The Twelve Steps of AA
Dick B.
Copyright 2012
Anonymous. All rights reserved
This article is written to show how one who believes in God,
and certainly one who has come to Him through Jesus Christ, can look at “old
school” A.A.—the original A.A. Christian Fellowship program. Then learn the
origins and intended purposes of that pioneer program. And then, apply the
original old school ideas in taking and understanding the directions in the Big
Book, Alcoholics Anonymous. At that
point, the believer can prayerfully, effectively, and appropriately utilize the
book’s directions for taking the Twelve Steps of A.A.
To that end, Dick B. and Ken B. have just published their
latest title, Stick with the Winners: How
to Conduct More Effective 12-Step Recovery Meetings Using Conference-Approved
Literature (Kihei, HI: Paradise Research Publications, Inc., 2012). This
guide can really show the newcomer or the sponsor how to find and learn how a
believer can pick up his or her history tools, Bible tools, and Big Book instructions
and follow the path the Big Book originally intended.
But we begin this explanation by showing you some of the
present-day problems encountered by those who believe in God and perhaps are
Christians as well. And showing why they seem to be confronted with several
daunting preliminary obstacles that arose because of the changes in A.A. since
its founding in 1935.
The Problem: How Can I “Take” and “Understand” the Twelve Steps of
A.A.?
Problem 1:
When I [Dick B.] walked into A.A. on April 23, 1986 (two
days sober and beginning to detox), I was told to get a Big Book and a Sponsor
and “take” the Twelve Steps of A.A. as quickly as possible. And I did. Thinking
that this was the start of a great new life.
Yet, after suffering three grand mal seizures in a matter of
days, I was trundled into a treatment program from the ICU. I was handed a Big
Book plus a 12 x 12, and a Twenty Four Hour “meditation” book. No instructions
or teachers telling me what to do with them. And—heeding the advice of my sponsor--I
read the Big Book, and nothing in the 12 x 12 or Twenty Four Hour book. Where,
I thought, did the other two books fit in my new found solution of relying on
God and following the instructions for taking the Steps per instructions from
the Big Book?
.
Problem 2: On leaving the treatment facility, I was told by my
sponsor not to read anything but the Big Book—not even the Bible. And he
suggested I go to a Step Study meeting every week. I did this for several months
thereafter suffering more and more from anxiety, confusion, forgetfulness, and
terror. But I don’t recall ever hearing anything but drunkalogs. Nor did I hear
any instructive material on taking the Steps. And I now know that neither my
sponsor nor his sponsor had any adequate idea as to how to follow the steps or
any idea as to how important it was for me to get into the Bible and turn to
God for help as soon as possible. The anxiety, confusion, forgetfulness, and
terror continued until I finally checked into the VA psych ward in San
Francisco.
Problem 3: Years after that—and after I had
studied the Bible; turned to God for guidance, forgiveness, and healing; and
overcome the tribulations of the mental ward, imprisonment, and a host of
financial and domestic problems—I believed I still had no significant idea as
to how the Steps were to be taken or as to how I should be instructing my many
new sponsees concerning them. And I therefore regularly went to Joe and Charlie
Big Book Seminars in September each year and got a solid handle on the relation
of the Big Book to the Twelve Steps of A.A. And they made clear that the Big
Book provided three vital suggestions:
a)
The Foreword to the First Edition said: “To show other
alcoholics precisely how we have
recovered is the main purpose of this book. For them, we hope these pages
will prove so convincing that no further authentication will be necessary.” (4th
ed., xiii)
b)
If you are an alcoholic who wants to get over it, you
may already be asking—“What do I have to do?” It is the purpose of this book to
answer such questions specifically. We shall tell you what we have done. (4th
ed., 20)
c)
Further on, clear-cut directions are given showing how
we recovered. (4th ed., 29).
I put my shoulder to the task of absorbing the “precise,”
“specific” “clear-cut directions” on taking the Steps. Yet I found the
directions inadequate in the book itself, and also in certain respects in the
comments at the seminars.
Meanwhile, at three years of sobriety, I had neither heard
nor been shown anything of significance about the history of A.A. itself, the
original A.A. program, the changes the Big Book made in that program, nor the
role that God and His Son and the Bible had played in A.A.’s founding and
successes. And that gap did not change until a newcomer (now dead of alcoholism)
asked me if I knew A.A. came from the Bible—after which I immediately set out
on the quest for facts that has kept me busy for the last 23 years.
Then came a somewhat different challenge. The Big Book said:
“Lack of power, that was our dilemma. We had to find a Power greater than ourselves. Obviously. But where and how were we
to find this Power? Well, that’s exactly what this book is about. Its main
object is to enable you to find a Power greater than yourself which will solve
your problem. . . . And it means, of course, that we are going to talk about
God.” (4th ed. 45). So now it seemed there were two main purposes
for the book: (1) Finding and following the specific directions. (2) “Finding a
power greater than myself” which power it claimed was God.
Problem 4: The foregoing seemed to point me to the directions
on pages 58-59: “Remember that we deal with alcohol—cunning, baffling,
powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all
power—that One is God. May you find Him now!” Find Him? I already believed in
Him! The Big Book had said “God either is, or He isn’t.” Yet it began to talk
about finding a God who was not lost by a newcomer who was not lost in his
belief in God. Where was this new course to lead? Was it to God? Or was it to
some “power greater than myself” – which also seemed to include the phrase
“higher power?”
Problem 5: Page 29 states: “Each individual, in the personal
stories, describes in his own language and from his own point of view the way
he established his relationship with God.” Did this not conflict with the later
comment that the individual needed to “find” God when many—particularly those
in the Akron A.A. Christian Fellowship”—were often those who believed in God
and had come to Him through Jesus Christ?
The Major Problem Yet to Be Unfurled: Just before the Big Book
went to print, changes were made in its manuscripts that would certainly leave
any thinking Christian in A.A. baffled! Between 1935 and 1939, when the Big
Book was finally printed, it appeared to leave the reader with a number of
inconsistent and conflicting options: (1) “Find” God. (2) “Find God “as we
understood Him.” (3) Find something called a “higher power” (4) Find “whatever
God the reader thought there was.” (5) Move forward on an existing belief in
God—Creator, Maker, Heavenly Father, and Father of Light. (6) Buy into the idea
that the “God of the Scriptures” had actually been removed from view and
replaced with the bogus idea—contrary to the language of Hebrews 11:6—that the
reader could “choose his own conception of a god.” (7) Worse, that he could
just declare himself an atheist or agnostic and believe in nothing at all. And
that latter course has surprisingly been adopted in A.A. literature today. And
the Big Book as changed seemed to leave the reader a new choice—choose “God” or
“a” god or what one writer claims is “not-god-ness” or what the latest A.A.
conference-approved literature claims—“something” or “someone” you need not
believe in at all!
At which point, one could ask, “Where is the Creator in all
of this?” “Where is the “Heavenly Father” that Dr. Bob said would never let you
down? (p. 181). What about the “precise, “specific,” “directions” for
establishing a relationship with God?
The major problem—the major change—did not really come to
light until one inquiring A.A. paid almost one million dollars at an auction to
get the manuscript that contained a major change of such huge proportions that
it influences AAs, their literature, and how one is to “recover” by following
Twelve Steps that lead to “no god?”
Preliminarily, and by contrast, we would point to Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, pages
156-57. There Bill Wilson wrote that before the major last minute changes in the language of the Big Book, he had
consistently used the unqualified word “God.” But the million dollar printer’s
manuscript shows the blockade that confronted him at that last minute. It was
two-fold:
(1) At the beginning of the manuscript, someone had penciled
in at the beginning a totally new kind of reference to “a” god. In the hand of
an unknown writer, the following was inserted and underlined: “Why dt you
choose your own conc of God” See The Book
That Started It All: The Original Working Manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous
(Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2010), pp. 23-24. This was fleshed out later to
say: “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God.”
(2) On pages 58 and 59 of The Original Working Manuscript, the great new compromise language
had been added. And it is Bill’s later Alcoholics
Anonymous Comes of Age that made
clear that the compromise language had been used to placate atheists and
agnostics after persistent arguments and threats by Bill Wilson’s partner Henry
Parkhurst. The changes were that, in Step Two, the Word “God” had been deleted.
And the words, “Power greater than ourselves,” had been substituted . In Steps
Three and Eleven, the phrases “as we understood him” (no capitalization of
“Him”) had been added to the unqualified word “God.”
Can a Christian or Any Other Reader “Take” the Twelve Steps with These
Problems?
They not only can. They do!
But what they may “find” is anything from Almighty God to
nothing at all. And the question remains, “What can the tens of thousands of 12 Step Christians do in the face of
the problems?”
Frequently, many AAs substitute nonsense gods, higher
powers, some idolatrous door knob or light bulb, or just plain nonsense for God.
This amends out the “God of the Scriptures” which Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob had
originally and consistently described. The Cofounders had consistently called
Him “Creator, Maker, Heavenly Father, Father, God of our fathers, Spirit,
Father of Lights, God, Him, His, He, Himself.” And the coexistence of bogus
gods and idolatry certainly does not block out God. The contrast is well stated
in Psalm 115: the idols can do nothing. God can!
How Can a Christian or Other Reader “Understand” the 12 Step Process in
the face of such nonsense language and dramatic changes?
There are many approaches. And here are a few:
Some Christians have said “. . . we discover our personal,
loving and forgiving Higher Power—Jesus Christ, the one and only true Higher
Power.” Celebrate Recovery Bible: New
International Version PurposeDriven (Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 2007),
viii-ix, xx, 1347, 1627, 1631, 1634, 1639, 1664, 1668.
Other Christians have stuck primarily with biblical language
concerning God—Almighty God, “Jehovah” [sic], Creator. The Life Recovery Bible: The
Living Bible (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1992)
Some interchangeably refer to Jesus or God as a “Higher
Power.” Recovery Devotional Bible: New
International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1993),
67, 419, 905, 1154, 1157, 1181, 1354, 1404.
One Christian Bible speaks of “looking to the Judeo-Christian
God as our higher Power.” Serenity: A
Companion for Twelve Step Recovery (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers,
1990), 30.
Two writers about A.A. history take a radically different
view of God as they have attempted to define him or characterize him in
Alcoholics Anonymous. They express that viewpoint in several different ways:
(1) “Within Alcoholics Anonymous, they learn that they can
reclaim “God” calling that “higher power” anything that they want. . .” Ernest
Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality
of Imperfection: Modern Wisdom from Classic Stories (NY: Bantam Books,
1992), 108.
(2) In the same book, the following appears at page 208:
“The most basic understanding of the concept “Higher Power” within Alcoholics
Anonymous is that it is that which keeps
me sober.”
In another earlier title, one of the authors makes these
assertions:
(3) “All right, then, the first steps in sobriety did not
require classic belief in a traditional “God”’ but they did require that the
alcoholic accept his not-god-ness by acknowledging some “Power greater” than himself. The A.A. group itself, clearly,
was such a “Higher Power.” Ernest Kurtz, NOT-GOD:
A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1979), 206.
(4) In this same book, the following appears at page 50:
“The fundamental first message of Alcoholics Anonymous, proclaimed by the very
presence of a former compulsive drunk standing sober ran: “Something saves.”
“Salvation” as the message remained. Yet A.A.’s total omission of ‘Jesus,’ its toning
down of even ‘God’ to a ‘Higher Power’ which could be the group itself. . .
were profound changes.”
Rejecting early A.A.’s early requirement of a belief in
God—not “a” god. God—and rejecting early A.A.’s documented requirement that
every member become a born again Christian, many aberrations appeared in
ensuing years. In my title Dick B., God
and Alcoholism: Our Growing Opportunity in the 21st Century
(Kihei, HI: Paradise Research Publications, 2002), I reviewed the scores of
ridiculous ways in which professionals, treatment programs, academics, clergy,
and 12 Step people have used, described, explained, or criticized the
expressions “higher power,” “power greater than ourselves,” and “God as we
understood Him.”
Beginning in God and
Alcoholism with Chapter 4, page 77, “The Nonsense “gods” of Recovery,”
these strange new “gods” are described as Allah, Confucius, Prime Cause, the
A.A. group, “Good Orderly Direction,” “Group of Drunks,” tables, bulldozers,
radiators, goddesses, “Something,” the Big Dipper, Santa Claus, Ralph, a stone,
a rock, “any god you want,” “yourself as
not-god,” light bulb, door knob, the “Man Upstairs,” and Gertrude. These are a
few I have personally heard used at a treatment program or conferences or in an
A.A. meeting.
There are many other names which A.A. cofounder Rev. Samuel
M. Shoemaker, Jr. described as “absurd names for God.” The following are
covered in God and Alcoholism from
the beginning of Chapter 4 to the end.Thus writers have described from their
own viewpoint and/or research the following, among many: (1) “him, her, it,”
(2) “Supreme Soul” (Trine), (3) “higher powers,” (James), (4) “Lightbulb”
(Snyder), (5) “Infinite Spirit” (Worcester, McComb, Coriat), (6) “some Higher
Power” (Kitchen), (7) “Higher Power—God” (Peale), (8) Tree (Gilliam), (9) “someone
or something out there,” Coke bottle (Gorski), (10) AA (“a new found
Providence”) (Chafetz and Demone), (11) “a familiar spirit,” “any deity of
Hindu-ism, Buddhism, Greek mythology, or New Age channeled entities” (Bobgans),
(12) “Buddha, Nature, Mighty Mouse,” “Allah, Creative Life Source, Energy”
(Kavanaugh), (13) “you are not God—then you are free to think of God in any way
that you please” (Ketcham), (14) “defining God in A.A.’s image” (Ragge), (15)
“any power, imagined or real” (Playfair), (16) “someone or something that you
can relate to that is more powerful than your addiction,” “Good Orderly
Direction,” “Group of Drunks” (the Wilsons), (17) “that which keeps me sober”
(Kurtz and Ketcham), (18) “the Christianity of alcoholics is not the
Christianity of most other American Christians. Alcoholics have a non-Christian
view of God” (Gorsuch).
Bill W., Dr. Bob, and A.A. Number Three All Originally Spoke of God
Many of my titles have taken great pains to list “God” as He
is named or described in the Scriptures and similarly described in A.A.’s Big
Book and other A.A. literature. These clear biblical usages include God,
Creator, Maker, Spirit, Father, Heavenly Father, Father of Lights, Almighty God,
Him, He, His, Himself, God of the preachers, God of the Scriptures, “God is
love,” and the “living God,” See Dick B., The
Good Book and The Big Book: A.A.’s Roots in the Bible, Bridge Builders ed.
(Kihei, HI: Paradise Research Publications, Inc., 1997), 46-92.
A.A.’s Own Literature Shows that the Early Recovery Program Began with
the Bible and God
Examine, please A.A.’s General Service Conference-approved
pamphlet P-53 (titled The Co-Founders of
Alcoholics Anonymous: Biographical Sketches Their Last Major Talks). Dr.
Bob states in the transcript of his last major address in 1948 that, in the
beginning: (1) They had no Twelve Steps and no Traditions. (2) They believed
the answers to their problems were in the Good Book (the Holy Bible). (3) That
he did not write the Twelve Steps and had nothing to do with the writing of
them, but that their basic ideas came from the time and effort and study of the
Bible that began in the summer of 1935 when Bill W. was living in the Smith
home in Akron.
As stated, in his Alcoholics
Anonymous Comes of Age, Bill W. declared that the original Big Book
manuscript consistently referred only to God—and not to the substitute words
that were inserted in last minute changes just before the Big Book went to
press. And all three cofounders referred at the beginning to God—not “a” God,
God!
Since the Twelve
Suggested Steps of Recovery are pointed at “Finding” God and conclude that “God
could and would” relieve alcoholics of their alcoholism “if sought,” any member
of Alcoholics Anonymous today—Christian or otherwise--can “take” and
“understand” the Twelve Steps and rely completely on the power of God, the
Creator—Almighty God if and when he or she learns and applies the old school
beginning Christian A.A. Fellowship program founded in 1935.
Gloria Deo
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