom. Sabbath observance can be cluttered with minuscule interdictions making the day of rest the most burdensome of the week, or extinguished as smoldering legalism to be doused with irreverent grace.
Prohibiting what God has permitted, or legalizing what He has outlawed, in an attempt to improve upon God’s word is allocating to wisdom what rightly belongs to foolishness. Correcting God’s symbol which He had aged to perfection through millennia of symbolic instruction betrays anachronistic, cultural, or personal bias and places on the nose the lenses of human prescription through which to see God’s word.
Over-wisdom overcorrects. It does not distance us from sin so much as it flings us off into sin on the other side. Flight from licensciousnesss by external means finds us running into the snares of pietism. There we find an enemy content to waylay our faith with miserly spirituality as he is with worldly excess and decadence.
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.1 Timothy 4:1-4 (ESV)
Here Paul is talking about eating foods sacrificed to idols, but the central principle applies. It is difficult to overlook how the imposition of grape juice precisely illustrates Paul’s warnings. I’m not saying the motivations for juice were demonic or our 19th-century brothers had beef jerky consciences, but there was a clear element of false asceticism funded by man’s wisdom. That wine is not the “devil’s drink” is manifestly obvious by God’s repeated approval and offering throughout scripture. Gymnastic contortion of the kind that wins Olympic gold is required to read the Bible otherwise.
WB Sprague, one of the few 19th-century voices speaking against removing wine from communion, warned in a sermon against worldly wisdom:
The point of true wisdom is to make our faith the exact counterpart of God’s revelations; to believe that, and only that, which He has revealed, either directly or indirectly, in the sacred scriptures. But there are many who show themselves over-wise by departing from this simple principle, and making a use of their reason in connection with God’s truth, for which reason never was designed…[And] the result of all is, either that in attempting to explain God’s truth, they have explained it all away, or else they have, in a great degree, neutralized its influence by mixing it up with the deductions of their own erring reason. It is an error to believe too little, and an error to believe too much; and he who makes himself over-wise is sure to fall into the one or the other
W.B. Sprague, Danger of Being Over Wise
Juice tells the fable of the overly wise whose inductions departed from the simple truth of the scriptures by interpreting Christ’s commands through their contemporary cultural lens. We thank our forbearers for their concerns and valiant attempts to de-sinify the world with abstinence and to seek a holier cup. In response to the well-intentioned zeal we agree with Cowper, and suggest that “Morality may spare Her grave concern, her kind suspicion there.” The symbol in the sip of the saccharine cup remembers man’s wisdom presuming to amend the 4-D living symbol God had created with his own checkered knowledge.
Regurgitated Reasoning
Seventeenth-century natural philosopher Francis Bacon is the father of the scientific method. Bacon, a devout Christian, believed in the special revelation of God in his Word but also believed truth to be buried throughout God’s creation. Truth, according to the prevailing system of thought in his day, was sequestered among authorities in the form of illiquid Aristotelian logic. His inductive approach yielded a democratic, unbiased access to truth in God’s creation, one that appealed to the senses we all held in common – the common sense.
Inductive logic, as opposed to formal deductive logic that reasons from universals to the particulars, attempts to arrive at universal concepts by beginning with particular, sensical observations. Common-sense observations provided premises that would uncover the secrets of God in creation. Since there is only one Truth, Baconian reasoning provided a path to understanding that was seen as equal to Biblical revelation. Pebbles that led to truth were scattered on the ground around the feet of peasants, not only in the inaccessible ivory minds of the elite.
Temperance advocates applied Baconian inductive reasoning to alcohol1. What did they see? Universal and repeated human experience demonstrated alcohol destroyed lives and led to wife-beating, deplorable living situations, laziness, slovenliness, and economic demise. All common sense led to the same conclusion: fermented drinks were bad from start to finish and in any amount. Since all truth is from God, these common-sense observations illuminated scriptures concerning wine that were dim and muddled.
Scientific observations, then, informed Biblical exegesis. Author Jennifer Woodruff Tait summarizes the common sense approach to wine as follows:
Behind all these uses of medical authorities lay the general presupposition that medical and scientific conclusions were unquestionable as long as their conclusions favored the temperance cause. Since these scientific claims [of alcohol’s sinfulness] were discovered through inductive experiment, they were, therefore, data that biblical interpretation must take into account – and since exegesis was itself a scientific process, current scientific knowledge could be used as theological data2.
Alcohol was “proven” by science to be a product of decay. Benjamin Rush wrote a pamphlet documenting the physical and mental sequelae of alcohol’s effect on the body and mind. Post-mortem dissections of stomachs and livers illustrated clear evidence of unmitigated rot. It ‘kills all the life-globules and fills the blood with dead matter”.3 Won’t someone please think of the life-globules? Temperance advocates of grape juice, believing that both religion and science relied on common sense observations, effortlessly translated scientific into moral data. Wine was sinful because scientific observations provided a deluge of data points leading to this irrefutable conclusion.
Taylor Lewis, in his preface to the Temperance Bible Commentary, said alcohol was “a spiritual sin – per se not a matter of excess merely, but wrong and evil in any, even the smallest, measure or degree”.4 Charles Fowler, president of Northwestern, saw his presumption and raised him, saying if Jesus was okay with wine drinking then he was on the side of “wife-beating and child beating” and “seven-eighths of all the crimes committed in the civilized world”.5
Certain leaps of logic were taken from this position. If alcohol in any quantity fouled the mind, this meant that any tippler, even in thimble-sized quantities, could no longer be trusted to see the truth of anything, let alone an objective take on the morality of wine. One may then dismiss out of hand anyone arguing for moderation as he must necessarily be an unrepentant fiend and an unscientific thinker.
Woe betides the tippler, for it got worse! From temperance premises, it was not only any ability to make a moral decision, but salvation itself was on the line. Leon Field, “Most crucially, upsetting this balance [drinking even one sip] incapacitated humans from being in right relationship with God necessary for salvation and sanctification,” and leaves one in ‘a condition in which one not only is not, but can not be saved”.6
As the Temperance movement gained cultural inertia, the language used to describe its benefits and the superiority of its adherents began to sound frighteningly similar to eugenics. Physician William Schrock, in a medical journal in 1883, decried the advancement of modern medicine in extending the lives of alcoholics when they otherwise would have perished. He expressed admiration of ancient civilizations, such as the Romans and Spartans, who left the weak to die of their infirmities and “though cruel, did keep the physical man up to the highest standard”, a fitness level that alcohol had impaired among the human race. Because of the scourge of alcohol, Schrock suggested physicians think in terms of “race survival” and that “marriage alliances should be entertained and consummate by parties most nearly approaching a perfect standard of physical and mental development, being free from the contaminating influences of constitutional diseases.” It was “the believer in and obeyer of the Bible [that] furnishes the world with the highest and most perfect type of man”.7 Fermented drink hobbled Man from ascending the ziggurat of perfection.
Understanding the Temperance view of alcohol in these terms, it may not be hyperbolic to say they viewed alcohol the way we may view crystal meth. Anyone arguing for moderation with synthesized methamphetamines would be consigned in all our minds as one who could not be trusted to adjudicate reality with any kind of clarity, particularly on the subject of meth. Suggesting that we remember the Lord’s death by burning a shard of meth off aluminum foil and inhaling nostalgically would be anathema. We get it. It is not their conclusion that is wrong.
This same reasoning answers the nagging questions as to why the scholars of the 19th were the first to discover this obvious truth in the Scriptures of wine’s wickedness. Elephant Nott, of Two-Wine theory fame, reasoned all prior generations of Christian exegetes had missed this because they “had their mind blurred with wine”; reading Scriptures through faulty, self-indulgent lenses that were incapable of seeing the truth.8
While it is true that creation speaks of God’s handiwork, and we can arrive at a form of truth through general revelation, science is mutable; it progresses one funeral at a time. Old theories are laid to rest, sometimes resurrected and revivified, others consigned to kookery of the ages. Pristine as science may be, scientists are not, bringing bias and confoundment into studies. Many experiments on alcohol differed in their conclusions, but only the data showing alcohol to be a poison were accepted, and only the experiments conducted by those empathetic to the temperance movement were taken as legitimate science. Cherry-picking is not a modern development.
Symbols cannot be separated from their inception. Scientific reasoning informing biblical exegesis was a portion of what grape juice namers chose the symbol to convey. Juice tells the story of the high watermark of trust in science, which led to the faulty premise that juice was holier and wine wickeder, a result of Temperance exegetes’ “scientific” reading of the Bible.9 This exegetical leniency was a storm crow for the abandonment of educational institutions and the nefarious ‘quest for the historical Jesus” of the late 19th and early 20th century, where the church fled from the empirical certainty science provided scattering spectral, insubstantial faith.
The Drink of Pelagius
Walking in step with science’s revelations on alcohol came a general revulsion to dirt and unhygienic living. The germ theory of disease, developed alongside grape juice by Pasteur, held that real uncleanliness was on the outside, living in the invisible scum on the skin and thriving in slovenly conditions. The household proverb “cleanliness is next to godliness” is a colloquial reminder of the close ties between hygiene and morality, a phrase coined by John Wesley, founder of Methodism – the denomination where grape juice communion first took root.
A vault of hygienic handbooks and health manuals lined the shelves of personal libraries expounding on Wesley’s aphorism in all areas of diet, cleanliness, dentistry, household ventilation, bathing, dress, and spices, to yawnish minutae. Dirt was not natural, harmless bits of creation; even small amounts of decay, in the form of dirt or fermentation, were capable of upsetting entire organisms, whether a body or a nation. When spirituality is directly proportional to order and cleanliness, even bathing becomes a moral imperative.
Alcohol was liquid dirt and made filthy the body and soul. Because of its sinfulness, it led unswervingly to filthy living which was synonymous with immorality – germs made one dirty from the outside in; alcohol from the inside out. Effulgia seeped from the skin of the tippler.
Abstinence from all fermentation was the only mental state capable of perceiving truth that corresponds to healthy (ie: righteous) living.10 Not only did the proper functioning of one’s body require abstinence, but the future of civilization, and the imminent millennium, demanded a boozeless future. Rampant debauchery met a fastidious moralism, and the latter meant to clean up the former through preaching and activism, then through legislative authority culminating in the 18th Amendment.
These efforts, as all such efforts do, end in failure. Paul warned of the alluring uselessness of a quick shave and a gob of pomade combed through the hair as false gentrification.
If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
Colossians 2:20-23 (ESV)
Establishing boundaries where God placed none is the definition of a human precept and promotes “self-made” religion, literally will-worship. This describes those who, making hair-breadth distinctions, and primly clutching little dogmas, attempt to PR in asceticism. However, as Paul tells us, this is not the freedom of Christ but gorging on the flesh. Extremes meet, as the saying goes, and extreme attempts to curb the flesh themselves become fleshly. Asceticism is debaucherous piety.
This is precisely the impetus for grape juice creation. Tasting wine was touching the devil lip to lip and inviting him into the bone house of the body. Human interdictions were introduced as though righteousness was sought through the weak and beggarly rudiments of the world, the same ones that humans failed to fulfill in the first place, or worse, had a measure of success bolstering righteousness that can be squeezed out of the will.
As happens, human precepts multiply and clutter up the freedom of worship with fastidious interdictions and prescriptions. Intolerance and external pressure are the hallmarks of man-centered movements. The Temperance movement mutated into a moral juggernaut that would suffer no questioning. In this way, it resembled a proto-cancel culture, an international phenomenon, along the lines of movements in our own day that strongarm opposing views. To argue for moderation in any capacity, even in the sacrament only, was to disqualify yourself from the argument.
Presbyterian minister W.B. Sprague, addressing the Temperance push to eliminate wine from the sacrament, mentioned twice in his sermon a general timidity, even among ministers, of standing in the path of this social steam engine.
…and even ministers of the gospel have been silent [on the removal of wine from the Lord’s Supper], because they have apprehended no serious danger, or possibly because they have feared to sound the alarm, lest it should subject them to the charge of being hostile to one of the best of causes [Temperence]…
Another professor connected with one of our colleges…has written an essay for publication, in which he endeavors to show that neither bread nor wine is essential to the acceptable observance of the Lord’s Supper; and that the Temperance cause cannot advance much farther until the use of wine is abolished from this ordinance.
W.B. Sprague, Danger of Being Over Wise.11
There stood wine in the Lord’s Supper, a cow in the road of human progress. Man’s cause could not progress until this pesky ordinance was removed. In this way, the push towards total abstinence resembles the Pelagian heresy that Charles Finney, revivalist of the Second Great Awakening, flirted with.
In De dono perseverantiae, St Augustine reduced the Pelagian heresy to three errors: that God redeems on a scale according to human merit, that human beings are capable in themselves of a sinless life through concerted moral effort, and that each human being themselves is born innocent, sinless, and may live as such as long as they continue to choose rightly. What we have in the late 19th century American psyche is a burgeoning hygienic Pelagianism, where it is possible to live rightly through tidy, sober, and antiseptic ordering of the household life, and through it achieve godliness.
The concoction of human progress evidenced by the abolition of slavery, the bolstering of women’s suffrage, and the wildfire religious movements of the mid-1800s, coupled with the parabolic improvement of society through science, stretched a Pelagian smile on the American face and steeled resolves that perfection was possible. Eradication of all fermented drink, even from the Holy Sacrament, was not only necessary but now possible, now that science -nay, God himself – had provided the church with the Pelagian juice.
Sinful desires require barriers to avoid attractive nuisances; this isn’t bad, it is wise. But when the bulwarks are not accompanied by heart change all it serves to do is cap the fermenting sin which always finds another escape, or blows out the threads on the cap itself. Or, worst of all, becomes like Flannery O’Connor’s grandmother in A Good Man is Hard to Find, who knew “the best way to avoid Jesus is to avoid sin.”
The Temperance movement was one of the jewels in the crown of the Social Gospel movement, that represented the confident belief that humanity is capable of sanctifying itself through the good and moral principles that Jesus of Nazareth was kind enough to model for us. God was a ghost in the machine of human progress, and the work of the Holy Spirit was indistinguishable from scientific and hygienic improvements which He worked irrevocably through man.
But the Social Gospel soured. Two world wars showed man his heart in a mirror, and despite all the fussiness of cleanliness and sober living, he was a monster. Alcohol consumption in the light of prohibition increased. Critical scholarship of the scriptures drifted from an orthodox understanding of Jesus, and the “search for the historical Jesus” snuffed out all that was holy from Him and viewed him as a light bulb among other bulbs, though brighter by half.
Grape juice was born amid this moral midwifery to birth a new humanity through clean living, scientific progress, and sobriety, aided by zealous Temperance forceps. Juice was the drink of Pelagius, representing man’s view that he was in himself perfectible, and could rid the world of dirt and ferment through an act of the will hitched to the oxen of science. The story of juice is the story of how this cultural and social moralism back washed up into the heart of worship and supplanted the sacrament with a surrogate sign.
Juice as Sensitivity
Thomas Welch’s desire to create a non-fermented communion wine stemmed from an interaction with a visiting minister whose appetite for booze was unleashed by a nip of communion wine.12 It was widely believed carnal appetites awakened through wine led to thoughts feelings, behaviors, and imaginations incompatible with evangelical religion. A shrewd understanding of human proclivities demanded a sensitivity to the sacrament that wine did not offer.
One area of agreement we find with the Temperance moment is the importance of the correct symbol at the center of Christian worship. “The use of fermented wine placed a symbolically inaccurate, physically dangerous substance at the heart of one of the most important common-sense proofs of Christianity’s existence”.13 Many modern Christians find themselves in solidarity with Welch in his protective stance towards the vulnerable.
As I noted in the post on Counterpoints, the most common rebuttal I have encountered in my conversations with other Christians on this subject is the caution taken to not offend or place a stumbling block in the path towards Christ. Though it may not have been the prime purpose of its namers, grape juice choice today symbolizes a sensitivity towards other’s pain. It is considerate to histories filled with drunken abuses doled or received, trepidations of lurking beasts waiting to be awakened, and weekend frat house benders now foresworn.
In comparison to juice’s warm and bosomy empathy, wine in the sacrament is a chilled handshake. Unfeeling and uncompromising, it is unwilling to condescend to weeping sinners and their suffering and unconcerned with sinful desires of the flesh. Welcoming churches want to remove any barriers that may bring saints face-to-face with perilous substances. Wine is the Lego block in the carpet that young believers, non-believers, or children, may step on barefoot and stumble headlong into shadow. Jesus threatens millstone necklaces to those making little ones stumble.
We don’t know the kind of hell people have been saved from. Why not remove any reminders of the hellish life to prevent flashback fears, tugging sins, and lascivious lifestyles that may beckon and woo through wine back to death? Why risk it when we have a viable, safe alternative? Like many similar situations, it seems the laws of love demand we love our neighbor in this simple, unobtrusive, common-sense way. And think of the kids! Introducing young stomachs to alcohol may be starting a countdown to addiction. Everything is more streamlined and safer when we defer to a least-common-denominator approach that errs on the side of sensitivity. Better safe than sinful.
However, if it is true that sensitivity is our reason for preferring juice as a symbol over wine, and if the sacrament is, as Jesus said, a ritual of remembrance, then the question that begs to be answered is what is it that juice is remembering? What is the drink designed to make us conscious of?
Juice is a drink that reminds us of us. Reflected in the juice, we see a dark image of our weakness, which is to say, ourselves. It is walking with crutches when the leg is healed. And in deference to past lives, ours and others, we attenuate the strong drink; someone is going to shoot his eye out.
But when we consider our gentle Lord, we see the inanity of our imposition: we are not wiser than He; we do not blow more gently on smoldering wicks; we are not more tender to bruised souls. Rather than seeing through the wine to the crucified and risen Lord, remembering and proclaiming his death and our with Him, we see reflected in the attenuated drink the remembrance of our own sins and those of others. What else would be the need for sensitivity? The symbol of the New Covenant, then, is blurred with occlusions of deference to human feelings, as though human emotions and histories were of greater significance than the Savior who redeems them.
Through the sacrament, we remember the death of our Lord, staggering in its potency, crushing in its gravitas, carrying the wrath of God and blessing of redemption in its heady brew. Impotence is the source of juice’s sensitivity. It cannot be abused like wine and grace; it will not hurt because it cannot; it is dangerless, safe, and unreal. Juice is unable to tell the story of the New Covenant because it does not carry the vocabulary in its body, providing instead an effete self-reflective image – a shadow of an image, twice removed and exponentially weak.
Of course, we are not unfeeling to pain, neither ought we to persist with wine because of their pain, as though the salt itself heals wounds. But the strength of wine is its perfection as a symbol to remember the wrath of God poured out for the very sins that juice remembers out of the side of its eye. Christ directs our eyes off of our festering wounds to the healing flowing from His hands, His feet, His side, that fills the cup – pain healed by remembering His blood, our death with him, and comingled resurrection witnessed by wine.
The 19th-century Christians believed a corrupted symbol at the center would yield corrupted lives. Here we have a point of agreement. What is central will push out. So too a cautious, sensitive symbolism at the center yields cautious Christian limbs; a weak heart enfeebles the whole body. Juice is a symbol of the centrality of human frailty in Christian worship and the need for sensitivity to it. A symbol selected for sensitivity will inform our actions with sensitivity as a prime concern in how it relates to its members and the world.
On the contrary, it is this holiness at the center of our worship typified by wine that emboldens us to die for Christ, to disciple the nations, declare to the world that there is a King who is now reigning, and to come and worship.
One last Squeeze
Are we reading too much into this here? Taking things too literally? Is this a case of classic overthinking? No. We are doing with grape juice, not only what the Bible demonstrates we are to do with a symbol like wine, but what we all do in how we understand poetry, baptism, and Revelation, what we tattoo on our bodies, how we dress, design our business logos, and name our kids. We are being taught by the symbol of juice, interpreting the New Covenant through its instructive whispers and drinking into our inmost parts the identity and purpose in the meaningful symbol – that is what symbols are for!
The adoption of juice in place of wine snuffed out the candle of joy and meaning at the center of our worship experience. The roaring long-fire of the Viking hall was replaced with the cold, blue light of a heatless LED display. Our Savior, the Groom of the Church, chose a symbol that told the story of the universe in a sip. He gave a gift to His bride that encompassed the totality of His relationship with her…and the gift was returned. Scientific data and common-sense observations regurgitated into exegetical interpretation to produce a kinder, wiser, more sensible symbol than what Jesus named. Collectively, the meaningful decision was made to eclipse clear Scripture and mitigate its potency, presaging church impotence.
Perhaps we needn’t have squeezed the juice as we have for indications of its insufficiency. Metaphorically, symbolically, juice’s deficiency lies right on the surface. The manufacturing of grape juice is an unnatural process; it must be heated to eliminate bacteria and yeasts – it must become sterile. No longer is it able to inebriate, neither can it gladden. Joy and pain are boiled out. Its destiny and design are sweetness, inoffensiveness, and safety – a drink for the kids. It masquerades as blood but carries neither life nor heat, triumph nor tragedy. No one finds their sorrow’s solution at the bottom of a jug of Ocean Spray; bottles of sparkling grape juice are not smashed on the hull of launching ships. Celebration is replaced with celibacy. It is wine with the spirit removed.
References
- Tait-Woodruff, Jennifer L,. The Poisoned Chalice: Eucharistic grape juice and common-sense realism in Victorian Methodism. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. 2011. p 20
- Ibid, p 24
- Coleman, Julia. Alcohol and Hygiene: An elementary lesson book for schools (New York: NTSPH) 1883
- Lewis, Taylor. “General Prefaces” to Lees and Burns, Temperance Bible Commentary, xi; Moore-Jumonville, 1-5
- Fowler, Charles. Wines of the Bible. (New York, 1878)
- Field, Leon C. “Was Jesus a Wine-Bibber?” Oinos: A Discussion of Bible Wine Questions. (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1883)
- Schrock, William. “Man According to Nature,” Journal of the American Medical Association (August, 1883) 201-209
- Ibid, p 90
- Ibid, p 90
- Ibid, p 92
- Sprague, William B., D.D. Danger of Being Over Wise. Preached June 7th, 1835
- Chazanof, William. Welch’s Grape juice from Corporation to Co-operative. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1977)
- Ibid, p 102
Thought Butter 