A Catholic priest who later became a Christian once stood in front of a corpse while Dr. Douglas, a Protestant physician, scalpel in hand, showed him the arteries that had literally been eaten away by alcohol. This priest was named Charles Chiniquy. He would later write, “Wine is a mocker. It bites like a serpent and stings like an adder.” From then on, he vowed never to drink again, and his story shook Canada. As a Roman Catholic priest, he started preaching abstinence. And yet still today many Christians will ask, “Well, should we not be able to drink alcohol? Is moderation not acceptable? Or does the Bible actually call us to something different?” Hi, church. Today I am going to be reviewing a few books on alcohol available at our resource desk. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. This video is called “Why Our Church Abstains from Alcohol,” and we have three books to explain why. I know I will probably take some flak for this, but I believe alcohol is harmful, foolish, and destructive, and more importantly, our church has decided we are going to abstain. Today I want to show you three books that influenced my conviction that alcohol is wrong for a Christian to consume, and that make a powerful case for why I believe we should avoid alcohol.
A Quick Commercial: Scripture Helps
Before I get to the books, a quick little commercial for an upcoming book called Scripture Helps. This is not the book; it is a resource taken from the book. These are three different brochures we have put together from a new book that we are going to put in our guest welcome packets, and I am really excited about it. One chapter of the book is practical helps, which includes a full one-year Bible reading schedule, as well as some shorter schedules and some prayer guide ideas. Another chapter is alphabetical topics: a whole list of different struggles people might have, with Scriptures that go with them. I was reading a counseling book from Striving Together that had a bookmark with several Scriptures laid out like this, and I thought, “That is really, really good. I want to be able to use something like that with our church.” So there is an alphabetical topics chapter, and then there are Scripture helps for understanding Christianity: Scripture helps for what I was, Scripture helps for what God provides, Scripture helps for what I did. I am really excited about this chapter. It was adapted from a Rock of Ages booklet they use in their prison ministries, and I wanted to take some of their thoughts and expand on them. This brochure has a condensed version of the longer chapter in the book, and the Scripture Helps book will have a chapter on the gospel. I am really excited about introducing this to our church on October 5th; it is coming up. If you are watching this video in the future, hopefully you have already seen the book and gotten access to it. For the next month or so we will be talking about it, and I am looking forward to that.
Three Books
Getting back to the books on alcohol, the first of the three we are covering today I do not have a hard copy of; I have a digital version. It was written back in the 1800s by William Patton, his classic book called simply Bible Wines. It is a study of what wine is in Scripture. Second is Pastor Chris Chadwick’s book on alcohol, part of his Simple Conversations Worth Having: Should Christians Drink Alcohol? It is a really straightforward pastoral answer to that question. Third is the booklet I started the story with, from Charles Chiniquy’s book Fifty Years in the Church of Rome. It is a few excerpted chapters from that book, his personal testimonies of some of the devastation alcohol brings. I am looking forward to diving into all three. They are three voices across history explaining why our church abstains from alcohol. So with that, let us dive in.
William Patton: The Scholar
I view William Patton as the scholar. He does the most in-depth dive into what biblical wines are, and that really helped shape my thinking. It helped me understand, from the history of wine, what wine is and what the Bible means when it refers to wine. The book was written in the nineteenth century, and it still stands as one of the clearest explanations of what the Bible means when it says wine. Patton shows that in ancient times the word wine could mean a couple of different things. On one hand, it could mean the fruit of the vine, the sweet, unfermented grape juice, and that is a refreshing blessing from God. On the other hand, wine could mean the fermented, intoxicating drink, and overwhelmingly that is warned against. It is called a mocker. It leads to brawling. It is a curse. Patton explains the laws of fermentation. He goes into the alcoholic content of biblical wines. He talks about the preservation methods the ancients used. He walks all through the Scriptures, and his conclusion is that God would never bless what He elsewhere condemns. So he makes a very hard-line distinction, and I appreciate his documentation of it. When the Bible warns against drunkenness, mockery, and destruction, it is talking about alcoholic wine, and when it talks about blessing, it is talking about the fruit-of-the-vine kind of wine. His insights really cleared up some confusion for me. If we do not understand the ancient context, we will misread the Bible through our modern lens and assume that Bible wine is the same as the extremely high-alcohol wine we have today. The words do not mean the same thing. Patton helps us see the truth of God’s Word as a consistent voice across time, and I appreciate the history in that book.
Chris Chadwick: The Pastor
Next, Chris Chadwick, a pastor friend of mine, approaches this as a pastor in San Diego. That is a Navy town, so he is definitely dealing with alcohol in some way pretty much every week. I appreciate that this book is written in a very simple, conversational style, as if you are having a conversation across the table with a pastor who is opening the Bible and trying to give you straight answers, not tiptoeing through these things. He is really straightforward, and I appreciate that about this book. Brother Chadwick deals with many of the real arguments people bring up today: What about moderation? Did not Jesus turn water into wine? Is this not just a cultural issue? He patiently answers these questions one by one from Scripture, and he points repeatedly to the Scriptures: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” He constantly reminds us of the practical implications of drinking alcohol: that it lowers our inhibitions, destroys self-control, and leads people away from holiness. I appreciate that he ties a lot of it back to Ephesians chapter 5, where the apostle Paul contrasts drunkenness with Spirit-filled joy. “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit.” The Spirit gives us gladness and peace and satisfaction, the very things people chase in alcohol, and they never find them in anything except Jesus Christ. The book helped me see that the issue is not really what we can get away with, or how much we are allowed to drink before it is drunkenness. It frames it this way: “Look, do you want to live a serious, holy, Spirit-filled life?” He deals with a lot of the same things Patton deals with: the alcoholic content of Bible wines, the preservation process, drinking water, mixing in the pulp from the grapes, and all of that. Not necessarily in the same detail as Patton, but he goes into what biblical wines are. So it is a good academic resource, but written in such a pastoral, easy-to-read tone. I appreciate this book very, very much.
Charles Chiniquy: The Eyewitness
If you want something much more passion-filled, coming out of lives of destruction, Charles Chiniquy writes from an eyewitness approach. This little booklet is one we produced for the booklet rack at our church, and it is just a few chapters from the book Fifty Years in the Church of Rome. He was a Roman Catholic priest who was later saved. He became a Christian and led his entire parish out of the Catholic faith and into Christianity. He saw firsthand the destruction alcohol brought to his parishioners’ lives, and he tells story after story of that destruction. I appreciate his bold approach as he became a prophet for abstinence. One of the most powerful stories he tells is of Dr. Douglas showing him the body of a sailor whose arteries were literally perforated by alcohol. Chiniquy called alcohol one of the most dangerous poisons, and after seeing that autopsy of an alcoholic, he began to question every excuse people gave for drinking, including those of his fellow Catholic priests. The story that really broke him was of a young mother who, in a drunken state, was carrying her baby, stumbled, and dropped the baby against a stove, crushing its skull and killing her child. In her grief she cried out to the priest, “Cursed wine! Cursed wine! My child is dead, and I am damned.” That tragedy drove Chiniquy to vow never again to touch alcohol, and God used him to lead a massive temperance revival across Canada, calling Catholics across Canada to give up alcohol, and bars and taverns dried up. I think it was a good force in turning people away from the bottle. His testimony is raw, emotional, and unforgettable. It is one thing to study the Bible’s warnings against alcohol and another to see them played out day after day in real human suffering. Chiniquy’s voice rings true: alcohol destroys lives. It is destroying homes. It is destroying souls.
Why We Abstain
So for us as a church, we abstain from alcohol, and with these three books the case to me is overwhelming. William Patton gives us the scholar’s approach, showing that the Bible is not going to contradict itself: unfermented wine is God’s blessing, but fermented wine is a curse. Brother Chadwick gives us the pastoral approach, reminding us that alcohol robs us of holiness, of Spirit-filled joy, and of wisdom. And Charles Chiniquy shows us the human cost, the broken families and broken souls that come from alcohol. It is not only through these three, but with these three the evidence to me is convincing. I have always had a personal conviction against alcohol, conviction meaning something I am convinced about. When I was a teenager, I was working a construction job building custom homes out in La Cresta, California, and a coworker sent me to his van to get a palm nailer, a little tool used to drive in TICO nails. As a matter of fact, he had a dog named Tico. In his van there was a beer can, crushed and folded in the middle, and a little of it dripped onto my finger while I was getting that tool. So I got a little drop of beer on my finger. I had never tasted beer before, and curiosity came over me: “What is the draw? What is the appeal here? Is it really all that bad?” All these things were racing through my mind. But then I said to myself, “I always want to be able to say I have never had a drop of alcohol, and here is a drop right here on my finger.” It was through that idea, that I never wanted to have even a drop of alcohol, that to this day I have still never tasted beer. I realize there is fermentation in kimchi and alcohol in some medicines. I get all of that, and I know one drop of alcohol would not have gotten me drunk. I realize all of that. I am just saying I did not, and I still do not even want to start down that path. That is a path that has led to so much destruction and misery. In our church, Brother Jim just celebrated two years sober last month. That is the kind of commitment I would like us all to be able to get behind and celebrate, and not be a stumbling block to.
So I truly think it is best for us to be teetotalers: absolutely abstain, not one drop of alcohol, no matter who justifies it. I realize it is so justified even within church culture today, but it is overwhelmingly bad in Scripture. I am aware of the few passages where it seems potentially positive, but overwhelmingly it is seen as abused, wrong, and hurtful, so I am absolutely convinced we should completely avoid it. Proverbs 20, which I quoted earlier: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” Our church has chosen not to play games with alcohol. Our bylaws say it: we are going to abstain because alcohol is harmful, foolish, and destructive if it is abused. We want to be filled with the Spirit. We want the Holy Spirit to bring us our joy, not the bottle. We want lasting peace from a holy life that honors Jesus Christ. So if you want to dig deeper into this topic, I encourage these three books I mentioned today: Bible Wines by William Patton; Should Christians Drink Alcohol? by Pastor Chadwick; and Fifty Years in the Church of Rome by Charles Chiniquy, with these excerpted chapters on temperance. These three voices together explain why our church abstains from alcohol. I hope that is an encouragement, edifying and equipping to you, to help you understand the argument a little more clearly, or at least to give you some resources to look into it further for yourself. Thank you for watching. If this video was a help to you, share it, and let us spread the truth that will set people free. God bless you, and we will see you in the next video.
