It never fails. Every so often the anti-alcohol issue has to emerge from one of the journalistic organs of the Southern Baptist Convention. This time Oklahoma’s own Baptist Messenger felt the need last week to beat the dead horse one more time. There was nothing really new this time around; not much, really, to comment on. The same tired arguments were drug up on stage: short on scriptural exegesis, well short on scripture, period; long on sophistry. I wouldn’t have bothered with this post on the evils of alcohol except for the on-line comments of a couple of ladies. The fairer sex, on the main, was better represented by sound reasoning and scripture than the men, who, for the most part displayed their more emotional feminine side a bit too much. There were some rational men, but not many. It was pretty impressive, considering one of the ladies was the missus, and the other was one of our three bright offspring. None of them were raised in a Southern Baptist church. That, the grace of God, and home schooling, is why they have a mind and can express themselves without saying “Uh, like, uh, you know.”
Sometimes these anti-alcohol types remind me of a few lines from that immortal classic The Chicken
And intellectually, they’re plumb light headed.
They’re not confused by the facts.
That’s why there’s no guard chickens,
seeing-eye chickens, or trained chicken acts.
You have a very hard time tying them down to plain scripture. They tend to have a penchant for statistics and less-clear scripture which they then “apply” to alcohol. I am not a member of the clergy club, but I know enough about hermeneutics to know that the principle of the analogy of scripture means that you use the clearer passages to see your way through the more unclear passages. With the anti-drink crowd it always seems to be the other way around. What do you do with passages like Deuteronomy 14:22-27, Psalm 104:14, 15, and Amos 9:13? Well, I guess if you don’t like those passages, just skip over them.