God As We Understood Him
‘God As We Understood Him’
The basic principles of Alcoholics Anonymous were worked out in the late 1930s and early ’40s, during what co-founder Bill W. often referred to as the Fellowship’s period of “trial and error.â€
The founding members had been using six steps borrowed from the Oxford Groups, where many of them started out. Bill felt that more specific instructions would be better, and in the course of writing A.A.’s basic text, ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’, he expanded them to twelve.
But he was dealing with a group of newly sober drunks, and not surprisingly his new version met with spirited opposition. Even though the founding members were in many ways a homogeneous bunch (white, middle-class, almost exclusively male, and primarily Christian in background), they represented the full spectrum of opinion and belief. Bill tells us in ‘Alcoholic Anonymous Comes of Age’, a history of the Fellowship’s early years, that “the hot debate about the Twelve Steps and the book’s content was doubled, doubled and redoubled.
There were conservative, liberal, and radical viewpoints.†(page 162) Some thought the book ought to be Christian; others could accept the word “God†but were opposed to any other theological proposition. And the atheists and agnostics wanted to delete all references to God and take a psychological approach.
Bill concludes: “We finally began to talk about the possibility of compromise. . . . In Step Two we decided to describe God as a ‘Power greater than ourselves.’ In Steps Three and Eleven we inserted the words ‘God as we understood Him.’ From Step Seven he deleted the words ‘on our knees.’
And, as a lead-in sentence to all the steps we wrote these words: ‘Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery.’ A.A.’s Twelve Steps were to be suggestions only.†(ibid., page 167)
More than sixty years later, those crucial compromises, articulated after weeks of heated controversy, have made it possible for alcoholics of all faiths, or no faith at all, to embrace the A.A. program of recovery and find lasting sobriety.
AA – A Newsletter for Professionals Fall 2003
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Filed under: 12-Step Groups • Alcohol • FAQ’s • Spirituality
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One of the most misunderstood and corrupted concepts in Twelve Step programs is that pertaining to Almighty God, Creator of the heavens and the earth. Early A.A. clearly dealt only with the Creator, as evidenced by the frequent use of the Biblical terms Creator, Maker, Father, Spirit, Father of lights, and over 400 references to “God” with capitalized letters. “God as we understood Him” was no different. It originated in the writings of Rev. Sam Shoemaker–whom Bill Wilson dubbed a “cofounder of A.A.” Thus in Children of the Second Birth, in 1927, Shoemaker twice wrote of surrendering as much of yourself as you understood to as much of God as you understood.
Later corruptions came from different sources – as is documented in my title God and Alcoholism.
“Higher Power” was an illusory word used primarily by New Thought writers such as William James, Ralph Waldo Trine, Emmet Fox, and Emanuel Movement writers.
“Power greater than yourself” was an expression widely used in the Oxford Group in connection with John 7:17 which held that one could find God if he or she turned to Him as a power greater than oneself.
http://www.dickb.com/Godandalcoholism.shtml