Same Great Oinos with Only a Quarter of the Calories (and Gladness of Heart, Too)
Well, If you haven’t read it, you certainly have heard of the bomb-shell research Dr. Mohler alluded to in his now-famous declaration of total abstinence over the air waves last Wednesday on his radio show. For a refresher course, or if you don’t know anything about what I am speaking, you can check out my post from a couple of days ago. I have since obtained and read this scholarly work by Dr. Robert Stein, and find it quite interesting. After reading it, I am curious why Dr. Mohler mentioned it all, for instead of advocating a total-abstinence position, such as Dr. Mohler was verbalizing, it called for a mixed, or watered-down approach to wine consumption. With the aid of primary sources from the ancient Greeks, the intertestamental Rabinic texts, and the early church fathers, an acceptable wine would be a wine that had been mixed one part wine to three parts water. Curious as to how this would taste, I decided to conduct an experiment. I felt like I was back in organic chemistry lab at college. With one ounce of Mogen David (Dr. Stein specifically mentioned this as a possible choice.) and adding three ounces of water you get what you see in the photograph above. Noticed how much darker the contents of the bottle are by comparison. How did it taste? Not bad. Not bad, at all. I tell you what: I’ll go for it if Dr. Mohler will. Now, about changing the wording of Article VII, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 back to the original wording found in the 1925 Baptist Faith and Message (then Article XIII).
Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The act is a symbol of our faith in a crucified, buried and risen Saviour. It is prerequisite to the privileges of a church relation and to the Lord’s Supper, in which the members of the church, by the use of bread and wine, commemorate the dying love of Christ.
I plan to post a more in-depth, serious piece in a few days concerning Dr. Stein’s paper, but for now, this will have to do.