If inebriation changes your social behavior much, you already have a problem.
Granted, human resistance to the effects of alcohol vary widely, but the point is that the primary effects of any central nervous system depressant should not change your moral character. Using alcohol as the most common factor in human experience, we note that the wiring in the heart is not on the same circuit as the brain. While the heart is affected by metabolic processes, it’s nothing like the huge change it has on the brain. The brain-mind is far more fragile than the heart-mind. The intellect is the chief part of our fallen nature.
You cannot be a real biblical man unless your heart rules. All of our Western behavioral science denies the heart as a factor. A genuine biblical psychology is so radically different that it naturally elicits scorn from Western behavioral scientists, including those with sufficient background to understand non-Western psychology. Exceptions are rare. Even those who acknowledge the heart as a sensory organ still tend to build from the Western mythology of what the heart does, which is little more than some stronger and more substantive repository of quasi-emotion. To the degree their programs work, it’s entirely by accident that discrete elements in those programs happen to coincide with reality.
Let’s remind ourselves that at least one thing we take away from the Genesis narrative is that God’s character defies human reason. The Fall was fundamentally the choice to rely on reason first as somehow superior to revelation through the heart-mind. Redemption — pulling yourself together into some thing closer to God’s design — demands that biblical man subject his whole being to comparison against God’s ideal. That starts with trusting the heart-mind, because it is the last organ to fail as the safe harbor for the focus of your conscious awareness. Your heart can reliably decide the good moral path when your mind is totally confused.
The question is not dominance over the world, but dominance over yourself.
Thus, when things get hairy and stressful, you must already have the frame of awareness that emotions are a servant, not a master. The Bible clearly says there is a place for all things, rather bluntly in the words of Solomon, and echoed in the pop song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (thanks, Pete Seeger). You don’t simply turn your body over to the mastery of your feelings, but you do grant your emotions some slack in the reins to get things done that require extra energy. Passion has its place, but never as commander. You can let passion squelch your intellect at times, but never your heart.
Did you know that stone-cold dispassion is a passion in itself?
I said in a previous post that generosity is not a character trait; it’s a tactic in the business in building a life that glorifies God. Given the context, generosity tends to see more use than the tactic of slaughter, for example. But slaughter has its place, too. The character is not in the thing itself, but in how they are used. It’s that business of reflecting God’s character, shining His revelation into the context. That’s the ultimate passion. As previously noted in this series, compassion does not equate to granting everyone what they want or claim that they need. Compassion is bringing divine justice, and God alone defines that in your soul.
The context determines the specifics of what it looks like. Depending on who is doing the screaming and yelling, one of the most powerful tools of justice is refusing to be drawn into it. That might range between a bemused half-smiling and gentle silence or a stone-cold stare, keeping full eye contact without a flicker of reaction. It could also mean simply ignoring them and pretending they aren’t even there.
The ultimate test is when your body registers a high level of agitation, but your decisions still follow your heart.
How do you keep doing that? You keep writing about something I was wondering about the evening before!
Habitual inebriation is, I take it, a symptom of a larger problem, although it is trouble in itself, to be sure. Can you address wine in the context of ANE culture a little more? (I’ve attended churches that were so strictly against it they used grape juice for communion and I’ve known Roman Catholic priests who only visited those parishioners who served the best wine with dinner!)
My sense, since it seems to be taken for granted in the Bible, is that wine was considered a blessing and a comfort, is this right?
It’s likely you aren’t the only one wondering about beverage alcohol and faith. In the Old Testament, neither alcohol nor inebriation were inherently sinful any more than eating or sex. Abstinence from anything is not inherently righteous, either. In Hebrew thinking, context is everything. God hasn’t changed since the Old Testament, but His revelation has been refined in His Son. If the Pharisees accused Jesus of being a drunkard, it’s for sure He consumed at least some beverage alcohol in their presence.
I don’t know if it shows up in earlier posts on this blog, but I’ve long taught that “temperance” was entirely a creature of Western self-righteousness. Specifically, the current temperance theology arises from the birth of sociology and liberal theology and the Salvation Army in England. Gazing at the rampant alcoholism among the poor, they reasoned that alcohol was the whole problem. It’s tied into the rise of works-based holiness as a mainstream branch of Christian religion. That’s a natural reaction to the cerebral “faith” of the Calvinists, and a bunch of other theological silliness in Western Christianity.
Wine is fine and we know that there were variations on beer. Actual distillation came later, but I see nothing wrong with the hard stuff. What’s wrong is, as noted, when it dominates some part of life.