For me the word “temperance” conjures up images from 7th grade American history of women marching in the streets and the prohibition years. The WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) seemed a bit comical to a 12 year-old boy in the 1960s. I even poked fun at them in a parody based on Robert Service’s poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”
Given what I know now about the struggles of addiction and how lives without the virtue of temperance are often ruined, along with family and friends, I am not so near inclined to laugh at what still might seem to some an old-fashioned virtue.
In our text for this week, Titus 2:1-15, “temperance” is used by the NRSV in verse 2 to translate a word that typically means to avoid the excess of drink, to be sober. It’s part of an admonition to older men. Paul goes on to admonish older women, young women, and young men, as well as slaves. Using another word group, translated “self-control” he touches the theme of temperance at least three more times in this text. It’s clear that he believes it’s a key Christian virtue.
While we typically associate temperance with moderation or abstinence in regard to alcohol, the ancient virtue was also concerned with avoiding excess of food, pride, anger, sexual desire and other extremes of passion and action. Temperance is as much opposed to workaholism or all-night video game binges as it is to a drunken bender. Temperance challenges the excessive life-styles of the rich and famous and challenges many of our not so rich and famous lives whenever we are tempted to excess.
In the words of Joseph Pieper in The Four Cardinal Virtues, temperance is “unselfish self-preservation.” We tend to excess in the very arenas that are needed for life: food, drink, sexual activity. Temperance calls us to moderate our activity in those arenas in a way that is actually healthy and life-preserving.
Ultimately, as Paul clearly shows in his epistle to Titus, temperance aims at a way of life that is spiritually healthy. The call in verse 12 is to renounce excess worldly passions in favor of, in verse 13, a focus on our coming life in God’s kingdom at the return of Christ. We are to be pure, gentle, humble people giving no just cause for criticism. That’s the thrust of verse 15, “Let no one look down on you.” May God give us the virtue of temperance.