When my daughters were children we enrolled them in an art course run by a retired art teacher in our community. He taught from his home, and it was a bit of a drive to get there, so usually I would take them both for the class and then wait in the make-shift waiting room he had set up in the rec room, adjacent to his studio, and read.
Well: sometimes I’d read. Other times I’d just sit and mindlessly watch the television set he had there. This was always on, and it was always tuned to the same channel: The Food Network.
Our family has never really had TV in the house, so I never knew till then, that there was such a thing as a television network devoted entirely, non-stop, 24/7, to food. It was always Diners, Drive-ins and Dives playing when I got there, and I’d get part way through Chopped before it was time to go. This was pretty much the only time I watched TV all week back in those days, so I got to say, far more Food Networking than reading got done while I was waiting for art class to end.
I’m thinking about The Food Network today, however, because we’ve been working our way through a “Biblical spirituality of food,” for the last month or so at terra incognita, and last week I posted some effusive thoughts about the pleasure of food, and what it tells us about God, the fact that he made the world so chock full of good things to eat. The shadow side of that coin, however, is that too much of a good thing—especially when it comes to food—can be sin. At least, the Christian Church has always thought so, and has traditionally listed the sin of gluttony, that is, an over-indulgence in food, as one of the seven deadlies. In the modern world, a world where you could, if you wanted to, spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week, watching television programs devoted (and I mean that in the theological sense) devoted exclusively to eating, the concept of gluttony seems somewhat antiquated. Even the term—gluttony—sounds quaint; the idea that giving full reign to one’s appetite might actually immoral sounds outright puritanical.In fairness, though, I should make it clear that the Bible itself says very little about gluttony, per se. The closest Hebrew approximation we have for the English word gluttony is zâlal which has the sense of eating that is “wasteful” and “rowdy.” The word shows up especially in the Book of Proverbs, where it warns that the glutton will come to poverty in the end (Prov 23:20, 21, 28:7). In the New Testament there’s even less to go on. The Greek word phagos (an over-eater) is about the same as the English word “glutton,” but the only time it appears is when the Pharisees use it to insult Jesus, calling him a “drunkard” and a “glutton.” So that’s hardly firm data against gluttony. Certainly there’s no direct commandment that says, “thou shalt not be a glutton,” like we have in the case of murder, theft, and adultery.
I haven’t studied this out, mind you, but my hunch is that the Christian teaching that gluttony is a sin comes less from concrete biblical interpretation, and more from Aristotelian ethics. Aristotle was the Greek Philosopher (ca. 300 BC) who taught that any action, character trait, or personal quality could be called a virtue only if it occupied the golden mean between the two extremes of having too much of it, or too little. Courage, for example, was a virtue because it expressed the golden mean between foolhardiness (too much courage), and cowardice (not enough courage). Generosity was the golden mean between stinginess and profligacy. In Aristotelian ethics, then, we might say that gluttony expresses an extreme at the opposite end of neurotic abstinence, for which the golden mean is temperance.
Certainly Aristotle has had a strong influence on the development of Christian ethics over the years (Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1274 AD) was a Catholic Theologian whose whole theological programme was an attempt to integrate Christian Theology and Aristotelian Philosophy), but there is probably a better place to turn to find a basis for our understanding of gluttony as sin.
In Philippians 3:19, Paul refers to some false teachers in the early church who were “living as enemies of the cross,” and he makes an interesting claim about them. “Their god,” he says, “is their stomach; their glory is in their shame. Their minds are set on earthly things.” Earlier in the chapter Paul was discussing a group of Jewish Christians who were insisting that the Gentile believers needed to be circumcised to be saved. Given this, it’s quite possible that here, when Paul mentions some people who have made “their stomachs” into “their god,” he’s referring to the same group of Judaizers, who would also have insisted that the Gentiles needed to follow the kosher food laws of the Jewish Torah. As such, they were making their “stomachs” their “god” by insisting that what you ate could save you.
This verse is probably not about gluttony specifically, then, or at least, it’s not only about gluttony. But in its application for Christians today, Philippians 3:19 forces us to wrestle with the possibility that we may have let food take the place that God rightly ought to occupy in our lives, turning to it for the sense of identity, the sense of belonging, the assurance that things are going to work out okay, and/or the spiritual comfort that really only God can give.
Does anyone really do this? (you may be tempted to ask). Well: what is a “foodie” except someone who has allowed their appreciation for “gastronomical esoteria” to define themselves? What are we doing when we binge-eat after a break-up? What is happening when we stress-eat to get through a hard season at work? What’s really behind that latest health-food fad that’s guaranteed to give you the looks, the libido, or the longevity you always dreamed of? What is the food network really celebrating, when it broadcasts food-focused programming for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
It turns out it’s far easier than we might have guessed to make a god of our bellies, counting on food to do for us what God alone can do. As such, it’s also far easier to fall into the sin of gluttony than we might have thought, too. Because the sin of gluttony has less to do with what you’re eating, or how much; it has everything to do with why you’re eating it. To be sure, usually one of the signs that food has replaced God for you, is if you are uncontrollably overindulgent when it comes to eating. But I’m trying to flesh out this definition of gluttony more broadly, because it’s also true that you can have your eating obsessively controlled and also be sinning the sin of gluttony. The health-food guru who tracks every calorie with hawk-like precision, so that they can remain in complete control of their well-being, may be just as gluttonous (on this definition) as the one who eats himself into a food-coma at every meal.
The alternative to gluttony, then, is not obsessively under-eating. This is just making a god of our stomachs in the other direction. The alternative is simply (more simply said than done sometimes) to let God be God in your life. If we will give him his rightful place, he will put our stomachs, our appetites, and our eating into its proper place, too. This will not mean a wholesale rejection of the delight the food can give us (see my previous posts on that), nor a denial of the importance of careful, healthy eating (see upcoming posts on this). But it will mean tasting and seeing how good the Lord himself is, and in that knowledge discovering that food is nothing more and nothing less than what it was always supposed to be: a healthy, wholesome, pleasant gift from him.
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