We were focused on leading people to Christ, shaping people in Christ-like virtue and behavior, and freeing people from addictions and sinful habits. Alcoholism was a difficult disease to battle. Before the advent of Alcoholics Anonymous even many medical physicians believed it to be an incurable and fatal condition.
It was also well known that alcoholic husbands were much more likely to abuse their wives. Wesleyans saw the bondage to the habitual sin of what we now call alcoholism and to the habitual sin of spousal abuse as a connected issue.
When drunks were converted they were counseled to quit drinking. But eventually, if they lived life in close connection to Wesleyans who drank they fell back into drinking through socializing with faithful Christians.
Easy solution? None of us will drink. Other arguments also seemed to point in the same direction. Alcoholic drinks usually cost much more than other beverages. This meant that drinking socially on a regular basis reduced the amount that could be given to the church and to the poor.
Also, it seemed impossible to tell whether members were drinking responsibly or on their way toward dissolution and enslavement to the drug. You don't have to agree with these arguments, or the Wesleyan position, but it usually helps to understand how things began. In the early 's in order for these arguments to stick through the storms of the fundamentalist movement the church felt the need for proof texts and arguments from those proof texts.
Those texts though were never the founding reason for the Wesleyan commitment to not drink. Now Wesleyans are deeply divided on this issue.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Skip to content See also: Bible says be sober again and again. We heartily favor moral suasion and the gospel remedy to save men from the drink habit. We believe that law must be an adjunct of moral means in order to suppress the traffic side of this evil. We believe that the State and the Citizen have solemn responsibilities and duties to perform in regard to this evil.
We believe that for the State to enact any law to license or tax the traffic, or derive revenue therefrom, is contrary to the policy of good government, and brings the State into guilty complicity with the traffic and all the evils growing out of it, and is also unscriptural and sinful in principle and ought to be opposed by every Christian and patriot.
We therefore believe that the only true and proper remedy for the gigantic evil of the liquor traffic is its entire suppression, and that all our people and true Christians everywhere should pray and vote against this evil, and not suffer themselves to be controlled by or support political parties that are managed in the interest of the drink traffic.
General Rules It is expected of all who are admitted to our churches that they should further evidence their desire for salvation by continuing: … To abstain from the manufacture, sale, and use of alcoholic beverages and all harmful drugs. To abstain from the cultivation, manufacture, sale, and use of tobacco.
Have we any directions to give concerning the use of Tobacco? Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Next Post Next Ephesians unsaved drunk but saved inhale the Spirit.
Sharon and I like most of my generation slipped ours on at the door after the ceremony. Eventually the law caught up to the practice. Boomers can recite a list of rules that eventually melted down after they simply defied them for a decade. They value their word more, their honor. So younger folk agonize over the rules they committed to while their parents simply defied them and waited for them to catch up.
Boomers think younger folk are over-sensitive. Maybe, but they also could simply have more integrity. Here is my prophecy on alcohol use. Before I move to Brooksville there will be a softening on this alcohol stance. They already can vote on a new building, budget and most every other issue except the pastor, board members and letting in new members.
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