The Poisoned Chalice: Eucharistic Grape Juice and Common-Sense Realism in Victorian Methodism

By Jennifer L. Woodruff Tait

Examines the introduction of grape juice into the celebration of Holy Communion in the late 19th century Methodist Episcopal Church and reveals how a 1,800-year-old practice of using fermented communion wine became theologically incomprehensible in a mere forty years

This work examines the introduction of grape juice into the celebration of Holy Communion in the late 19th century Methodist Episcopal Church and reveals how a 1,800-year-old practice of using fermented communion wine became theologically incomprehensible in a mere forty years. Through study of denominational publications, influential exegetical works, popular fiction and songs, and didactic moral literature, Jennifer Woodruff Tait charts the development of opposing symbolic associations for wine and grape juice. She argues that 19th century Methodists, steeped in Baconian models of science and operating from epistemological presuppositions dictated by common-sense realism, placed a premium on the ability to perceive reality accurately in order to act morally. They therefore rejected any action or substance that dulled or confused the senses (in addition to alcohol, this included “bad” books, the theatre, stimulants, etc., which were all seen as unleashing unchecked, ungovernable thoughts and passions incompatible with true religion).    This outlook informed Methodist opposition to many popular amusements and behaviors, and they decided to place on the communion table a substance scientifically and theologically pure. Grape juice was considered holy because it did not cloud the mind, and new techniques—developed by Methodist laymen Thomas and Charles Welch—permitted the safe bottling and shipment of the unfermented juice.   Although Methodists were not the only religious group to oppose communion wine, the experience of this broadly based and numerous denomination illuminates similar beliefs and actions by other groups.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780817384906

Book preview

RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE

SERIES EDITORS

David Edwin Harrell Jr.

Wayne Flynt

Edith L. Blumhofer

The Poisoned Chalice

Eucharistic Grape Juice and Common-Sense Realism in Victorian Methodism

JENNIFER L. WOODRUFF TAIT

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2011

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: New Baskerville

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-5697-2 (paper)

A previous edition of this book has been catalogued by the Library of Congress.

Tait, Jennifer L. Woodruff.

The poisoned chalice : Eucharistic grape juice and common-sense realism in Victorian Methodism / Jennifer L. Woodruff Tait.

    p. cm. — (Religion and American culture)

Includes bibliographical references (p.    ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1719-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8490-6 (electronic) 1. Lord's Supper—Wine—History of doctrines—19th century. 2. Lord's Supper—Methodist Episcopal Church—History of doctrines—19th century. 3. Methodist Episcopal Church—Doctrines—History—19th century. 4. Temperance and religion—United States—History—19th century. 5. Grape juice—United States—History—19th century. 6. United States—Church history—19th century. I. Title.

BX8338.T35 2011

264’.07036097309034—dc22

2010032808

For my mother

Marilyn Stanger Woodruff

October 12, 1939-July 6, 2008

Sure and real is the grace, though the manner be unknown;

Only meet us in Thy ways and perfect us in one.

Let us taste the heavenly powers, Lord, we ask for nothing more.

Thine to bless, ‘tis only ours to wonder and adore.

—Charles Wesley, O the Depth of Love Divine

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1.    What Has Grape Juice to Do With Common Sense?

2.    Alcohol and Science

3.    Alcohol and the Overthrow of Reason

4.    Alcohol, the Ideal Worker, and the Poisoned Chalice

5.    Alcohol and the Truth of the Gospel

6.    Common Sense and the Common Cup

7.    Juice and Cups or Wine and Chalice? Concluding Thoughts on Symbolism and Minor Vices

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Defeat may be an orphan, but books have many fathers and mothers. This one was conceived when Grant Wacker of Duke University commented to me that no one had ever written on the connection between evangelicals and grape juice. Grant deserves much credit for shepherding the research that became this book—and for continually mentoring its fractious author. I thank also Duke professors Jack Carroll, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Richard Heitzenrater, and Karen Westerfield Tucker for their comments and advice, and for the reminder to take theology seriously, without which I might have remained skidding over the calm surface of cultural explanations and never have dug up all the common-sense realism in grape juice exegesis. While at Duke, I also benefitted from the collegial working environment (and exposure to Methodist historical resources) provided by Roger Loyd, Roberta Schaafsma, and Andy Keck at the Duke Divinity School Library. I also thank Jennifer Trafton, Esther Chung, Chris and Sharon Armstrong (and their children), Christie and Steve Hinkle, and Julie Steele for keeping me balanced.

Early in my work on this project, I was for three years the librarian at the United Methodist Archives and History Center at Drew University. While this means I have fewer librarians and archivists to thank than most, they are an important few. Andrew Scrimgeour gave me two writing sabbaticals from work; Cathie and Charlie Wagner (the latter a librarian by marriage) opened their cabin to me as a writing retreat; Lois Sechehay and Josie Cook dealt with odd interlibrary loan requests; Margaret Tarpley sent me the article by William Schrock that opened my eyes to the eugenics movement; Jocelyne Rubinetti helped protect my writing boundaries; and Dale Patterson, whose knowledge of American Methodism knows no bounds, helped me untangle Victorian cultural forces and the publishing history of Methodist periodicals. If it were not for the majesty and accessibility of Drew's library collection, I would never have found The Temperance Bible-Commentary by browsing the shelves. Since relocating to Huntington, Indiana, I have depended on Pat Jones and Jean Michelson of Huntington University to make sense of my interlibrary loans, and on Chris Anderson (my successor at Drew) to respond to countless e-mails beginning: Can you please, please check this citation for me? I completed much subsequent research and revisions accompanied by my toddler daughter in the Huntington University computer cluster, in the midst of teaching online and blended classes for four institutions in four different states (all of which has given me great sympathy for J. K. Rowling). I thank my students at Asbury Theological Seminary, Huntington University, Southwestern College, and United Theological Seminary for their patience—and Whitney Abbott, Andrea Cox, Rebekah Brown, Emily Frankle, Heather Gill, Christina Hernandez, Caitlynn Lowe, Elizabeth Holtrop, and Raquel Monroy for keeping both eyes on my daughter while I kept both eyes on the computer screen. Colleagues at all these schools and in the wider scholarly communities of the Wesleyan Theological Society, the American Theological Library Association, the American Society of Church History, and the John Wesley Fellows have helped me to form and reform my ideas, especially Jay Blossom, Bill Kostlevy, Jonathan Krull, Randy Maddox, Robert Moore-Jumonville, Doug Strong, and Charles Yrigoyen, Jr.

I am forever grateful to Keith Harper for asking me to write the essay that introduced me to the University of Alabama Press. Daniel Ross and Crissie Johnson of the Press have been unfailingly helpful and patient, and copy editor Joan Matthews is not only eagle-eyed, but witty. Along the way, I have been formed and reformed—and communed in both grape juice and wine—at Bethesda United Methodist Church and St. Joseph's Episcopal Church (Durham, NC); New Providence UMC and St. Andrew's EC (New Providence, NJ); Christ the King EC (Huntington, IN); and Christ's UMC (Roanoke, IN).

Most deeply I thank my family. My late grandparents, Frank Bateman Stanger and Mardelle Amstutz Stanger, set an example of commitment to Methodist history and holiness practice. My in-laws, Barry Tait and Trudy Harvey Tait, spent an entire week playing with their granddaughter at a particularly crucial stage in the revision process. Jonathan and Melissa Woodruff, my brother and sister-in-law, have maintained steadfast faith in me. I thank my parents, John Woodruff and the late Marilyn Stanger Woodruff, for their trust, belief, love, suggestions, nostalgia, accountability, probing questions, and multiple tuition fees. Three weeks before her death, when I signed my book contract, my mother promised to buy enough copies to start earning me royalties. My husband, Edwin Woodruff Tait, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the humanities that is as good as being married to a department full of colleagues, is a ruthless critic of anything less than excellence, and does half the housework. (He had me at We used to kneel before the host and drink Christ's blood for wine / But Mr. Welch has sobered up the days of auld lang syne.) My beautiful daughter, Catherine Elanor, already knows that Mummy is writing a book about grape juice. It was my original intention to dedicate it to her. When she is older, she will understand why I could not.

Abbreviations

ATS = American Tract Society

EA = Evangelical Association

JAMA= Journal of the American Medical Association

MEC = Methodist Episcopal Church

MECS = Methodist Episcopal Church, South

MPC = Methodist Protestant Church

NTSPH = National Temperance Society and Publication House

UBC = United Brethren in Christ

UMC = United Methodist Church

WCTU = Women's Christian Temperance Union

1

What Has Grape Juice to Do With Common Sense?

When the right over wrong shall prevail,

When the woes of wine-drinking shall cease,

Then all nations and people shall hail

With a shout the glad triumph of peace.

—No. 20, When the Right Shall Prevail, Cold-Water Army Song Book (Charleston, IL: A. H. Davis, c. 1890), 9

The time: August 16, 2003. The occasion: My wedding, between an Episcopalian Southerner with British holiness roots and a Midwestern United Methodist with American holiness roots. The question: Which liquid should fill the cup when the Eucharist is celebrated at the wedding service? Wine or nonalcoholic grape juice?

This question encompassed far more than a simple choice between two sacramental liquids, as dueling senses emerged of what constituted fidelity to tradition and witness to the Gospel. The passions aroused on both sides of the argument convinced me to explore further a topic I was already pondering: the link between grape juice and the evangelical tradition—particularly that tradition's connection to Wesleyan-Methodist temperance activism.¹ Why did my American Methodist uncle, despite worshipping off and on at an Episcopal church for fifteen years, declare he would never drink wine in the sacrament? Why did my fiancé's British parents, though avid teetotalers, see nothing wrong with the use of wine on the Communion table? Why was the sacrament valid for my fiancé's Episcopal priest only if the grapes in the cup were fermented? Exactly what kind of poison have American Methodists found in the wine cup for over a hundred years, and why did they call it poison? And why have more liturgical traditions found the Methodist fear of wine so puzzling? When and how did grape juice come to symbolize so much more than grape juice, and become so closely associated with evangelical religion—both for those evangelicals and for their detractors?

The casual observer's first question is how grape juice got into the Methodist cup after over eighteen hundred years of Eucharistic fermentation.² The common answer is that grape juice was adopted when the nineteenth-century temperance movement, with its insistence on total abstinence from intoxicating beverages, intersected with the new technological ability to arrest fermentation popularized by Methodist dentist Thomas Welch and his son Charles. Tellers of this tale give varying amounts of credit to both the capitalistic marketing savvy of the Welches and perceived deficiencies in nineteenth-century Methodist sacramental theology.³

This conventional narrative often references the lengthy debate about the meaning of the Biblical words for wine that took place in the course of adopting a total abstinence viewpoint. But it pictures theological and exegetical issues involved as subservient to cultural and economic ones. In this story, since grape juice has no credible theological motivation, its adoption must be due to Victorian American Methodism's cultural captivity. Liturgical historian Betty O'Brien concludes: Within the space of a century, Methodist churches joined many American churches in the move from a sacrament using grape wine preserved by a natural God-given, life-changing, fermentation process to a sacrament using grape juice preserved by an artificial, human-made, life-destroying pasteurization process.⁴ The questions of how and why, in this narrative, are both answered easily: Culture-captive Methodists goofed.

But this interpretation leaves an important question unanswered. Why would Methodists, and the other nineteenth-century Protestants who followed eagerly in their wake, deliberately adopt a life-destroying liturgical practice? For grape juice advocates, O'Brien's equation was exactly reversed. They placed grape juice on the Communion table because it was life-affirming, natural, and holy—the most suitable symbol for Christianity's most sacred act. Fermented wine, in contrast, was an artificial, man-made, life-destroying substance. Furthermore, the reasons for this were theological and philosophical as much as cultural. This is the story of how grape juice became holy—because consuming it, unlike consuming alcohol, allowed the human mind accurately to perceive external reality and base moral acts on those accurate physical perceptions.

All the myriad associated lifestyle issues of the Victorian moral code, temperance chief among them, represented a theological vision that placed a premium on the ability to perceive reality accurately. This vision was deeply rooted in Baconian common-sense realism, which pervaded the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century America. In this climate, every physical act had a moral implication, and every moral belief resulted in a correct physical act. Wine broke down this one-to-one correspondence between perception and action. Thus, it was unsuited to represent Christ's blood and convey his grace. Grape juice was pure, unstimulating, healthful, and wholesome, and consuming it would aid in the development of moral character. Its adoption represented, not a theological detour, but the natural result of applying the common-sense worldview to the temperance problem.

COMMON SENSE AND THE MORAL UNIVERSE

Though criticized in its historical details, Weber's description of sober bourgeois capitalism has exerted enormous psychological staying power.⁵ Weber argued that the Protestant sense of secular vocation as moral calling produced a concern for professionalization, efficiency, rational scientific inquiry, ascetic ethics, self-control, and good character. This concern resulted in sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen who clung to their work as to a life-purpose willed by God.⁶ Weber provided an enduring image of middle-class respectability—both the complex of lifestyle choices it accepted, and those choices it rejected. Instead of the glitter and ostentation of feudal magnificence which, resting on an unsound economic basis, prefers a sordid elegance to a sober simplicity, ascetic capitalist Protestants esteemed the clean and solid comfort of the middle-class home as an ideal.⁷ Because time and money were both moral issues, everything about modern industrial life became commodified in terms of one or the other, and the waste of either posed a serious problem.⁸

Weber's theory turned on asceticism as the governing principle of the sober bourgeois capitalist, linking repression of emotion to the discipline necessary to be a middle-class Protestant. But more recent scholarship argues that nineteenth-century Protestant emotion existed to be controlled and appropriately displayed, not suppressed.⁹ The middle-class lifestyle sought the right emotions in the right contexts. But how would the temperate middle class know which were right emotions, thoughts, and responses? Fitness for the capitalist economy was a motivating factor in determining a godly character, but not the only one. And that fitness was defined primarily in moral and ethical, not economic, terms.

Weber recognized the decided propensity of Protestant asceticism for empiricism, but he did not connect that propensity with his larger argument.¹⁰ I argue that empiricism holds the key to understanding the connection of lifestyle issues Weber compellingly identified. The place of grape juice near the heart of evangelical religion owes its symbolic power to a philosophical worldview linking the physical and the moral by means of accurate sense perception. George Marsden has been chief in placing common-sense realism at the heart of nineteenth-century evangelicalism, concerned with exploring common-sense arguments in nineteenth-century views of science and the Bible and narrating how those views have survived largely unchanged into twentieth-century fundamentalism.¹¹ Mark Noll has also recently used the pervasiveness of common-sense realism, along with notions of republican virtue and equality, to explain how nineteenth-century theology diverged so strongly from its Continental roots and how its hermeneutic was, in his view, ill equipped to deal with the issue of slavery.¹² But in addition to shaping specific views of scientific truth and Biblical interpretation, common-sense realism underlay a complex of middle-class lifestyle issues that also survived, still undergirded by an implicit common-sense explanation, into twentieth-century fundamentalism and evangelicalism.

Nineteenth-century evangelical religious thought depended heavily on the empiricist method of English Renaissance natural philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) within an epistemological framework laid out nearly two centuries later by Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid (1710-1796). Bacon, widely hailed as the father of the inductive method, considered scientific argument to consist of carefully observing and assembling facts, then drawing conclusions from those assembled facts.¹³ Bacon advocated the doctrine of the two books—God's truths were taught equally in both Scripture and nature, with the created world guiding proper Biblical interpretation.¹⁴ Many nineteenth-century American thinkers united Bacon's ideas with Protestantism so closely that Protestant theology was considered Baconian by default. Noll comments:

In divinity, a rigorous empiricism resting on facts of consciousness and facts from the Bible became the standard for justifying belief in God, revelation, and the Trinity. In ethics, similar empirical procedures marked out the royal road to moral certainty. The same procedures also provided a key for using physical science itself as a demonstration to religious truths. In every case the appeal was, as Stanhope Smith put it in 1810, to the evidence of facts, and to conclusions resulting from these facts which…every genuine disciple of nature will acknowledge to be legitimately drawn from her own fountain.¹⁵

Or as temperance writer Eliphalet Nott (1773-1866) channeled Bacon to explain:

The books of nature and revelation were written by the same unerring hand. The former is more full and explicit in relation to the physical, the latter in relation to the moral laws of our nature; still however, where both touch on the same subject, they will ever be found, when rightly interpreted, to be in harmony.¹⁶

Humans found knowledge by different, but parallel, means in each sphere, and misery followed equally from disobeying either kind of laws—moral or physical. Thus, interrogating Nature through experiment produced a result entirely consonant with the revealed word of God.¹⁷

Protestant theologians also found an affinity between Bacon's method of discovering truth and Reid's philosophical assumptions about truth. Reid rejected speculative theories of knowledge, holding that any human being of good common sense whose mind was operating normally would believe certain basic truths: the existence of the external world, the continuity of the self, the existence and continuity of others, and the reliability of sense perception, memory, and testimony when obtained under the correct conditions. For common-sense adherents, these beliefs were fundamental to all cultures, representing a common basis of argument and understanding.¹⁸ Human beings could thus perceive the real world directly with an assurance that what was observed was what was actually there.¹⁹

Baconian methods of argument and scientific discovery dovetailed nicely with Reid's assertions—as Presbyterian theologian and Princeton Theological Seminary president Charles Hodge (1797-1878) explained in his influential Systematic Theology:

The man of science comes to the study of nature with certain assumptions. 1. He assumes the trustworthiness of his sense perceptions. Unless he can rely upon the well-authenticated testimony of his senses, he is deprived of all means of prosecuting his investigations. The facts of nature reveal themselves to our faculties of sense, and can be known in no other way. 2. He must also assume the trustworthiness of his mental operations. He must take for granted that he can perceive, compare, combine, remember, and infer; and that he can safely rely upon these mental faculties in their legitimate exercise. 3. He must also rely on the certainty of those truths which are not learned from experience, but which are given in the constitution of our nature.²⁰

By using the inductive method, people could assemble accurately perceived facts from both nature and Scripture to make correct judgments about physical objects, intellectual beliefs, and moral actions. If the facts were accurately perceived, that is—which was where the middle-class lifestyle came in. The practices encouraged by sober bourgeois capitalists were precisely those practices that would preserve the ability to perceive reality accurately and thus make appropriate moral decisions. The practices they rejected all had in common their interference with this process.²¹

By the early twentieth century, in Marsden's memorable words, the common-sense philosophical outlook that had graced America's finest institutions came to be generally regarded as merely bizarre.²² The view that replaced it saw reality as created by the perceptions of the observer and not merely discovered. It developed from a different set of nineteenth-century currents: romanticism, transcendentalism, and German idealism.²³ Such a view was anathema to many temperance authors, who repeatedly rejected thinkers and artists who championed some form of romanticism—or exhibited its perceptual problems through indulging in intoxicants—especially Thoreau, Emerson, Coleridge, Lamb, and Byron.

Only a few authors have addressed the topic of grape juice at any length. Betty O'Brien and Daniel Sack both ultimately root the adoption of grape juice in cultural, not theological, pressures. O'Brien argues that grape juice and the subsequent switch to individual Communion cups represent distorted interpretations of the Biblical witness. Sack's Whitebread Protestants uses the grape juice debate to introduce his survey of food in Protestant culture.²⁴ He emphasizes the trust in science and gentility motivating temperance reformers, and connects temperance (as its contemporaries did) to movements for food purity and diet reform—including those of Sylvester Graham, Ellen White, and John Harvey Kellogg—which shunned dietary condiments and overindulgence, advocating pure fare, prepared simply—the way God designed it.²⁵ He also notes that while modern-day mainline liturgical scholars have protested both cups and juice, conservative megachurches and their kin have continued nineteenth-century emphases on hygiene and efficiency by introducing prepackaged Communion sets. For Sack, all these movements emphasize the middle-class white American desire to design Christianity in its image: The world of whitebread Protestants…focuses on cleanliness rather than theological tradition. It is a world of well-ordered social lives.²⁶ The more interesting question, which Sack leaves unanswered, is the theological nature of that image. What was holy—not merely socially useful—about cleanliness and well-ordered lives?²⁷

The introduction of Eucharistic grape juice figures briefly in histories of alcohol and prohibition in America, but temperance historians have generally been satisfied with the claim that revivalist Protestants, as opposed to liturgical ones, adopted grape juice easily because they believed that the Lord's Supper was only a memorial of Jesus's death.²⁸ Some have found dealing with the theological motivations of temperance reformers difficult and even distasteful. Even sympathetic interpreters have stopped short of suggesting a coherent theological basis for sobriety.²⁹ Much difficulty lies in acknowledging that Methodists and other evangelical temperance advocates were shaped by cultural concerns without collapsing their motivations into cultural ones. More usually, historians claim that temperance sprang totally from nontheological concerns or was based on fundamentalist religious beliefs that can no longer be taken seriously.³⁰ I refuse to introduce into the historical narrative this assumed theological and exegetical flaw in the argument. It is not that the argument had no flaws—but the theology of grape juice advocates needs to be understood on its own historical terms before it can be countered on theological ones.

This disparaging assessment of temperance motives is rooted most strongly in Joseph Gusfield's Symbolic Crusade and W. J. Rorabaugh's The Alcoholic Republic. While keenly aware of the differing lifestyles and conceptions of leisure time that temperance and drinking cultures symbolized, Gusfield ultimately views temperance through the lens of the twentieth-century fundamentalist-modernist controversy, using it to illustrate the process by which the native American Protestant, old middle class of individual enterprisers were losing out in the modern world—leading them eventually to protest against fluoridation, domestic Communism, school curricula, and the United Nations.³¹ Rorabaugh is critical of the temperance commitment to controlling, structuring, rationalizing, and challenging emotions as well as a kind of pragmatism that stressed industrialism, materialism, and progress. For Rorabaugh, the emotional release of temperance and evangelical religion relieved the anxieties of American culture formerly relieved by drinking, a more non-ideological practice. Furthermore, temperance reform ultimately led to the triumph of an anti-intellectual faith deriving from the feverish, anti-intellectual, nondoctrinal spirit of the Methodists.³²

Though recently challenged by more sympathetic interpretations, this fundamentalist reading remains prominent, as exemplified by Robert Fuller's Religion and Wine and Maureen Ogle's Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer. Introducing the 1820s-era crusade against hard liquor, Ogle comments, That first generation of anti-drink crusaders infused the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol with a stain of disrepute that has never gone away. God's good creature had become the devil's handmaid, and respectable folk were, by definition, ones who abstained.³³ Fuller connects wine with highbrow freethinking, particularly on the East Coast. Such freethinking combated rigidity, dogmatism, and sectarian disputation and encouraged a progressive and rational culture interested in individual freedom of expression as well as an aesthetic style of spirituality with "a greater appreciation for