基督教与酒精

基督徒对酒的看法难以一概而论。在教会历史的首1,800年，基督徒视喝酒为日常生活的一部分，并将圣经上所述「喝葡萄酒」 作为他们礼仪的中心—圣餐或最后的晚餐。 这些基督徒藉著圣经和基督教传统，视酒为上帝的礼物，使人生加添喜乐，但同时认为酗酒而喝醉却是有罪或错误的。
在19世纪中期，一些新教徒一改以往「容许适度喝酒」的观点（适度说），认为「决定不喝酒，从现时的处景来说，是明至之举」（弃权说），甚或是「禁止一切喝酒，并视之为罪恶」（禁令说）。时至今日，这三种说法仍同时存在，但传统的说法依然最为普遍，当中英国国教、罗马天主教和东正教会均支持这个观点。
过半的福音派领袖（52%）都认为「滴酒不沾」与「好信徒」两者不能混为一谈，其中在印度/尼泊尔的领袖大都支持这个看法（83%），传统的「基督教国家」则只占42%。
圣经对酒的记载.
The commonness and centrality of wine in daily life in biblical times is apparent from its many positive and negative metaphorical uses throughout the Bible. Positively, wine is used as a symbol of abundance and physical blessing, for example. Negatively, wine is personified as a mocker and beer a brawler, and drinking a cup of strong wine to the dregs and getting drunk are sometimes presented as a symbol of God's judgment and wrath.
The Bible also speaks of wine in general terms as a bringer and concomitant of joy, particularly in the context of nourishment and feasting. Wine was commonly drunk at meals, and the Old Testament prescribed it for use in sacrificial rituals and festal celebrations. The Gospels record that Jesus's first miracle was making copious amounts of wine at the wedding feast at Cana, and when he instituted the ritual of the Eucharist at the Last Supper during a Passover celebration, he says that the wine is a "New Covenant in blood," though Christians have differed on the implications of this statement (see Eucharistic theologies contrasted). Alcohol was also used for medicinal purposes in biblical times, and it appears in that context in several passages—as an oral anesthetic, a topical cleanser and soother, and a digestive aid.
Kings and priests in the Old Testament were forbidden to partake of wine at various times, and certain optional vows excluded as part of their ascetic regimen not only wine, but also vinegar, grapes, and raisins (unlike John the Baptist, Jesus evidently did not take such a vow during the three years of ministry depicted in the gospels, and is once accused of being a drunkard by the Pharisees). St. Paul further instructs Christians regarding their duty toward immature Christians: "It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall."
Virtually all Christian denominations hold that the Bible condemns ordinary drunkenness in many passages, and "Easton's Bible Dictionary" says, "The sin of drunkenness ... must have been not uncommon in the olden times, for it is mentioned either metaphorically or literally more than seventy times in the Bible." Additionally, the consequences of the drunkenness of Noah and Lot "were intended to serve as examples of the dangers and repulsiveness of intemperance." and St. Paul later chides the Corinthians for becoming drunk on wine served at their attempted celebrations of the Eucharist. For nearly all Christians, drunkenness "is not merely a disgusting personal habit and social vice, but a sin which bars the gates of Heaven, desecrates the body, which is now in a special sense the dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit, and stains the mystical body of Christ, the Church."
圣经时代的酿酒.
The fermentation process started within six to twelve hours after pressing, and the must was usually left in the collection vat for a few days to allow the initial, "tumultuous" stage of fermentation to pass. The wine makers soon transferred it either into large earthenware jars, which were then sealed, or, if the wine were to be transported elsewhere, into wineskins (that is, partially tanned goat-skins, sewn up where the legs and tail had protruded but leaving the opening at the neck). After six weeks, fermentation was complete, and the wine was filtered into larger containers and either sold for consumption or stored in a cellar or cistern, lasting for three to four years. Even after a year of aging, the vintage was still called "new wine," and more aged wines were preferred.
Spices and scents were often added to wine in order to hide "defects" that arose from storage that was often not sufficient to prevent all spoiling. One might expect about 10% of any given cellar of wine to have been ruined completely, but vinegar was also created intentionally for dipping bread among other uses.
The Feast of Booths was a prescribed holiday that immediately followed the harvest and pressing of the grapes.
Alcohol in Christian history and tradition.
For over 1,800 years, the regular use of wine in the celebration of the Eucharist and in daily life was the virtually universal and undisputed practice in Christianity. During the 19th and early 20th century, as a general sense of prohibitionism arose, many Christians, particularly some Protestants in the United States, came to believe that the Bible prohibited alcohol or that the wisest choice in modern circumstances was for the Christian to abstain from alcohol willingly.
Before Christ.
The Hebraic opinion of wine in the time before Christ was decidedly positive: wine is part of the world God created and is thus "necessarily inherently good," though excessive use is soundly condemned. The Jews emphasized joy in the goodness of creation rather than the virtue of temperance, which the Greek philosophers advocated.
As the Jews returned from the Babylonian exile (starting in 537 BC) and the events of the Old Testament drew to a close, wine was "a common beverage for all classes and ages, including the very young; an important source of nourishment; a prominent part in the festivities of the people; a widely appreciated medicine; an essential provision for any fortress; and an important commodity," and it served as "a necessary element in the life of the Hebrews." • • Raymond, p. 23: " was a common beverage for all classes and ages, even for the very young. Wine might be part of the simpelest meal as well as a necessary article in the households of the rich. • </ref> Wine was also used ritualistically to close the Sabbath and to celebrate weddings, and circumcisions, and Passover.
Although some abstentionists argue that wine in the Bible was almost always cut with water greatly decreasing its potency for inebriation, there is general agreement that, while Old Testament wine was sometimes mixed with various spices to enhance its flavor and stimulating properties, it was not usually diluted with water, and wine mixed with water is used as an Old Testament metaphor for corruption. Among the Greeks, however, the cutting of wine with water was a common practice used to reduce potency and improve taste. By the time of the writing of 2 Maccabees (2nd or 1st century BC), the Greeks had conquered Palestine under Alexander the Great, and the Hellenistic custom had apparently found acceptance with the Jews • • Raymond, p.47: "The regulations of the Jewish banquets in Hellenistic times follow the rules of Greek etiquette and custom." • Compare 2 Mac 15:39 (Vulgate numbering: 2 Mac 15:40)</ref> and was carried into Jewish rituals in New Testament times.
Under the rule of Rome, which had conquered Palestine under Pompey (see Iudaea Province), the average adult male who was a citizen drank an estimated liter (about a quarter of a gallon, or a modern-day bottle and a third) of wine per day, though beer was more common in some parts of the world.
中世纪.
Wine has a place in the divine services of the Orthodox Church, not only in the celebration of the Divine Liturgy (Eucharist), but also at the artoklassia (blessing of bread, wine, wheat and oil during the All Night Vigil) and in the "common cup" of wine which is shared by the bride and groom during an Orthodox wedding service. A small amount of warm wine (zapivka) is taken by the faithful together with a piece of antidoron after receiving Holy Communion. In the Serbian Orthodox Church wine is used in the celebration of a service known as the Slava on feast days. The fasting rules of the Orthodox Church forbid the consumption of wine (and by extension, all alcoholic beverages) on most fast days throughout the year. The Orthodox celebrate St. Tryphon as the patron saint of vines and vineyard workers.
Reformation.
As the Protestant Reformation began, the Reformers from Luther and Calvin to Zwingli and Knox strongly supported the enjoyment of wine as a biblical blessing, and Calvin's annual salary in Geneva included seven barrels of wine. With Calvin at Geneva, "Low taverns and drinking shops were abolished, and intemperance diminished." The Lutheran Formula of Concord (1576) and the Reformed Christian confessions of faith also make explicit mention of and assume the use of wine, as does the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith and the Methodist Articles of Religion (1784). In the Dordrecht Confession of Faith (1632), even the radical Anabaptists, who sought to expunge every trace of Roman Catholicism and to rely only on the Bible, also assumed wine was to be used, and despite their reputation as killjoys, the English Puritans were temperate partakers of "God's good gifts," including wine and ale.
信义宗.
Wesley's Articles of Religion, adopted by the Methodist Episcopal Church in America in 1784, assume in Articles XVIII that wine is to be used in the Lord's supper and in Article XIX that it should given to all the people, not ministers only as in the Catholic practice of the time. Coke and Asbury comment on the latter article saying, "St. Paul does not complain of lay Corinthians' "drinking the wine" at the Lord's supper ... but of their both "eating" and "drinking" most intemperately" (emphasis in original). Likewise, the listed duties for Methodist preachers indicate that they should choose water as their common drink and use wine only in medicinal or sacramental contexts, with Coke and Asbury commenting that frequent fasting and abstinence are "highly necessary for the divine life."
"I have had one thought about our citizens in general. I wish they would lay aside the use of wine and strong drink in general. God would suddenly and certainly work. I am determined not to go out of my way on that matter for five hundred presidents and all the bishops in the world." - Francis Asbury 
禁酒运动.
Since grape juice begins naturally fermenting upon pressing, opponents of wine utilized alternate methods of creating their ritual drink such as reconstituting concentrated grape juice, boiling raisins, or adding preservatives to delay fermenting and souring. In 1869, Thomas Bramwell Welch, an ordained Wesleyan Methodist minister, discovered a way to pasteurize grape juice, and he used his particular preservation method to prepare juice for the Lord's Supper at a Methodist Episcopal church.
From 1838 to 1845, Father Mathew, the Irish apostle of temperance, administered an abstinence pledge to some three to four million of his countrymen, though his efforts had little permanent effect there, and then starting in 1849 to more than 500,000 Americans, chiefly his fellow Irish Catholics, who formed local temperance societies but whose influence was limited. In 1872 the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America united these societies and by 1913 reached some 90,000 members including the juvenile, women's, and priestly contingents. The Union pursued a platform of "moral suasion" rather than legislative prohibition and received two papal commendations. In 1878 Pope Leo XIII praised the Union's determination to abolish drunkenness and "all incentive to it," and in 1906 Pope Pius X lauded its efforts in "persuading men to practise one of the principal Christian virtues — temperance." By the time the 18th Amendment was up for consideration, however, Archbishop Messmer of Milwaukee denounced the prohibition movement as being founded on an "absolutely false principle" and as trying to undermine the Church's "most sacred mystery," the Eucharist, and he forbade pastors in his archdiocese from assisting the movement but suggested they preach on moderation. In the end, Catholicism was largely unaffected in doctrine and practice by the movements to eliminate alcohol from church life, and it retained its emphasis on the virtue of temperance in all things.
Similarly, while the Lutheran and Anglican churches felt some pressure, they did not alter their moderationist position. Even the English denominational temperance societies refused to make abstention a requirement for membership, and their position remained moderationist in character. It was non-Lutheran Protestantism from which the Temperance movement drew its greatest strength. Many Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and other Protestants signed on to the prohibitionist platform. The 1881 assembly of the United Presbyterian Church of North America said "the common traffic in, and the moderate use of intoxicants as a beverage are the source of all these evils," and in 1843 the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America's general assembly, generally considered part of the conservative Old School, considered and narrowly rejected making the selling of alcoholic beverages grounds for excommunication from the church.
The legislative and social effects resulting from the temperance movement peaked in the early 20th century and began to decline afterward. The effects on church practice were primarily a phenomenon in American Protestantism and to a lesser extent in the British Isles, the Nordic countries, and a few other places. The practice of the Protestant churches were slower to revert, and some bodies, though now rejecting their formerly prohibitionist platform, still retain vestiges of it such as using grape juice alone or beside wine in the Lord's supper.
当代观点.
Some groups of Christians fall entirely or virtually entirely into one of these categories, while others are divided between them. Fifty-two percent of Evangelical leaders around the world say drinking alcohol is incompatible with being a good Evangelical. Even now nominally "Christian" countries still have 42% who say it is incompatible. Evangelicals in Asia, Africa, and also in Muslim-majority countries are decidedly against drinking. 83% of Evangelical leaders in the region of India and Nepal say consuming alcohol is incompatible with being a good Evangelical. Roman Catholics in Kerala, India have also launched a major anti-drinking campaign, with a ban on drinking by church workers, alcohol consumption being a sin which must be confessed, also calling for prohibition of alcohol by the state.
Moderationism.
The moderationist position is held by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglicans, and within Protestantism, it is accepted by Lutherans and Reformed churches. Moderationism is also accepted by Jehovah's Witnesses.
Moderationism argues that, according to the biblical and traditional witness, (1) alcohol is a good gift of God that is rightly used in the Eucharist and for making the heart merry, and (2) while its dangers are real, it may be used wisely and moderately rather than being shunned or prohibited because of potential abuse. Moderationism holds that temperance (that is, moderation or self-control) in all of one's behavior, not abstinence, is the biblical norm.
On the first point, moderationists reflect the Hebrew mindset that all creation is good. The ancient Canons of the Apostles, which became part of Canon Law in the eastern and western churches, likewise allows church leaders and laity to abstain from wine for mortification of the flesh but requires that they not "abominate" or detest it, which attitude "blasphemously abuses" the good creation. Going further, John Calvin says that "it is lawful to use wine not only in cases of necessity, but also thereby to make us merry," and in his Genevan Catechism, he answers that wine is appropriate in the Lord's Supper because "by wine the hearts of men are gladdened, their strength recruited, and the whole man strengthened, so by the blood of our Lord the same benefits are received by our souls."
On the second point, Martin Luther employs a "reductio ad absurdum" to counter the idea that abuse should be met with disuse: "must not ... reject [or condemn anything because it is abused ... and women bring many a man to misery and make a fool of him (Ecclus. ; ); so [we would need to kill all the women and pour out all the wine." In dealing with drunkenness at the love feast in Corinth, St. Paul does not require total abstinence from drink but love for one another that would express itself in moderate, selfless behavior. However, moderationists approve of voluntary abstinence in several cases, such as for a person who finds it too difficult to drink in moderation and for the benefit of the "weaker brother," who would err because of a stronger Christian exercising his or her liberty to drink.
While all moderationists approve of using (fermented) wine in the Eucharist in principle (Catholics, the Orthodox, and Anglicans require it), because of prohibitionist heritage and a sensitivity to those who wish to abstain from alcohol, many offer either grape juice or both wine and juice at their celebrations of the Lord's Supper. Some Christians mix some water with the wine following ancient tradition, and some attach a mystical significance to this practice.
Comparison.
In addition to lexical and historical differences, moderationism holds that prohibitionism errs by confusing the Christian virtues of temperance and moderation with abstinence and prohibition and by locating the evil in the object that is abused rather in the heart and deeds of the abuser. Moreover, moderationists suggest that the prohibitionist and abstentionist positions denigrate God's creation and his good gifts and deny that it is not what goes into a man that makes him evil but what comes out (that is, what he says and does). And so, moderationists hold that in banishing wine from communion and dinner tables, prohibitionists and abstentionists go against the witness of the Bible and the church throughout the ages and implicitly adopt a Pharisaical moralism that is at odds with the what moderationists consider the right approach to biblical ethics and the doctrines of sin and sanctification.
Abstentionism.
The abstentionist position is held by many Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists, and other evangelical and Protestant groups including the Salvation Army. Prominent proponents of abstentionism include Billy Graham, John F. MacArthur, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., and John Piper.
Abstentionists believe that although alcohol consumption is not inherently sinful or necessarily to be avoided in all circumstances, it is generally not the wisest or most prudent choice. While most abstentionists do not require abstinence from alcohol for membership in their churches, they do often require it for leadership positions.
Some reasons commonly given for voluntary abstention are:
Additionally, abstentionists argue that while drinking may have been more acceptable in ancient times (for instance, using wine to purify polluted drinking water), modern circumstances have changed the nature of a Christian's responsibility in this area. First, some abstentionists argue that wine in biblical times was weaker and diluted with water such that drunkenness was less common, though few non-abstentionists accept this claim as wholly accurate or conclusive. Also, the invention of more efficient distillation techniques has led to more potent and cheaper alcohol, which in turn has lessened the economic barrier to drinking to excess compared to biblical times. Second, some of the consequences of drunkenness have been amplified by changing circumstances such as the availability of automobiles and the hazards of driving under the influence.
Comparison.
On historical and lexical grounds, many abstentionists reject the argument of prohibitionists that wine in the Bible was not alcoholic and that imbibing is nearly always a sin. Piper summarizes the abstentionist position on this point:
Abstentionists also reject the position of moderationists that in many circumstances Christians should feel free to drink for pleasure because abstentionists see alcohol as inherently too dangerous and not "a necessity for life or good living," with some even going so far as to say, "Moderation is the cause of the liquor problem."
Prohibitionism.
The prohibitionist position has experienced a general reduction of support since the days of prohibitionism as a movement, with many of its advocates becoming abstentionists instead. Groups adopting prohibitionist positions include the Southern Baptist Convention and Seventh-day Adventists. The former group resolved that their "churches be urged to give their full moral support to the prohibition cause, and to give a more liberal financial support to dry organizations which stand for the united action of our people against the liquor traffic." Charles Spurgeon: "I wish the man who made the law to open them had to keep all the families that they have brought to ruin. Beer shops are the enemies of the home; therefore, the sooner their licenses are taken away, the better." 
Prohibitionists such as Stephen Reynolds and Jack Van Impe hold that the Bible forbids partaking of alcohol altogether, with some arguing that the alleged medicinal use of wine in 1 Timothy 5:23 is a reference to unfermented grape juice. They argue that the words for alcoholic beverages in the Bible can also refer to non-alcoholic versions such as unfermented grape juice, and for this reason the context must determine which meaning is required. In passages where the beverages are viewed negatively, prohibitionists understand them to mean the alcoholic drinks, and where they are viewed positively, they understand them to mean non-alcoholic drinks. Prohibitionists also accuse most Bible translators of exhibiting a bias in favor of alcohol that obscures the meaning of the original texts.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest body of the Latter Day Saint movement, also teaches that "God has spoken against the use of ... name="Benson"></ref> They base this teaching on the Word of Wisdom, a section in Doctrine and Covenants which is part of the Mormon canon, that recommends against the ordinary use of alcohol, though it makes an exception for the use of wine in the sacrament, a similar rite to the Eucharist. However, the church now uses water instead of wine in the sacrament, and since 1851, the Word of Wisdom's advice for wise living has been considered "a binding commandment on all Church members."