09/6/22

What Does Religious Mean?

As Terence Gorski has pointed out, A.A. is now legally a “religion” within the US. But I don’t think this really settles the dispute over whether A.A. is or is not religious. Legal rulings can be changed, as they have for many issues such as abortion and marriage. So I’d suggest that A.A. as a “religion” is based upon a particular sense of what “religious” means in modern culture and that could change. There is at least one other view of religion that would not consider A.A. to be religious.

It seems that there two main starting points to define what being “religious” means in modern culture. One follows Edmund Tylor and focuses on the belief in the supernatural, while the other emphasizes Emile Durkheim’s notion of the sacred and the profane. Within American culture, Tylor’s understanding seems to have influenced legal decisions on constitutional issues of the separation of church and state as well as legal rulings on the religiousness of A.A. At this point in time, Tylor’s sense of religion rules the day.

Tylor (1832-1917) simply defined religion as “the belief in spiritual beings” and held that this belief existed in all known cultures. He suggested that a belief in spirits and deities grew out of a belief in souls, which itself was a result of attempting to explain phenomena such as dreams, trances, visions and death. An evolving understanding of religious belief, Tylor’s theory said that all religions were based on animism, which had two parts: belief in a human soul that survived bodily death and belief in other spirits or deities. Animism led to fetishism, the veneration of animals, idols trees and so forth.

This belief was extended to the veneration of spirits and gods which were less attached to objects; leading to the concepts of gods, demons, spirits, devils, ghosts, fairies and angels. The next stage was the association of gods with good and evil, leading to belief in very powerful deities. Another pathway to these powerful gods was to seek after “first causes” for reality. The attribution of good and evil or first cause to the idea of gods and spirits then led to the concept of a Supreme Being. “Animism has its distinct and consistent outcome, and Polytheism its distinct and consistent completion, in the doctrine of a Supreme Deity.”

This seems to have built on the thought of Ludwig Feuerbach, who wrote The Essence of Christianity in 1841. Feuerbach argued against both the divinity of Christ and the existence of God, stating that all theology could be resolved into anthropology—with God as the projected essence of Humanity. What ranked second in religion, namely humanity, must be recognized as first:

If the nature of Man is man’s Highest Being, if to be human is his highest existence, then man’s love for Man must in practice become the first and highest law. Homo homini Deus est— man’s God is Man. This is the highest law of ethics. This is the turning point of history.

Tylor’s ‘evolving’ understanding of religion was similar to that of Carl Jung. Jung saw Western religions as unsophisticated. He said there were five main stages in the evolution of the idea of God.

First was the animistic view, where Nature was ruled by an assortment of gods and demons. Second was the Greco-Roman polytheistic notion of a father of Gods ruling in a strict hierarchy. The third stage idea was that God shared human fate, but was betrayed, died and then resurrected. The fourth stage held that God became Man in the flesh and was identified with the idea of the Supreme Good. Christianity conflated the third and fourth stages, according to Jung.

“The fifth and highest stage of belief in God is when the entire world is understood as a projected psychic structure and the only God is the ‘God within’ or the ‘God-image.’” (Frank McLynn Carl Gustav Jung: A Biography, 409-410) The God-image was a special reflection of the Self, the penultimate archetype of the collective unconscious in Jung’s psychology. This Self was not the ‘self’ of everyday language, which Jung typically referred to as the ‘ego.’ Frank McLynn suggested that Jung’s Self was roughly equivalent to the ‘Atman’ of Buddhism.

On the other hand, Emile Durkheim said in The Elementary Form of the Religious Life, (EFRL) that religion was a product of society and not always supernaturally inspired. So religion should not be defined just in terms of the ideas of divinity or spiritual beings: “Religion is more than the idea of gods or spirits, and consequently cannot be defined exclusively in relation to these latter.” (EFRL, p. 35) As a category, Durkheim said the supernatural only made sense when opposed to a modern scientific explanation for natural phenomena. He pointed out that for most of the world’s peoples, including premodern Europeans, religious phenomena were viewed as perfectly natural. For Durkheim, the division into “sacred” and “profane” was a necessary precondition for religious belief:

All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred. This division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought. (EFRL, p. 37)

Durkheim believed that a belief in the supernatural was not necessary or even common among religions. However, the separation of different aspects of life into the two categories of sacred and profane was common. Objects and behaviors seen as sacred were considered to be part of the spiritual or religious realm. Sacred things for Durkheim were not limited to just gods or spirits. Anything and everything could be sacred: rocks, trees, a spring, a piece of wood, a house. Sacred objects were as varied as the diversity of religions. “Sacred things are simply collective ideals that have fixed themselves on material objects.” Profane things were everything else in the world that did not have a religious function or hold a religious meaning.

There was a radical separation between the sacred and profane, so that the two could not approach each and still retain their essence. The sacred was not the profane and the profane was not sacred; they were “more or less incompatible with each other.” (EFRL, p. 40) And yet, they interact with one another and depend upon each other for survival.

Durkheim believed that religious belief was built upon this fundamental distinction. When a number of sacred things were organized within a belief system that can be distinguished from other similar types of systems, “the totality of these beliefs and their corresponding rites constitutes a religion.” (EFRL, p. 41)

There were two essential criteria for religious belief, according to Durkheim. First, there was a division of the entire universe into the sacred and the profane; which embraced all that exists, but which radically excluded each other. Second, religions formed a Church: “In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.”

So then Durkheim defined religion as: “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” (EFRL, p. 47)

The spiritual, religious distinction made by William James and embedded in Twelve Step spirituality, seems to be the most widely accepted sense of generic spirituality in American culture today. It embraces Durkheim’s thought on religion and rejects Tylor’s understanding. It does this by self-consciously refusing to formulate a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things and also accepts the naturalness of believing in some type of transcendence. The very heart of Twelve Step spirituality is the permissibility of the individual to formulate a personal understanding of their “god.” So what unites members of Twelve Step groups like A.A. is the diversity of religious and spiritual belief permitted—even to the acceptance of the lack of such a belief.

This is the first of three related articles (What Does Religious Mean?, Spiritual not Religious Experience, The God of the Preachers) that will more fully describe some of the influences I believe helped to shape the spiritual, but not religious distinction of 12 Step recovery.

Originally published on May 22, 2015.

08/30/22

Doers of the Word

Knesset Menorah with Hillel; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

It has been said that the great Jewish rabbi Hillel was asked if he could explain the Torah (the Pentateuch; the first five books of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures) while standing on one foot. He accepted the challenge and said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is explanation.” This is the negative or prohibitive form of what has become widely known as the Golden Rule: “treat others as you would like others to treat you.” In one form or other the Golden Rule is found in many religions and embodies the ethic of relationships within Alcoholics Anonymous and self help groups based upon its Twelve Steps.

Christianity gives Jesus credit for stating the positive sense in Matthew 7:12 of the Sermon on the Mount: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus in effect was saying the golden rule was a summary of the entire Old Testament. Leon Morris said in his commentary on Matthew: “The person who consistently lives according to the golden rule is keeping all the regulations in Scripture directing one’s conduct toward other people.” There is no getting around it: if you are a follower of Jesus, you are to be actively doing good to others.

Jesus states both the Golden Rule and the two greatest commandments can be seen as summaries of the Hebrew Scriptures—the Law and the Prophets. In Matthew 22:34-40 Jesus was challenged by a Pharisee to give the great commandment of the Law—to summarize the law in one commandment. His response was to say there were two great commandments. The first one was: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And the second one was: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He then declared: “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said he came to fulfill, not abolish the Law and the Prophets. He repeatedly sharpened and clarified for his listeners various teachings in the Old Testament and he did so again here in Matthew 7:12. Other references to the Golden Rule in Jewish literature are primarily in the prohibitive or negative form. Here for the first time Jesus stated it positively—do to others what you would have them do to you. Timothy Jacobs observed Jesus’ formulation here was “a stronger interpretation of the command to love one’s neighbor.”

According to Timothy Jacobs in the Lexham Bible Dictionary, referring to this phrase as the “Golden Rule” can be attributed to the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus (225-235 AD) who had it inscribed in gold on the wall of his chamber. The earliest reference to a variation of it seems to be from Egypt’s “Elegant Peasant” story, dating to around 1800 BC, but the translation there is uncertain. Various forms of the Golden Rule may be found in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Taoism, Scientology, Wicca, and others. “In philosophical traditions it has a presence in Existentialism, Humanism, Platonism, modern psychology, and countless others.”

Criticisms of the Golden Rule center on its lack of nuance, as it implies we should always do to others what we would want them to do to us. These critics have suggested a change known as the “Platinum rule.” George Bernard Shaw said one should not do others as they would want done to themselves because “their tastes may not be the same.” Karl Popper wrote in The Open Society and Its Enemies: “The golden rule is a good standard which is further improved by doing unto others, wherever reasonable, as they want to be done by.” A response to these critiques is “the Golden Rule implies a consideration of how the other person wants to be treated.” This so-called Platinum rule and the negative or prohibitive form of the Golden Rule may at first seem to be merely saying the same thing in a different way; not so. According to Leon Morris:

It is often urged that it matters little whether the golden rule be cited in its positive or negative forms, but this is not so. If we did nothing at all, we would satisfy the negative form! In the great judgment scene in chapter 25 [of Matthew] those who are condemned might well claim that they had fulfilled the golden rule in its negative form. Their condemnation lay in the fact that they had failed to do good, not in any evil action that they had carried through.

In his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, D.A. Carson said the difference between the positive and negative forms of the Golden Rule are profound. The negative form teaches that if you don’t like being cursed at, don’t curse. If you don’t like being robbed, don’t rob others. Yet the positive form extends beyond the mere avoidance of wrongdoing. It says: if you enjoy being loved, love others. If you like receiving things, give to others. If you like being appreciated, appreciate others.

The positive form is thus far more searching than its negative counterpart. Here there is no permission to withdraw into a world where I offend no one, but accomplish no positive good, either. What would you like done to you? What would you really like? Then, do that to others. Duplicate both the quality of these things, and their quantity—“in everything.”Why are we to act in this way? Jesus does not say that we are to do to others what we would like them to do to us in order that they will do it to us. At stake is no such utilitarian value as “honesty pays” or the like. Rather, the reason we are to do to others what we would like others to do to us is that such behavior sums up the Law and the Prophets. In other words, such behavior conforms to the requirements of the kingdom of God, the kingdom which is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets. It constitutes a quick test of the perfection demanded in 5:48; of the love described in 5:43ff.; of the truth portrayed in 5:33ff.; and so forth.

In chapter 11 of the A.A. Big Book, “A Vision for You,” Bill W. described the fellowship and friendship formed in A.A. He said you would make lifelong friends and be bound to them by escaping disaster together. Then, he said, you will know what it meant: “to give of yourself that others may survive and rediscover life.”

You will learn the full meaning of “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Although the Golden Rule itself cannot be found in the Big Book, or the Twelve Steps, it lies at the heart of carrying the message of sobriety in the Twelfth Step. In the November 1970 issue of the AA Grapevine, F.F. pointed out that although the Twelve Steps do not include the words of the Golden Rule, “it does advise members to help other alcoholics.” You become a member of A.A. because “some other member was implementing the Golden Rule.” In response to the question “What Do I Get Out of AA?” in the January 1952 issue, Robbie said he got fellowship with folks he could respect and trust, “folks who believe in and practice the Golden Rule of life.” In the January 1948 issue, P.O.L. said among other things, sobriety was “honesty, tolerance, humility and the Golden Rule.” There are dozens of other references to it in the AA Grapevine.

It is likely that many within A.A. think of the Golden Rule in the broader sense of a moral or ethical principle of reciprocity and not because such behavior sums up the requirements of the kingdom of God. D.A. Carson observed that as the overwhelming demands of “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” drives home our spiritual bankruptcy, God gives us “a burning desire to turn to him with humble, persistent asking, seeking, knocking. Out of this we shall become ‘doers’ of the Word, and not just ‘hearers.’”

This is part of a series of reflections dedicated to the memory of Audrey Conn, whose questions reminded me of my intention to look at the various ways the Sermon on the Mount applies to Alcoholics Anonymous and recovery. If you’re interested in more, look under the category link “Sermon on the Mount.”

Originally posted on August 28, 2018.

08/23/22

Erasing the Providence of God

“One cannot give thought to the Church’s confession of faith in Providence without very soon being impressed by the distance between this confession and modern thought.” With these words, the theologian G. C. Berkouwer opened his classic work, Studies in Dogmatics: The Providence of God. He went on to note how modern scientific and philosophical thought—as well as that of the ordinary person—is engrossed in the question of the meaning of the world and its history and the purpose of human life. A series of revolutionary, catastrophic events have led many moderns to ask: Can life still be said to make sense or be meaningful? “This is now a pre-eminently existential question whose persistence we cannot avoid.”

One of the most eloquent expressions of human insignificance was expressed by the astronomer Carl Sagan in his book, A Pale Blue Dot. At Sagan’s suggestion to NASA, Voyager 1— at a distance of 3.7 billion miles from earth—turned and took one last photographic look at earth before it continued on its journey out of the solar system. Reflecting on the resulting photo, he said:

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

You can watch and listen to a YouTube video with a section from the audio book containing the quote above from A Pale Blue Dot here.

Berkouwer said that when God’s hand presses hard upon life, the question becomes: WHY? Where is God? That question underlies everything happening in our time. It reverberates through the estrangement of humanity from the rest of creation; through our secularization and alienation from God. “God is estranged from man; and man becomes a stranger in His world.” He said the following three motifs play an important role in modern secularization.

The first is the influence of modern science on faith in God. When nature is repeatedly explained through natural causes, the premise of God’s preservation and rule is set aside. For the scientifically-minded person, the doctrine of Providence was “convenient for pre-scientific naivete.” But it is rendered irrelevant by the insights of the scientific method. The reality of God is a relic of the pre-scientific age.

Though many are beginning to talk again about the limitations of the scientific method and though one hears occasional murmurs against its imperialism, the inevitable conclusion of modern science is that it has no room left for God.

The second motif is seeing religion as nothing more than a projection or reflection of human thought. It appears in the writings of several influential thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and others. Religion is an opiate of the people (Marx); man’s god is man (Feuerbach); religion as a “universal obsessional neurosis” (Freud); Christianity is “Platonism for the people” (Nietzsche). When religion is a projection or reflection of human thought, it becomes expendable. Here, belief in Providence is dangerous, as it is only “a lust for safety and protection against the threats to our existence.”

The third motif is refuting God’s Providence through catastrophe: “How could an all-loving, all-powerful God allow …” The meaninglessness of a crisis seems to cut off any perspective that reveals purpose. “The Providence doctrine fails to give an explanation of the gruesome reality that holds life in its grip.” Faith affirms meaning and purpose in life. “But where can one point to purpose or reality in the radically ungarnished life of our times?”

Does not honesty tell us to limit ourselves realistically to what lies before our eyes, and without illusions face the order of the day? How can we overcome the catastrophic by a return to a confidence in the meaning of life, when the possibility of meaning itself is in question? Realism and a facing of facts have come to fetter the human heart. The beautiful story of Providence and the Hand of God, it is said, is a religious fancy, and belief in it an illusionary escape from reality.

There is a fundamental flaw embedded in each of these motifs, namely that understanding the world around us—including the meaning of our lives within it—must have a human starting point. This seems to be what Berkouwer meant by secularization; what we see is what we get. Science explains, or will explain, what was previously unexplainable. As the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace said when Napoleon asked him where God fit into his mathematical work, “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.” Belief in God then becomes a projection of human thought. Christian faith is mistakenly interpreted as a Christian version of fate or determinism.

When this happens, it means that an abstract concept of sovereignty has replaced the God of revelation. God is construed as a “super power,” a potentia absoluta, which is another God than He of Scripture. Sovereignty “in itself” is a compassionateless concept quite as inspiring of dread as is blind fate. Biblical thinking is always directed to the sovereignty of God, that is, to the real, the true, and living God, the God of revelation.

Berkouwer encouraged his readers to turn to the Scriptures to overcome the modern crisis with the doctrine of Providence. He said as the Scriptures rule our thinking and speaking, as they fill the preaching of the Church, “so the Word of God will speak to the distressed and disordered life of our times.”

J. I. Packer said in the New Bible Dictionary that providence is normally seen in Christian theology as the unceasing activity of the Creator God. In Scripture, it is presented as a function of the sovereignty of God. “God is king over all, doing just what he wills (Psalms 103:19; 135:6; Daniel 4:35; Ephesians 1:11).” Packer said this conviction is throughout the Bible and must be distinguished from the following: pantheism, deism, dualism, indeterminism, determinism, chance, and fate.

Pantheism absorbs the world into God, while deism cuts creation off from him. Dualism divides control of creation between God and another power, where indeterminism denies there is any control at all. On the other hand, determinism imagines a control that obliterates human moral responsibility. Chance denies that the controlling power is rational, while fate denies that it is benevolent. Whenever these views creep into our understanding of God and his interaction with creation, they dilute a biblical sense of God’s providence. Packer said by God’s providence:

He upholds his creatures in ordered existence (Acts 17:28; Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:3), guides and governs all events, circumstances and free acts of angels and men (cf. Psalm 107; Job 1:12; 2:6; Genesis 45:5–8), and directs everything to its appointed goal, for his own glory (cf. Ephesians 1:9–12).

When humans deny the continued work of God in his creation through secular views of science and philosophy, they are trying to erase what God has written across creation with indelible ink. As the apostle Paul said in Acts 17: 28: “In him we live and move and haves our being.” What can be known about God is plainly revealed in the creation. Since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived in the things that were made. “So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:19-21).

Originally posted on August 15, 2017

08/16/22

Reinhold Niebuhr and the Serenity Prayer

Heath Union Church, Heath MA

In May of 1943 Reinhold Niebuhr completed teaching his classes at Union Theological Seminary and left for a two-month series of meetings, conferences and lectures in England and Scotland. The German Axis forces in North Africa surrendered on May 12, 1943. Four days later, German troops crushed the last resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, killing thousands of Jews. The rest were sent to Treblinka. Soon after Niebuhr returned to his family in Heath Massachusetts, Allied troops landed in Sicily on July 10^th. On July 24^th, the Allies began bombing the German city of Hamburg. By July 25^th, Mussolini was overthrown and the new Italian government began peace talks. Somewhere in the midst of these earth-shaking events, Niebuhr preached a sermon at the Heath Union Church and uttered what would become known as the Serenity Prayer for the first time.

The above-described origins of the Serenity Prayer were given by Elisabeth Sifton, the daughter of Reinhold Niebuhr, in her book: The Serenity Prayer. Sifton deftly placed its origins in the midst of the work and ministry of her father during WW II. She said at some point in late 1943 or early 1944, a friend of her father’s, Howard Robbins suggested this little prayer about “grace, courage and wisdom” would be appropriate for inclusion in material he was preparing for army chaplains in the field. Niebuhr gave Robbins a copy of the prayer, and in 1944 it was included in the Book of Prayers and Services for the Armed Forces.

This was its first publication in any form and in any language, and its because of this little booklet that eventually it became famous. . . . A short while later Alcoholics Anonymous, then a fledgling small organization scarcely a decade old, with my father’s permission, also started to use the prayer in their regular meetings.

Sifton said she doesn’t know when or how A.A. simplified the text of her father’s original version of the Serenity Prayer. And although he let it happen “and didn’t fuss when the wordings were altered,” he did mind the changes. But Niebuhr never copyrighted his prayer. Sifton said it was inconceivable to him to construe prayers as a source of revenue. So he could not and did not control its misquotation, misattribution or embellishment. The original text for Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer is followed by the shortened A.A. version, and one of the longer versions.

Niebuhr’s 1943 version: “God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

The AA version appears in the Third Step essay of the A.A. book, The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

One version of the so-called “Complete” Serenity Prayer is in the linked article below by Nell Wing, an A.A. archivist. It is as follows:

God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as the pathway to peace. Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it. Trusting that He will make all things right; if I surrender to his Will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen.

Elisabeth Sifton said she has no idea where the additional clauses of the “complete” version came from. But their message and tone were not in any way “Niebuhrian.” She noted how the A.A. version simplified the opening and framed the prayer in the first person singular, rather than the first person plural of her father’s original text. It also omitted the spiritually correct, but difficult idea of praying for “grace to accept with serenity that which we cannot change.” Instead, it focused on the simpler idea of obtaining “serenity to accept what cannot be changed.”

Nell Wing, an A.A. Archivist, wrote a paper in 1981: “Origin of the Serenity Prayer.” There she described several different purported “origins” for the Serenity Prayer that A.A. was told over the years. Bill W. and A.A. have attributed their initial discovery of the Serenity Prayer to Niebuhr, but still seem to repeat information about it that conflicts with Sifton’s above-described version—which was told to her by her parents. For example, A.A. attributes their initial discovery of the (then) anonymous prayer to an obituary found by an early A.A. member in a New York paper in June of 1941. The connection to Dr. Niebuhr didn’t come to A.A.’s attention until the late 1940s.

Wing said an A.A. member reported seeing the prayer in Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, “as if it were original to him.” She also quoted from a 1951 letter by an A.A. member to Bill W. The man had been in contact with Dr. Niebuhr, who confirmed that he did write the prayer and that it had been distributed to soldiers during WWII. Bill W. responded by saying that it was probable the Serenity Prayer existed in some form or other before Dr. Niebuhr. “Now it is pretty certain that Dr. Niebuhr did write the prayer in its present form and we also have on file a letter from him to that effect.” Bill then referenced a September 1950 article by Jack Alexander, which Wing quoted:

Originally thought in Alcoholics Anonymous to have been written by St. Francis of Assisi, it turned out on recent research to have been the work of another eminent nonalcoholic, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, of Union Theological Seminary. Dr. Niebuhr was amused on being told of the use to which his prayer was being put. Asked if it was original with him, he said he thought it was, but added, “Of course, it may have been spooking around for centuries.” Alcoholics Anonymous seized upon it in 1940 [actually 1941], after it has been used as a quotation in the New York Herald Tribune. The fellowship was late in catching up with it; and it will probably spook around a good deal longer before the rest of the world catches up with it.”

Wing also referred to several other “origins” of the prayer that have been sent to A.A. at one time or another. There was even the reprint of a letter written by Ursula Niebuhr, Reinhold’s wife, which briefly reviewed the background to the Serenity Prayer given above by her daughter.

In the January 1950 issue of the AA Grapevine, there appeared an article entitled: “The Serenity Prayer,” that attributed the prayer to Niebuhr, and even gave what they said his original text. The prayer attributed to Niebuhr in the Grapevine article was not the version quoted above as the Niebuhrian 1943 version. The A.A. article also dated the origin of the Serenity Prayer to 1932. Howard Robbins is said to have received permission to place it in a compilation of prayers he then published in 1934. An A.A. member saw the prayer in an obituary in 1939, and brought it to the attention of Bill W. and others in A.A. The history described here seems to contradict that given above by Sifton. For more on the A.A. understanding of the origins of the Serenity Prayer, see: “The Serenity Prayer and A.A.”

Elisabeth Sifton, her mother and father all seem to have a similar sense of the Niebuhrian version of the Serenity Prayer coming from a sermon that he preached at Heath during WWII. Nell Wing reviewed several other possibilities, some of which were shown to be false. Yet the consensus from A.A. seems to believe the 1943 Niebuhrian version wasn’t the first. Writing for the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2008, Fred Shapiro wrote of his own investigations into the origins of the Serenity Prayer, “Who Wrote the Serenity Prayer?”

Shapiro noted that Niebuhr’s version of the Serenity Prayer was selected by the editor’s of the World Almanac as one of the ten most memorable quotes of the last 100 years. In English and German-speaking countries, he thought it was probably the only prayer to rival the Lord’s Prayer in popularity. Shapiro said Niebuhr himself said it was possible he assimilated its concept from some earlier, forgotten source. Nevertheless, Niebuhr made it clear that he believed the prayer originated with him.

Shapiro’s research found versions of the Serenity Prayer in newspaper databases before 1943. He stated how the evidence was by no means, conclusive; and it is entirely possible Niebuhr composed the prayer much earlier than he himself remembered. When he found at least eight versions of the prayer in newspapers before 1943, he contacted Elisabeth Sifton with his evidence. In response, Sifton commented that prayers evolve, are borrowed, transmuted and revised—by their original writers and others.

Sifton herself noted in her own book where the ideas expressed in the Serenity Prayer existed in previous works by her father. She noted how the tone of the Serenity Prayer radiated throughout Niebuhr’s classic work, The Nature and Destiny of Man. Niebuhr gave a series lectures with the same name at the Gifford Lectures between 1938 and 1940 at the University of Edinburgh. She pointed out where the second volume ended with a consideration of the ideas he was to express in his little prayer just a year or so later:

Wisdom about our destiny is dependent upon a humble recognition of the limits of our knowledge and our power. Our most reliable understanding in the fruit of “grace,” in which faith completes our ignorance without pretending to possess its certainties as knowledge, and in which contrition mitigates our pride without destroying our hope.

The following are two examples of what Shapiro found. Follow the above link to his full article for more.

In the January 16, 1936 edition of the Syracuse Herald, the executive secretary for the Syracuse Y.W.C.A. quoted the following prayer in her annual report:

O God, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and insight to know the one from the other.

In the February 19, 1939 edition of the Ada (Oklahoma) Herald the home counselor for Oklahoma City’s public schools prayer said the prayer for both parents should be:

Oh God, give me serenity to accept that which cannot be changed, give me courage to change that which can be changed and wisdom to tell the one from the other.

Shapiro said it was possible that Niebuhr introduced the prayer by the mid-1930s in an unpublished or private setting. It was then quickly disseminated with his identification largely forgotten. But he said it must be asked why Niebuhr himself never suggested he had used the prayer in the 1930s. However, he believes a second alternative is more likely. The prayer really was “spooking around for years” and Niebuhr unconsciously adapted it from some already-existing formulation.

Sifton responded to Shapiro’s conclusions in “It Takes A Master to Make A Masterpiece.” You can find her response at the end of the link for Shapiro’s article, “Who Wrote the Serenity Prayer?” She still affirmed her father as the essential author of the Serenity Prayer. Shapiro merely demonstrated that her father’s voice reached far more American churches and organizations than they had previously realized. Prayers are presented orally and become famous orally long before they are put on paper.

Yet the great masterpiece prayers don’t materialize in some random, bubble-up way, either: their power comes from a distillation of complex spiritual truths, and for this we need authors, we need the tradition’s most gifted practitioners. In my book, I quoted prayers from various sources that my father knew well and whose cadences and theology feed into the Serenity Prayer’s concise wisdoms, because I wanted to suggest how the rich texture of worship as experienced by generations of believers nourishes the creation of new prayers. To throw light on this long, often anonymous process was one purpose of my book.

Sifton commented that since the Serenity Prayer has become so associated with the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, most people think of it as expressing what we must work on within our “personal self-improvement projects.” Yet it was composed in wartime. It addresses “the inconsolable pain, loss, and guilt that war inflicts on the communities that wage it.”

She said her father drafted his prayers rapidly, or composed them right on the spot, rewording them many times before he felt they were in final form. Most of the prayers she cited in her book were not published until after his death in 1971. But by then generations of student and worshipers had known them well and used them for decades. “The Serenity Prayer was unusual in his oeuvre [body of work], then, only in the odd circumstance of its wartime publication and subsequent diffusion.”

The Niebuhrian version of the Serenity Prayer seems to have clearly come from Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1943 sermon. It also seems likely that the concepts within the prayer had been part of his teaching, thinking and writing in the years prior to that fateful sermon. And yet, religious believers and philosophers for thousands of years have struggled to be at peace or in harmony with the things in life that cannot be changed; to find courage to change the things they can; and to know the one from the other. The dilemma of the Serenity Prayer strikes at the heart of all religious and philosophical quests to know the will of God. Lord, by your grace grant us the serenity, courage and wisdom to know and do your will.

Originally posted on 01/17/2017

07/26/22

Doing My Utmost for Surrender and Sanctification

A pastor of the church I attended preached a sermon many years ago on Romans 12:1-2 and he started off by asking a question: “Do you know what the problem with living sacrifices is?” He answered his question with: “They are always trying to crawl off the altar.” I don’t recall the sermon he preached, but I have always remembered the wisdom of these words; particularly as they apply to surrender in 12 Step recovery.

In a previous article in this series, “Surrender and Sanctification Along the Romans Road,” I reflected on how Romans 12:1 (I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship) applied to recovery. Here we will pick up the discussion by continuing with Romans 12:2.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

What is this living sacrifice supposed to look like? What form does this spiritual worship, this devotion to God take? There are three things to see in how 12:2 responds to these questions. First, the command is set in the negative. Paul is realistic in recognizing the continued presence of sin in the life of believers. In his commentary on the book of Romans, John Murray said that eight of the Ten Commandments were negative because of sin; and that the first evidence of Christian faith is when we turn from sin. We might add that the living sacrifice of progressive sanctification is a persistent struggle against our sin nature, which repeatedly attempts to crawl off of the altar upon which it was sacrificed. “Sanctification is a process of revolutionary change in that which is the centre of consciousness . . . It is the thought of progression and strikes at the stagnation, complacency, pride of achievement so often characterizing Christians.”

The second thing is the term for ‘world’ here–aiōn, means a unit of time within a particular stage of history. In this sense, it should be understood as a contrast between the present age and the age to come. “This age,” its wisdom and its rulers, will pass away (1Co. 2:6). Its wisdom is foolishness before God (1Co. 1:20; 3:18-19). The age to come is the time of the resurrection at Christ’s return, when he will rule over all things; those who are raised in Christ will be equal to the angels and will never die (Matt. 12:32; Eph. 1:21; Luke 20:34-36).

Murray is helpful in his observation that this age is temporal and transient. “Conformity to this age is to be wrapped up in the things that are temporal, to have all our thought oriented to that which is seen and temporal.” The age to come is eternal. So, Paul gives us a warning here, do not be conformed to the things of this world.

Thirdly, there is a contrast between being conformed to this world/age and being transformed by the renewal of our mind. To fully appreciate what Paul is saying here, we need to look at some of his vocabulary in the original Greek. The term rendered ‘conformed’ is used only one other time in the NT (in 1 Peter. 1:14) and has the sense being conformed to a pattern or mold. The term ‘transformed’ means to metamorphose or change the essential nature of something. Again, the term for renewal is rarely used, found only one other time in the NT, in Titus 3:5.

Paul is attempting to communicate the radical change brought about by this living sacrifice. It is not a conformity or alignment with the Logos, the inherent Reason or “god” of the universe as with Stoic philosophy. We are not to accommodate the things of this world; not even the general revelation of God in creation (Romans 1:19). There is to be a metamorphosis of our essential nature into the image of Christ by the renewal of our minds; a transformation only possible through the action of the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18).

The radical transformation required in the life of an addict or alcoholic is often one of the biggest stumbling blocks to their ability to establish and then maintain lifelong abstinence. The things of this ‘age’ include wine with dinner; beer and football games; parties and pot. Separation from the People Places and Things of this addictive age can mean losing a life-long friendship; never going to another rock concert; foregoing a raucous ‘pub crawl’ with friends to celebrate turning twenty-one. It can mean giving up a lucrative career as a nurse anesthetist because you have easy access to your drugs of choice. It can mean separation, and even divorce, from a life-long partner who refuses to give up their own drinking or drug use and follow you into an abstinent-based lifestyle.

It requires changes to the essential nature of how you live your life and look at the world around you.

In the exhortation to be transformed by the renewal of our mind, we see a further application of Romans 6:17, where Paul said that we were to become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which we are committed. Faith without works is dead (James 2:26) was a favorite saying of Bill W. There is a necessary correspondence between what we do and what we believe. The faith we have in Christ is inexorably related to the metamorphosis of our will and lives into the will of God. The preceptive will of God for us, found in God’s law, should be progressively evident in our lives. This is also called progressive sanctification.

Inevitably in our lives, the question arises about which potential option before us is God’s will? Guidelines for many such decisions are clearly indicated in Scripture. Regardless of the allure of another person, do not commit adultery. Despite the enormity of the hurt done to us by another, do not murder. But many others are less readily discernible.

Do I marry this person or not? Do I accept this job or not? Do I comply with seemingly unethical directions from my boss? If God has a good, acceptable, perfect plan for my life, what is it here and now in this immediate situation? What do I decide? How do I respond? Am I reading the situation correctly?

Paul’s answer is to ‘test’ your choice. Make a decision and give it a trial run; formulate a hypothesis and see if your ‘experiment’ confirms or rejects the hypothesis. The testing process will determine if a certain decision is genuinely God’s will. We learn by experience what the will of God is; and in the process of testing, confirm the goodness and perfection of that will.

In the AA Grapevine article, “A Life Without Problems,” a man with twenty-three years of abstinence from alcohol remarked at a meeting that by turning his will and life over to the care of God, he had no problems that day. He readily admitted that hadn’t always been true, having “four marriages, three divorces, nine jobs, fourteen addresses (across four different states), dozens of home groups, and a countless number of meetings” in his twenty-three years since joining A.A. Even into double-digit years of sobriety he clung to his problems, making them his identity. He resisted anyone who might offer a solution and fought “to stay in my comfortable zone of unhappy competence that I had established with my problems.”

After the meeting, he was asked how he did it. The answer he gave was that the Third Step swept them away. “I turned my will and my life over to the care of God, as I understand him (or don’t understand him, her, it or them). Now I have only one task, laid out in AA’s Eleventh Step: ‘praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.’” Even if there was only “the Random God of the Cosmic Dice Game,” that “god” would get better results than what he had achieved through self-will.

Quoting the closing words to Bill Wilson’s Step Three essay in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, he said that to turn your will and life over to the care of God, “we can pause, ask for quiet, and in the stillness simply say [the Serenity Prayer], ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’” In this moment, regardless of what happened before or what may happen tomorrow, what is the very best thing you can possibly do right now? Either do God’s will forcefully or be willing to be proved wrong–even if it means experiencing temporarily painful consequences. “Do what you think is God’s will at each particular moment, and you will have no problems. At least, that’s the best I can explain it today.”

Although you don’t see this mentioned in A.A. approved literature, AAs and its founders read the Oswald Chambers devotional My Utmost for His Highest in the early pre-Big Book years. Early Akron A.A. meetings opened with prayer and a reading from the Bible or a devotional such as My Utmost for His Highest. Dr. Bob, his wife Anne, Bill W. and his wife Lois used it. Chambers regularly returned to the topic of surrender and being a living sacrifice in his devotional comments. Here are a few selections.

It is of no value to God to give Him your life for death. He wants you to be a “living sacrifice,” to let Him have all your powers that have been saved and sanctified through Jesus. This is the thing that is acceptable to God. (January 8^th)

The natural must be turned into the spiritual by sacrifice, otherwise a tremendous divorce will be produced in the natural life . . . The only way we can offer a spiritual sacrifice to God is by presenting our bodies a living sacrifice. (December 10^th)

Surrender is not the surrender of the external life, but of the Will; when that is done, all is done. There are very few crises in life; the great crisis is the surrender of the will. God never crushes a man’s will into surrender, He never beseeches him, He waits until the man yields up his will to Him. That battle never needs to be re-fought. (September 13^th)

Notice the parallel themes to the following exhortation by Bill W. in his final words to chapter eleven of the Big Book, “A Vision for You”: “Abandon yourself to God as You understand God. Admit your faults to Him and to your fellows. Clear away the wreckage of your past. Give freely of what you find and join us.”

If you’re interested, more articles from this series can be found under the link for “The Romans Road of Recovery.” “A Common Spiritual Path” (01) and “The Romans Road of Recovery” (02) will introduce this series of articles. If you began by reading one that came from the middle or the end of the series, try reading them before reading others. Follow the numerical listing of the articles (i.e., 01, 02, or 1st, 2nd, etc.), if you want to read them in the order they were originally intended. This article is the 15th in the series. Enjoy.

07/5/22

Surrender and Sanctification Along the Romans Road

Roman Road in Pompeii; © bloodua | 123rf.com

In chapter 12 of Romans Paul shifts from his discussion of the theological basis for faith in Christ, to a more practical discussion of how this faith should be applied in daily living. The ‘therefore’ in verse 1 suggests that what is to follow is based upon what came before. But not only does this verse refer back to the mercy discussed in Romans 11, of God bringing salvation to both Jews and Gentiles, but also to all the mercies throughout the first eleven chapters of Romans. These mercies include those we’ve looked at along the Romans Road: the mercy of God’s redemptive work Christ (Romans 3:23-25); the resulting mercy of the free gift of eternal life (Ro. 6:22-23); the mercy that this gift is available for all who believe in the person and work of Christ (Ro. 10:9-11); and the great mercy of being at peace with God (Romans 5:1).

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12:1)

In his commentary on the book of Romans, Robert Mounce said, “These ‘mercies’ provide not only the basis, but also the incentive for all moral effort on the part of the Christian.” So, we are to consider ourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ. Sin should not have dominion over us (Romans 6:1-14). We are to walk according to the Spirit; not according to the flesh (Romans 8:4).

Greek philosophy often devalued the body. According to John Murray, “The ethical ideal was to be free from the body and its influences.” But this belief runs counter to a Biblical understanding of the importance of our physical nature. The degeneration of the body is the consequence of sin (cf. Genesis 2:17; 3:19; Romans 5:12), but the consummation of redemption anticipates the resurrection of the body (cf. Romans 8:23; 1 Corinthians 15:54-56). So, the renewal of our physical being is an integral part of the redemptive work of Christ. What was Paul trying to say here in Romans 12:1?

In First Corinthians (1 Corinthians 9:24-27), Paul urged Christians to discipline their bodies by self-control in all things. Here in Romans, he said we are to consider ourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ. Sin should not have dominion over us (Romans 6:1-14). We are to walk according to the Spirit; not according to the flesh (Romans 8:4). Therefore, we are to present ourselves “to God as instruments of righteousness” (Romans 6:13); or as he said in Romans 12:1, as a living sacrifice.

Paul uses ritual sacrifice here, common in both Jewish and Roman culture, as a conceptual metaphor to introduce how the Christian should live out their faith in Christ. An offering in Old Testament, Jewish ritual or Roman cultic practice was killed; its blood was shed. Paul turns the usual understanding on its head by saying that believers are called to a living sacrifice of their bodies.

Similar to our own time, in Roman culture there was a tendency to minimize or justify certain physical appetites as ‘normal.’ Coupled with the tendency to diminish the importance of the physical body, there was a real danger that some within the Roman church would seek to live a sinful lifestyle because they were under grace (Rom. 6:15ff). Paul was aware that if sanctification did not include the physical aspect of our being, it would be impossible to achieve. So here in chapter 12, he calls for the alignment and renewal of bodily appetites according to the will of God, and declares it to be an act of spiritual worship.

This living sacrifice is clearly voluntary, and suggests that free will has a role to play in sanctification. Surrendering our bodies as living sacrifices is a decision and we could choose to not do. As Robert Mounce noted, “Holiness of life rarely progresses apart from deliberative acts of the will. While sanctification is gradual in the sense that it continues throughout life, each advance depends upon a decision of the will.”

Living Sacrifice in the Third Step

Paul’s appeal to present our lives as living sacrifices to God in Romans 12:1 has a clear recovery parallel within the Third Step of Alcoholics Anonymous, which reads: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” Here we see the same dynamic of a call or decision to turn over the living sacrifice of our will and lives to the care of God, albeit to God as we understood Him. This god is not necessarily the God of Scripture, but the language of surrender in Step Three has an echo of familiarity to the Christian. In an essay he wrote on the Third Step, Bill Wilson said, “It is when we try to make our will conform with God’s that we begin to use it rightly.” If Bill had been referring to the God of Scripture, his comment could have been appropriately applied to the Biblical call to surrender in Romans 12:1.

Using the metaphor of a closed and locked door which opens only to the key of ‘willingness,’ Wilson said that looking through it, we see an inscription beside a pathway which reads: “This is the way to a faith that works.” Faith of some kind, even if it was only in A.A. itself, was possible to anyone. “But faith alone can avail nothing. We can have faith, yet keep God out of our lives.” Wilson added that the effectiveness of the whole A.A. program rested upon “how well and earnestly” the alcoholic worked the Third Step. Even the smallest beginning of willingness was enough. Once the key of willingness was placed in the lock and the door was even slightly open, “we find that we can always open it some more.” Self-will may slam it shut, but “it will always respond the moment we again pick up the key of willingness.”

The program of Narcotics Anonymous believes “Recovery begins with surrender.” It’s Third Step Prayer says, “Take my will and my life. Guide me in my recovery. Show me how to live.” The relief of letting go and letting God helps an addict to develop a life worth living. This surrender gets easier with daily practice. “When we honestly try, it works.” But there is a caution that recognizes this is a living sacrifice: “Although we know that ‘turning it over’ works, we may still take our will and life back.”

Bill Wilson observed that simply by joining A.A., the person had made a beginning on Step Three. “Already a willingness has been achieved to cast out one’s own will and one’s own ideas about the alcohol problem in favor of those suggested by A.A.” But suppose that instinct of self-determination attempts to limit the surrender only to things involving alcohol?

“How persistently we claim the right to decide all by ourselves just what we shall think and just how we shall act.” We are confident that intelligence and willpower can control our inner lives and give us success. This philosophy of playing God sounds good, but it has to meet the acid test: “how well does it actually work?” The alcoholic learned through experience that self-sufficiency did not pay off. “Each of us had his own near-fatal encounter with the juggernaut of self-will, and has suffered enough under its weight to be willing to look for something better.” Circumstances drove them to A.A. where they admitted defeat, acquired the rudiments of faith and are now faced with the decision to turn their will and life over to a Higher Power.

As the Third Step says, we make a decision to turn our will and life over to the care of God; we become a living sacrifice. Sanctification must include our body. Our sacrifice encompasses our whole being: body and soul. For the addict or alcoholic, this alignment and renewal of their bodily appetites with the will of God includes abstinence from all mind altering and mood changing drugs. They must make this surrender.

In his daily devotional, Oswald Chambers said surrender is not the surrender of the external life, but of the will. He said one of a few great crises in life is the surrender of our will to God, who neither crushes it into submission nor pleads with us to surrender it. He waits until we yield our will to Him. According to Chambers, “That battle never needs to be re-fought.” (My Utmost for His Highest, September 13^th).

06/14/22

We Are But Thinking Reeds

gladkov / 123RF Stock Photo There seems to be a disturbing trend within our culture to take for granted that mind is just a byproduct of brain activity. More specifically, consciousness or thought is a manifestation of mere brain activity. To paraphrase Blasé Pascal, we are but reeds, the most-feeble things in Nature; but we are thinking reeds. And when the measurable evidence of thought is absent, “we” are dead and gone. Disembodied souls or minds are fairy tales.

In Texas, the family of a brain dead, pregnant woman wanted to remove life support, while the hospital sought to continue it for the sake of her unborn child. After a court order, the woman (and child) were removed from life support and died. In California, the family of a brain dead teenage girl fought to retain life support while the hospital sought to remove her from a ventilator because she was legally dead. The hospital eventually released her to the coroner, insisting this was necessary, because she was legally dead. The coroner then immediately turned her over to the parents, who now have her at an undisclosed location.

These two situations illustrate the dilemma that technological advancements have brought to the mind-body dualism of human nature. No more can we say with confidence, “What is mind? Never Matter! What is matter? Never Mind!” The husband and family of the Texas woman believed her mind was gone and would never return. The family of the teenage girl continues to hope that despite all the negative medical evidence, her mind is still present and may someday resume its manifestation in her bodily life.

We cannot quantify or measure the presence of mind, so medicine and law assumes the absence of a soul in these circumstances. More likely, the possibility of soul or mind independent of body is not considered at all. Do the machines register any brain activity? Does a medical expert interpret these readings as indicating life or death?

Biblically, the terms heart, soul, mind and spirit are all used to refer to nonmaterial human nature. As the theologian Anthony Hoekema puts it, we are material and nonmaterial; we have a physical side and a mental or spiritual side. A human being must be understood as an embodied soul; a unitary being. “He or she must be seen in his or her totality, not a composite of different parts.”

Hoekema suggests that human nature is a psychosomatic unity of body (soma) and soul (psyche). “The advantage of this expression is that it does full justice to the two sides of man, while stressing man’s unity.” There are material and nonmaterial aspects to humanity that constitute an indivisible whole. He quoted the “brain physicist” Donald M. MacKay to illustrate this relationship between mind and brain:

We are considering them [my conscious experience and the workings of my brain] as two equally real aspects of one and the same mysterious unity. The outside observer sees one aspect, as a physical pattern of brain activity. The agent himself knows another aspect as his conscious experience. . . . What we are saying is that these aspects are complementary.”

Understanding human nature as a psychosomatic unity of body and soul raises serious questions about how we should conceptualize mind-body problems like addiction and “mental illness.” Stephen Weatherhead, a British psychologist, voiced his fear that “We are in danger of trying to neurofy every human experience, every response, every behaviour. . . . We must be careful not to keep on digging away on this hypothesis that all mental health difficulties have a root cause in biology.” Weatherhead does not want to see neuropsychology self-destruct and “fall into the pit of over-simplifying complex human experience.”

Neuroscience will likely play an increasingly important role in our lives, but we would do well to keep in mind the word of Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, who said: “You will not find the limits of the soul, though you take every road; so deep is the tale of it.” Remember, you are but a thinking reed.

Originally posted on June 6, 2014

05/31/22

The Foundation of the Book of Job

We can look at the world around us and wonder will there ever be justice for the death, destruction and war in Ukraine. We can ask why God allowed hundreds of thousands of people to die from COVID; from AIDS; from ebola. Will there ever be justice for the genocide of the Tutsi people in Rwanda; for the victims of terrorism? These questions wrestle with a theological problem called theodicy, how can God be said to be good, righteous, and powerful in a world full of such disorder and evil? Walter Brueggeman, a Biblical scholar, suggested these are echoes of the dilemma of Job.

The problem of theodicy is a concern throughout the Bible, from the first pronouncement of judgment against the entire human race for the sin of Adam in Genesis, to the last plague of Revelation. But John Walton sees the dilemma of Job more particularly as the retribution principle. Satan, the adversary, claimed Job’s blamelessness and uprightness was simply because God has “blessed the work of his hands” and put a hedge around him and all that he has. If he were to lose all that he has, Satan said Job would curse God to his face (Job 1:9-12).

The retribution principle essentially says the people get what they deserve. The righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. Satan voiced this principle to God in Job 1:9, when he asked: “Does Job fear God for no reason?” The implication is that Job follows the retribution principle and obeys God because he knows it will result in his prosperity. If God were to reverse that and have Job suffer despite his righteousness, Satan predicted Job would curse God to his face (Job 1:11).

The retribution principle is an attempt to understand what God is doing in the world, to articulate it, to justify it, to systematize the logic of how God is working in the world, that God is working a justice system. You do good, you get good. You do bad, bad things happen. So, the retribution principle assumes an understanding of how God works in the world. It’s an attempt to sort of quantify or systematize it.

It’s common for people to assume their circumstances in life somehow reflect that they are in favor with God or the gods; or that they are out of favor. The retribution principle is behind the modern idiom, “What goes around comes around.” We casually say when something goes well, “Oh, I must be doing something right.” Or, “What did I do to deserve this,” when things go badly. But people in the ancient Near East widely thought that way too.

In fact, the book of Job is putting the retribution principle under the microscope because Job and his friends all believe very firmly in the retribution principle. That’s really part of the problem. They see the retribution principle. Not only do you assume that if someone is righteous, they will prosper and if someone is wicked, they will suffer, they also turn that around. If someone is suffering, they must be wicked. If someone is prospering, they must have done something right. And so, when Job’s circumstances turn so dramatically, so tragically, we know what conclusion everyone is going to draw. They’ll decide he must’ve done something really, really bad to bring this kind of disaster, to go from the heights to the depths.

That is really what we see with Job. He was living the lifestyle of the rich and famous and he fell into the lowest depths of suffering. Walton said remembering those extremes is important in order for us to think clearly about the retribution principle as we read Job. If the retribution principle is truly part of God’s policies, yet righteous people like Job suffer, then God’s justice is suspect. This seems to be the belief of Job’s wife, who encourages him to curse God and die (Job 2:9).

But if the retribution principle brings benefit and prosperity to good, righteous people, it is detrimental to true righteousness, because it sets up an ulterior motive, the anticipation of gain for doing good.

Walton suggested thinking about there being a triangle of claims within Job. At one of the lower ends of the triangle is the retribution principle; at the other lower end is Job’s righteousness. At the top of the triangle, is God’s justice. As long as Job is prospering, the triangle holds together nicely. “God is doing justice. Job is righteous, and the retribution principle is true and everything’s happy.”

But when righteous Job begins to suffer, something is wrong with the triangle of claims and it begins to fall apart. All three corners of the triangle— God’s justice, Job being righteous, and the retribution principle—can no longer all be true. But which two do you hold on to? You can’t hold on to all three; something’s got to give.

Job’s friends hold fast to the retribution principle. “Repeatedly in their speeches, they affirm the retribution principle. They apply it; they use it as part of their argumentation.” Are they really going to say God isn’t really being just with Job; or are they going to say Job isn’t really righteous? They continue to affirm God’s justice and ask Job what he did to deserve his suffering. But Job holds onto his righteousness.

Job tries to find fault with the retribution principle, but he really can’t. An so he turns his eyes towards God, and as Job’s speeches continue, they become more and more accusing of God; it becomes more and more doubtful, skeptical about God and whether He does justice at all. So, Job builds his house in his own corner and holds onto the retribution principle. He’s giving up on God’s justice.

Elihu Redefines the Retribution Principle

Then another voice, that of Elihu, who had kept quiet because of his youth, enters into the discussion. He takes his stand on God’s justice, essentially saying the retribution principle is true, but Job and his friends have got it wrong. Elihu wants to refine and expand it. He says most people think it refers to bad things you’ve done in the past— people get what they deserve. Elihu says this way of thinking about the retribution principle makes it remedial; fixing or responding to what’s gone wrong. But what if it is actually preventative, or developing?

It’s not so much what you did in the past that’s causing negative consequences, it’s something you are just getting ready to get involved in that you’re on the brink of this kind of behavior; that it’s supposed to turn you away from it. So, the retribution principle could be a response to, present developing things, instead of things in the past.

So, Elihu doesn’t have to find unrighteousness in Job’s past. He says the reason for Job’s suffering is his self-righteousness—his willingness to vindicate, to justify himself at the expense of God. The problem is not what Job did before his suffering began. It has become evident in how he responded once the suffering started. The problem is Job’s self-righteousness.

Walton said this seems to be cheating with the dilemma of the triangle of claims. By redefining what the retribution principle means, it gives Elihu an alternative the others never thought of and could not choose. Job himself is also less able to defend himself; and as he continues to affirm his righteousness, his self-righteousness becomes clearly evident. Elihu sees Job more realistically, more appropriately than the other friends. But he has his own problems because he makes the retribution principle the foundation for how he understands how God is working in the world.

How can we resolve these tensions? Bad things do happen to good, righteous people and evil people do prosper. How can we resolve the tension of the retribution principle? “Most people at one time or another experience life in such a way that it looks suspect to them. How are those tensions resolved?”

One way is to qualify the nature of God. Walton said this is what people did in the ancient Near East. “They had no confidence that God was acting justly.” Others qualified the purpose of suffering. Some said it was character-building. Today, they might refer to it as participating in Christ’s sufferings. They ultimately qualify the purpose of suffering. Walton said this does resolve some of the tensions in the retribution principle.

In the biblical texts, the Psalmist sometimes thinks about timing. In the lament psalms, most of the lamenting is in the context of the retribution principle. Why is this happening? Eventually things will smooth out. God will, at the appropriate time, act against the enemy. In Christian theology, we look to eternity. Things may be bad now, but on the scale of eternity, the things we suffer now are minor.

Or you could qualify the retribution principle according to the role of justice in the world. God acts justly, but we live in an unjust, chaotic world. “In this world, non-order continues.” We know that he hasn’t made the world conform to his own justice, because we know we’re sinful and yet we still exist. “If the world fully conformed to God’s justice, it wouldn’t be a world we could life in.” Therefore, perfect justice is not obtainable in a fallen world.

God and his world are different and he has not imposed his justice upon it. In his wisdom, God is concerned with justice. But given the constraints of an imperfect, fallen world, a not-yet fully ordered world, we’re not living in a perfectly ordered world yet. And therefore, it does not reflect his attributes throughout. None of these explanations is completely satisfying.

Walton suggested we think of the retribution principle as proverbial in nature. It’s often how things are, but does not always explain how things work. It’s not a guarantee or promise. And it does not provide an explanation of all the suffering or evil in the world.

The retribution principle tells us about the heart of God. He delights in giving good things to those who are his faithful servants. He also takes seriously the need to punish wicked people. “But he doesn’t carry those things out throughout, because it’s a fallen world and none of us could live through that.”

We shouldn’t expect it to work all the time. We have the theology of God—what he is like—standing against the theodicy of God, which explains life as we experience it. The contrasting positions of the theology and theodicy compels us to turn to God and ask him to resolve the dilemma.

The book of Job is, as it were, doing some radical surgery to separate these two principles so we don’t make the mistake of thinking that a theology of God leads to an explanation of how he is working in the world. Yahweh’s justice must be taken on faith rather than worked out philosophically. God does not need to be defended. Our attempts at theodicy, are in one sense, an insult to God. “He doesn’t need our defense.”

Walton added we cannot defend him very ably anyways. God wants to be trusted. We can’t tell when God is going to choose justice or when he’s going to choose mercy. We can’t tell where his compassion might override something else that he “ought” to be doing. Justice is a part of God, but does not trump all the other attributes God has.

Jesus and the Retribution Principle

Jesus was repeatedly challenged with retribution questions. For example in John 9, Jesus heals the man born blind. The disciples posed the retribution principle in their question saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” If the answer is the man sinned, why was he was born blind. If the answer is his parents, why did he suffer? Their question is a question of cause; a theodicy question.

But Jesus said: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” In effect, Jesus tells them not to look to the past and ask about cause. That’s not the answer. Instead, he tells them to look to the future and think about purpose, namely that the works of God might be displayed. The glory of God is a purpose, not a cause.

Walton said this was the same answer Job got from God—“trust God’s wisdom and seek out his purpose.” Don’t expect to get causal explanations. When Jesus addressed issues concerning retribution principles, he consistently turned away from giving reasons or explanations for cause and pointed to what God intended to do. That’s essentially what the book of Job is about.

This was a retelling of Lecture 7 of Dr. John Walton’s YouTube series of 30 mini lectures on the book of Job, “Theological Foundation: Retribution Principle, Tringle.” Dr. Walton also wrote the commentary on Job for NIV Application Commentary Series, for which he was one of the contributing editors for the Old Testament.

05/10/22

Thoroughly Following the Path of Recovery

When discussing “Salvation” in the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, M.J. Harris said it had three tenses: the past, the present and the future. Trusting in the reality of our past deliverance in Christ, salvation can be understood as a past event. ‘Being saved’ is also an ongoing, present process as believers strive to manifest the reality of that salvation in our present lives (Romans 6:6, 12-14, 19). Yet the ultimate consummation of salvation lies in the future when Christ will return and redeem His creation. Christians are saved in hope with the expectation of the redemption of the body (Romans 8:23-24).

There is a similar sense of three tenses in recovery: a past decision to be abstinent, coupled with a present commitment to change, which results in the future realization of recovery. Abstinence may be a past completed action, but recovery is also a process of change that continues throughout the life of an addict or alcoholic. In this way, there is an eschatological sense to both salvation and recovery, where growth and change is a progressive process of striving for a fulfillment we cannot achieve in this life. Progress, not perfection applies equally to the journeys of salvation and recovery.

The Importance of Faith

(Romans 5:1-2) Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

The three tenses of salvation are embedded in what Paul says here. Paul concludes that since we have been justified by faith (a past completed action), which he convincingly demonstrated in chapters one through four of Romans, we now have (present tense) peace with God “through our Lord Jesus Christ.” We also have access by faith into the grace in which we stand (present tense); and so, we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. The past completed work of Christ results in grace and peace with God; and we rejoice in the future hope of the glory of God. No human being will ever be justified by works of the law (Romans 3:20). But now the righteousness of God through faith in Christ is available as a free gift for all who believe (Romans 3:21-4:25; esp. v. 3:24). Therefore, we rejoice, because what had seemed hopeless is no longer hopeless because we have been justified by faith.

While it clearly lacks the centrality of Christ, consider the parallels with this example of the three tenses of recovery.

J. B. boldly declared there was never a clearer example of faith in God than his. As an alcoholic, “Four walls and a bottle had become my world.” He drank until he was unconscious. He carried on conversations with “the man who wasn’t there.” He imagined little bugs crawling under his skin; and more. With the help of a friend, he came to the realization that he had been trying to run his own life. “I had always known there was a Higher Power, but I had forgotten God. He hadn’t forgotten me.” He was convinced that only a power greater than himself could cure him of his obsession for liquor. With complete faith, he turned to God. He admitted defeat and asked for help. He began to work the principles of the A.A. program.

I found peace within myself. I felt in harmony with, and became conscious of, the power of God. It is in the air we breathe, in the wonders of creation. . . . I changed on the inside, so life for me changed on the outside. I have faith in myself again. I became free of that pattern of running away from life and myself. I didn’t need an escape. My alcoholic problem had disappeared. . . . I am grateful and humble to be a part of something so big and wonderful; a spiritual program that is growing, and whose principles can be applied to all our daily affairs. It is simple. It is faith. (“When Faith Helped Me Most,” AA Grapevine, November 1952)

Suffering Leads to Hope

(Romans 5:3-5) More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Paul says that not only do we rejoice in our future hope of the glory of God, we also rejoice in our present sufferings or troubles. Our present peace is not just because of our future hope. Right now, in the midst of our troubles we can rejoice, because suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. The Greek term for “character” here denotes something that has been proven by trial. Perseverance or spiritual tenacity in the midst of trials and suffering produces character, which leads to hope. There is a progressive spiral upwards that begins with the grace we obtained by faith and ends with hope that will not put us to shame.

The implication here is that we cannot be defeated; there is always hope in achieving the glory of God, if we remain faithful. Looking ahead to our future hope, confident of its fulfillment because we have been justified by faith, we endure in suffering. As we continue to bear up under trying circumstances, Robert Mounce thought we developed strength of character. “Christian suffering is a source of joy because its purpose is to build character in the believer.”

Christianity is not a masochistic rejoicing in suffering, but it is a confidence that when we rely upon Christ in the midst of our suffering, we cannot be defeated. But without faith, there is a progressive downward spiral: suffering brings about despair; despair leads to faint-heartedness; and faint-heartedness produces hopelessness. Hope leads to more hope; hopelessness brings about greater hopelessness.

In “Embers of Hope,” a man described the consequences of a decision he made to end his life on Labor Day, 2001. After drinking himself into oblivion, he set fire to his house and staggered into the woods behind his home. There he put a shotgun with a rifle slug under his chin and pulled the trigger.

An hour later he awoke, filled with disgust for failing to end his life. He’d only brought one shell and couldn’t go back home for more, because by this time there were twelve fire companies on the scene. So, he crawled further into the woods, hoping that he would bleed to death before anyone could find him. In what he said was “an act of Providence,” he had a moment of clarity and somehow found the strength to walk the distance he had crawled into the woods.

A photographer for a local paper who saw him at first thought he was some kind of a Halloween decoration, with his jaw blown away and his left eye hanging out of its socket. The doctors who treated him said it was a miracle he was alive; ten more minutes in the woods and he would have most likely bled to death.

In the hospital, I awoke one morning and standing next to my bed was the pastor from the local church in my community. He asked me in no uncertain terms if I had had enough yet and handed me a Bible and the A.A. Big Book. With tears streaming down my face, I reached out for the books. With a nod of submission, I started my journey into recovery.God has turned my shadow of death into another morning and A.A. is giving me the tools to live in this day. I am powerless over alcohol, and I firmly believe that what my human helplessness could not overcome, God’s divine enablement can. (AA Grapevine, June 2007).

The reason for us to have hope as we endure suffering is: “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” This love is God’s love for us, which does not waver and cannot fail. He has loved us with an everlasting love and continues His faithfulness to us (Jeremiah. 31:3). The Greek word translated as poured in Romans 6:5 has the sense of dying as a sacrifice (Matthew. 26:28; Mark. 14:24; Luke. 22:20). Paul is obviously thinking of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ through which we receive the Holy Spirit. This love of God has also been poured into our hearts; and what rules our heart, rules our behavior (Matthew. 6:21; Luke. 6:45). Again, the result is that we will be like Him. We shall be at peace with God and full of the glory of God. So we rejoice in our sufferings, as we rejoice in hope of the glory of God, because nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ (Romans 8:39).

Often in recovery there is a tendency to focus efforts on addictive behavior, the wrong doing of addiction. Don’t drink and go to meetings. Don’t pick up the first joint, pill, fix or drink. Stay away from people, places and things associated with addiction. Although these behavioral changes are necessary, they are not sufficient for long-term recovery. Just not using drugs or alcohol (abstinence) and systematically modifying your addiction-related behavior is a shallow imitation of true recovery. Without concurrent attention to the wrong being of addiction, the addict or alcoholic will eventually resume active drinking or drug use. There has to be a corresponding change in the heart and soul of the addict or alcoholic; you must abstain from active drinking or drug use and then change the thinking, feeling and attitude patterns that were part of the addictive lifestyle. You have to transform, to metamorphose your mind (Romans 12:2).

On February 20, 2001, a man named ‘John’ was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The driver turned himself in and was incarcerated for vehicular homicide. Despite three previous citations for drunken driving, he had continued to drink. The night of the accident, he swore he’d never drink again; Again. But after a year of being locked up, it became “I will never drink and drive again.” One day he went to an A.A. meeting in prison, and realized it was three years to the day of the accident. He took that as a sign and has been active in A.A. and practicing the Twelve Steps ever since. He’d been contacted previously by John’s brother, and so after a year in A.A., he wrote another letter to John’s brother, saying that he belonged to A.A. and was practicing the Twelve Steps in his life. He hoped his story would reach another alcoholic, “and–in John’s memory–save at least one family from the tragedy I had put his family through.” Ten months later, he received a letter, which said:

I am John’s mother and will celebrate five years of sobriety on the twenty-second-of this month. I do not know what direction this letter will take–I leave it to God to guide me. Twenty-nine years ago, I gave birth to John and, in honor of the way he lived and the loving memories I have of him, I find the right thing to do is to reach out to you. John’s brother shared your letter of amends. I cannot describe the gratitude I felt and the healing that letter brought. I sobbed in my sponsor’s arms and let go of so much of what I had kept inside me. Thank you. I pray that you will keep on the path of sobriety and receive God’s love and forgiveness. (“A Letter from the Mother of the Man I Killed,” AA Grapevine, December 2006)

“Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. . . . It works–it really does” (Alcoholic Anonymous, p. 58).

04/19/22

Recovery Is a Life-Long Process

The greatest enemy to recovery is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness: if it doesn’t seem to matter whether or not I abstain from using drugs or alcohol, why abstain? There is a similar tendency in the Christian life, as we live out the ongoing war between the desires of the Spirit and the desires of the flesh, “for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Galatians 5:17). The temptation to give up, to live like a captive to the law of sin (Romans 7:23) is ever present. And the needed response in both recovery and the Christian life is spiritual tenacity or perseverance.

The importance of spiritual tenacity was emphasized in My Utmost for His Highest, for February 22^nd, “The Discipline of Spiritual Tenacity”: “It is endurance combined with the absolute certainty that what we are looking for is going to transpire.” We need to work deliberately to manifest love, justice, forgiveness and kindness to others, relying upon “the certainty that God is not going to be worsted.” We are to persevere. My Utmost for His Highest was a devotional read in early A.A.

Because of the very real correspondence between sin and addiction, spiritual tenacity or perseverance is a daily requirement for the Christian believer and the recovering alcoholic or addict. In another article, “Born of the Flesh,” I noted that addiction was simultaneously “a disease of the brain” and “an infection of the human heart.” The scientific evidence of genetics and biochemistry explains the physiological aspect of addiction, but cannot fully account for how that is translated into abnormal behavior or why the tendency to fall back into active addiction must be guarded against for a lifetime.

Increasingly in our time, materialistic cause seems to dominate accepted views of human nature and disorder. Here the bodily, material aspect of humanity is emphasized. Our mental, emotional, and spiritual lives are thought to be simply by–products of our material constitution. Therefore, explanations of human behavior have a radically naturalistic explanation. The notion of freedom, the ability to choose how we act or respond to our environment is ultimately a myth from this perspective. Moral responsibility for our actions is not something the individual can claim. Physiology, society or the environment—or a combination of these sources—is ultimately responsible for our good or bad behavior. Ultimately there is no God or Higher Power and no sin. Morality is a socially constructed phenomenon; sin does not exist; and addiction is merely a brain disease. A wonderfully complex brain disease, but ultimately caused by bio-physical mechanisms alone.

But if we are psycho-somatic beings as Anthony Hoekema claims in Created in God’s Image, we are creatures with a body (soma) and soul (psyche). Then there is an interaction between the physical and psychological aspects of our being. Genetics and biochemistry can influence human behavior, but they cannot fully determine it. If you believe that we are more than a sophisticated complex of bio-physical processes, explanations for all human behavior—including sin and addiction—must have this dual causal sense without subsuming ultimate responsibility under the other. For more on Hoekema’s idea, see “Created in the Image of God.”

Now we come to a necessary presumption, the existence of God or a Higher Power. This God or Higher Power is a necessary part of Twelve Step recovery and Christian, Biblical belief. But it is an irrelevant nuisance at best if you hold to a consistent view of addiction as merely a brain disease. When there is a God or Higher Power, there can be a basis for morality beyond human, social consensus. Wrong doing or sin can then be a violation of what this God or Higher Power declares is right. Biblical, Christian thinking goes one step further and sees sin as wrong being as well as wrong doing.

Sin is thus never merely a voluntary act of transgression; it proceeds from something more deep-seated; the expression of a sinful heart. Here the sense of sin in Romans 3:23 (all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God) and Romans 5:12-19 is in view. We are sinful in this way because the sin of Adam is imputed (credited) to all of us. Rejecting the doctrine of original sin fails to appreciate the close relationship between the imputation of Adam’s sin to all of humanity and God’s plan for the accomplishment of salvation in Christ. In the New Bible Dictionary, John Murray and B.A. Milne said:

The history of mankind is finally subsumed under two complexes, sin-condemnation-death and righteousness-justification-life. The former arises from our union with Adam, the latter from union with Christ. These are the two orbits within which we live and move. God’s government of men is directed in terms of these relationships. If we do not reckon with Adam we are thereby excluded from a proper understanding of Christ. All who die die in Adam; all who are made alive are made alive in Christ.

So that which is born of the flesh (the physical body) is flesh (a depraved heart, given over to wickedness). Addiction is simultaneously a disease of the brain and an infection of the heart. And this bio-psycho-social-spiritual ‘disease’ precedes the addictive/sin behavior noted in Romans 7:18-19: “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

Like sin, addiction is wrong being as well as wrong doing. And the wrong being of addiction has an ongoing existence in the human heart that continually strives to re-engage the addict or alcoholic in the wrong doing of active drinking or drug use. So, it’s not enough to simply abstain from drugs or alcohol; the addict has to change: Abstinence plus change equals recovery. And this change process must be a lifelong pursuit.

Walking Up the Down Escalator

One metaphoric image that captures this truth is to say that recovery is like walking up a down escalator. The trick for progress is to continue walking up the escalator faster than it is moving down. It doesn’t matter how long you have been walking up the escalator, the moment your efforts to walk up are less than the down movement of the escalator, you start to drift back to where you started. You may even continue to walk up; but if the effort isn’t greater than the movement of the down escalator, you don’t even realize you are actually moving backwards. For more on this concept, see “Preventing the Relapse Process, Part 2.”

In the AA Grapevine article, “PO Box 1980,” was the story of an older man at a treatment center. He approached a counselor after a talk on relapse and said that until two weeks before that, he had been sober for forty-two years. For thirty-nine of them, he attended A.A. meetings. After he moved three years ago, he stopped going to A.A. when he found that he just didn’t like the meetings in his new area. He figured he’d heard all he was going to hear and learned all he was going to learn; that he didn’t need them after thirty-nine years.

On an ordinary day, when a couple of things went wrong, he thought he would feel better with a drink. “That first day I only had a couple, but the next day I drank until I passed out. I disappeared for two weeks and my grandkids came looking for me. They found me passed out in a closet and they brought me here.” Abstinence relieves the symptoms of wrong doing, but it does not cure the disease of addictive wrong being. Recovery is a life-long process.

Faith Seeking Understanding

Charles Sigler, D.Phil.

Category Archives: Thinking God’s Thoughts