Wine or Grape Juice?
Unbelievable that 4 years at a Christian college, 3 years at Seminary and a lifetime raised in Baptist-like churches and I’ve never heard this…okay, maybe it’s totally believable.
”What you need for this sacrement is simple: just some bread and some wine, or grape juice. Grape juice became popular in the late nineteenth century, when temperance-advocating evangelicals realized they couldn’t call for a complete ban on potables if they were imbibing themselves at the altar on Sunday. They mounted all sorts of complicated arguments about the different Greek words for wine, and they suggested that Jesus hadn’t been drinking fermented wine, but rather unfermented, nonalcoholic, wine at the Last Supper. The people in the pews found these arguments bizarrely persuasive, and then churches were faced with a new probelm — producing enough unfermented grape juice. The ladies of the Women’s Christian Temperence union circulated ‘receipts’: “Express the juice of the grapes as you do for jelly; heat immediately to the boiling point, bottle and seal exactly as you do fruit. Adapt the size of the bottles to the number of communicannts, as the wine will ferment if left over from one communion to another.” Women labored over their stoves, churning the stuff out, week after week. Thomas Welch, a Methodist dentist from the strip of upstate New York so given to religious revivals that it earned the moniker “burned-over district,” saw a great business opportunity. In 1869, he found a way to mass produce nonalcoholic grape juice and, in 1875, his son Charles Welch founded a company.” [Lauren Winner, Girl Meets God, 181-182.]
