Drunkenness

Drunkenness in Scripture is the state of being overcome by wine or strong drink, and the word carries both a literal moral charge and a figurative use for judgment.

The text says that drunkenness belongs to a catalogue of behaviors that exclude a person from the Kingdom: Galatians 5:21 lists it among the works of the flesh alongside sexual immorality, envy, and orgies, with the warning that those who practice such things will not inherit God’s Kingdom. Romans 13:13 sets it with reveling, lustful acts, strife, and jealousy as conduct unfitting for those who walk "as in the day." Luke 21:34 warns that hearts "loaded down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life" will be caught suddenly by the day of judgment, and 1 Thessalonians 5:8 ties soberness to belonging to the day. Ephesians 5:18 frames the matter as a contrast of fillings: "Don’t be drunken with wine, in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit." Historically, wine and strong drink were ordinary staples of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean life, and these passages address being mastered by drink rather than the act of drinking as such; the vocabulary is of excess and loss of self-command, and in each case drunkenness is grouped with other moral failures rather than treated as a matter of diet.

The same word pictures judgment. Isaiah 19:14 describes Egypt staggering "like a drunken man staggers in his vomit" under a spirit of perverseness Yahweh has mixed into her midst, so that her works go astray. Isaiah 51:22–23 speaks of "the cup of staggering, even the bowl of the cup of my wrath," taken from Jerusalem’s hand and put into the hand of those who afflict her. Isaiah 63:6 has Yahweh himself making the peoples drunk in his anger. One way to read this imagery is that drunkenness serves as a picture of losing control to a power stronger than oneself, whether wine or wrath. Isaiah 56:12 adds a further literal note, the complacent resolve of leaders — "I will get wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and tomorrow will be as today" — where drink accompanies a false security about the future.

Christian traditions agree that Scripture condemns drunkenness and disagree about what that requires in practice. Catholic, Orthodox, and most historic Protestant teaching reads these passages as prohibiting excess while permitting moderate use, noting that the texts speak of being overcome rather than of drinking. Methodist, Baptist, Adventist, and many Pentecostal bodies teach total abstinence as the faithful application of the same texts, and some make it a condition of membership. Traditions also differ over the warning in Galatians 5:21: some read it as a genuine threat of lost salvation, others as a description of the kind of life that shows a heart not yet renewed.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.