Alcohol, Addiction and Christian Ethics:

Christopher C H Cook
(Cambridge 2006) ISBN 0521851823

This is an entirely praise worthy attempt by Chris Cook to open the ethical debate on alcohol questions amongst Christians after many years of embarrassed silence. One hundred years ago every mainstream denomination had a public policy position on alcohol questions and many required of their members abstinence from all intoxicants.

That intensity of moral purpose has now been transferred to other causes. Social drinking has resumed among most church members and drink-related problems are once more on the increase.Chris Cook comes to this area of ethical concern both as committed Evangelical Christian and someone with a long experience of treating drink dependency.Although he addresses a breadth of ethical questions raised by alcohol it is to the addiction issues set out in his title that he keeps on returning.

The methodology he adopts is to survey scripture and tradition, including an analysis of leading texts from the nineteenth century temperance movement. The heart of the book consists of this disciplined and analytical work, rather than the incremental building of a particular ethical case.The author is too generous a person to pronounce his anathema against the demon kings of his world,whether they be the corporate leaders of the drink industry, ambivalent about public health, or the obsessive teetotalers, who substituted abstinence for the Gospel. If he reaches a conclusion it is that Christians need to re-examine their ethical stances on alcoholand to drink sparingly as a result.

More could have been said about the role of modern science in complicating traditional ethics.As Christians have discovered in the debates about the origins of life, there are hermeneutic problems once we turn to the Biblical text or the works of Augustine.Their arguments are based in the limited biological knowledge of their day.Chris Cook takes up the case for a modern psychological understanding of dependency and sees how it might be rooted in authors such as Aquinas,who had no first hand knowledge of such a discipline.There remains a further science-based debate about the nature of the human personality and will, rooted in our enlarged understanding of neurology.This discipline is driving us back to the more holistic view of the person which we find in the Hebrew Bible and putting question marks over the Greek distinction between body and soul. Although the primary impact is in arguments about immortality, neurological science does also demand we revisit questions of will-power and addiction. Similarly, in a book of this length and scope one can understand the limits to what can be said historically, but to introduce the nineteenth century temperance movement in a British and American context with no reference to the role of women is surprising.

This leads to the hope that Chris Cook can be persuaded to write further in this neglected area of ethical enquiry. Christians cannot go on ignoring what secular agencies have identified as an area of major challenge for those who promote public health and public order.The nineteenth century history, especially, is suggestive of further fruitful work.Clearly, the lead in promoting abstinence was taken by ‘Free Church’ denominations in the Evangelical tradition,with the Anglicans and Roman Catholics drawn into the debate. What would be fascinating to see is how far the Holiness Movement within Evangelicalism fuelled the growth of tee-totalism, especially as Pentecostalists remain largely committed to abstinence. On the basis of what Chris Cook has already said about Donatists and Manichees in the present volume there are promising possibilities. He obviously believes in a life affirming Christianity. Christian ethics, for most people, seems to suggest the opposite.

Stephen Orchard