Is It a Sin?

Dr. Keith Drury of Indiana Wesleyan University wrote an internet column this week that can be viewed at http://www.drurywriting.com/keith/the.holiness.question.htm.

I wrote a response to the article (and to the responses the article had received up to that point), which I would like to share here as well:

As a follow-up to the original article and to the responses up to this point, there seem to be two questions: "Is It a Sin to Drink Beer?" (the question in the article title); and the question as to whether there should be stricter, more lenient, or the same standards for 21-year-old (and older) students at a denominational university as there are for the general membership of the denomination.

I guess that the problem I see more and more is that blanket statements as to what is and what isn't sin (or, conversely, what does or does not contribute to "godliness") simply don't cover every aspect of most issues (get it? blanket...cover? In the genre of Foghorn Leghorn--"That's a joke son!").

Back to seriousness, the longer I have lived and the longer I have been a Christian, the more I have realized that the tendency over the years (especially in the past, although I see this relaxing a bit more now) has been to codify things as unacceptable not because they are contrary to some specific Biblical mandate(s) in and of themselves, but because they have the potential, at least in the eyes of some people, to lead to behaviors that would indeed go contrary to Biblical mandate(s). In effect, it becomes sin by degrees of separation.

Drinking beer is a perfect example. On one hand, drinking beer can, and indeed often does, lead to drunkenness, against which the Bible speaks. On the other hand, The drinking of wine as recorded in John 2 indeed led to "godliness." So while in the hearts and minds of some people the tendency towards drunkenness while drinking beer will far outweigh the likelihood that drinking beer will be a tool that is used to lead to "godliness", making the blanket statement against drinking beer doesn't allow for the fact that there are indeed exceptions to the general rule. I sometimes wonder if classifying something universally as a "sin" when it really isn't universally a sin is not in itself a sin!

At the same time...these students aren't being forced to attend a certain university, and when they choose to attend that university, they are agreeing to abide by the rules set forth by the decision-makers of the institution (whether or not the students should have a role in the decision-making process is another whole issue).

By extension, the same can be said of the general membership of the denomination. Nobody is ever forced to join a Wesleyan congregation (or in my case, a Church of the Nazarene congregation). But sometimes doctrinal standards can seemingly tend to "get in the way" of certain things, such as church membership. For instance, if a local congregation is doing well spiritually and financially, is serving Jesus within its community, and is attracting enough people who are actively involved in the church's worship and ministry to make it a viable institution, generally speaking, stricter standards can usually be set for people to hold leadership positions--or even to become official members of the congregation. But if a congregation is struggling, the tendency could be (not necessarily SHOULD be) to relax standards of membership and/or leadership positions in order to have the human resources necessary to continue and/or build the ministry.

It therefore seems to me that as long as institutions of higher learning that are affiliated with "holiness" denominations continue to draw enough students to not only let the institutions be viable, but to thrive, the tendency will be that the relaxing of standards of behavior for the educational institutions will lag behind the relaxing of standards for the general membership of the denomination.