Bill W. had just finished telling his companion about how he was finished with liquor forever. “I’m one of those people who can’t manage it.” Among other things, he described the allergy and the obsession when he drank. Then the bartender brought them each of them a drink, saying it was on the house because it was Armistice Day. Without a moment’s hesitation Bill drank it down. His friend said: “My God, is it possible that you could take a drink after what you just told me? You must be crazy.”
The Psalmist declares that we were diseased and depraved from the beginning: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalms 51:5). A favorite term of Paul’s when describing this depravity is flesh: “I am of the flesh, sold under sin” (Romans 7:14); “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh” (Romans 7:18); “with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (Romans. 7:25); “the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God” (Romans 8:7); “make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans 13:14). In this sense, sin is the great leveler. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
So when he listed the works and desires of the flesh in Galatians 5, Paul was complementing the list of “lusts of the heart” and “all manner of unrighteousness” described in Romans 1. Our flesh is ruled by lust and unrighteousness; it is depraved. “Sin never consists in a voluntary act of transgression.” It is something more deeply rooted than mere free will. In the New Bible Dictionary, John Murray said:
From whatever angle man is viewed, there is the absence of that which is well-pleasing to God. . . . all have turned aside from God’s way and become corrupted. . . . there is no area or aspect of human life which is absolved from the sombre effects of man’s fallenness, and hence no area which might serve as a possible ground for man’s justification of himself in the face of God and his law.
This sense of ‘flesh’ means something in addition to our mere physical body. Turning to Galatians 5:16f, we see that Paul contrasts flesh and Spirit, saying that the desires of the flesh are opposed to the desires of the Spirit; and that this opposition is so that we can’t do the things we want to do. God intends for us to be powerless over the desires of the flesh, over this deeper sense of sin so that we will in turn realize our need for Christ: Romans 7:24-25 says: “Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
In Twelve Step recovery the realization of powerlessness over alcohol and drugs (Step One) is followed by coming to believe that a Higher Power can save you from the hopeless insanity of active addiction (Step Two). Clearly there is a radical theological and spiritual difference between coming to believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and coming to believe in a Higher Power. But the dynamic of recognizing personal inability and powerlessness over sin (or addiction), with the concomitant need to believe in and surrender to a Higher Power (or Jesus Christ) captures the ‘conversion’ process present in both Twelve Step recovery and becoming born again.
In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin extends the metaphorical use of ‘flesh’ in a nonphysical sense for sinful human nature by referring to the behaviors that proceed from the depravity of the flesh as ‘disease.’ In a discussion of how we are all, without exception, “depraved and given over to wickedness,” Calvin noted that God is pleased to put forth His healing hand to some who “labour naturally under the same disease.” In other sections of the Institutes, he refers to the diseases of evil-speaking, concupiscence, distrust and sin: “Had he not foreseen that his people were constantly to labour under the disease of sin, he never would have appointed these remedies.” Matthew Henry, Charles Spurgeon, Warren Wiersbe and others have also conceived of sinful desires and behavior as disease—with Christ as: “the Great Physician who heals the heart from the sickness of sin.”
Ralph Robinson, a Presbyterian minister in the 1600s, cautioned his readers to watch against sin as they watched against sickness. Noting how many people are careful to avoid eating or drinking anything that would disturb the quiet in their bodies, he asked why they aren’t as cautious of sin? “No sickness is so catching as sin is. Everyone has the root of it, and an inclination to it in their hearts. . . . It is worse than the small pox, worse than the plague. Other diseases will kill the bodies of your children, but sin will kill both body and soul.”
Alcoholism and drug addiction are often accepted as ‘diseases’ in their own right, and said to have no real differences from other diseases such as diabetes. Research on addiction increasingly refers to it as a ‘brain disease.’ In “Addiction is a Brain Disease, and It Matters,” published in the journal Science, Alan Leshner said that recognizing addiction as a “chronic, relapsing brain disorder” would benefit society’s overall health policy and help reduce the costs associated with drug abuse and addiction.
Similarly, in an HBO documentary Addiction, Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse specifically claimed that addiction was a brain disease: “Drug addiction is a disease of the brain . . . that translates into abnormal behavior.” She added that this leads to an inability to control the drug, because the brain will view its need for the drug with the same intensity as if the person was starving. Brain imaging research done by Dr. Volkow has revealed “neurochemical and functional changes in the brains of drug-addicted subjects that provide new insights into the mechanisms underlying addiction.” In The Science of Addiction, Carleton Erickson said research suggests that continued exposure of the MDS (mesolimbic dopamine system/pleasure pathway) pathway of the brain to a drug leads to changes in nerve function. The changes reach a threshold, which then leads to compulsive substance use over which the individual has impaired control.
However there is a biblical problem with addiction as merely brain disease. In Addictions: A Banquet in the Grave, Ed Welch said: “When we have a disease, we can still be growing in the knowledge of Christ, but addictions are incompatible with spiritual growth.” Genetics and biochemistry can influence human behavior, but they cannot determine it. While addictive ‘disease’ may include actual physiological dysfunction, it is also an “infection of the human heart.” The “translation process” from brain physiology to abnormal behavior passes through the human heart.
Addiction is then simultaneously “an infection of the human heart” and “a disease of the brain.” To emphasize or ignore either aspect of addiction will lead to an incomplete picture of what constitutes addiction. Carleton Erickson attempts to approach this truth from a purely scientific or general revelation perspective in noting that if addiction is a brain disease, then “behavioral therapies probably change brain chemistry.” He then comments that for some people, “spirituality could be a very effective way to do this.”
The morning after Armistice Day his wife found Bill unconscious in the area way of their home. He’d fallen against the door, and was bleeding heavily from a bad scalp wound. He settled hopelessly into a kind of bottomless bingeing. He no longer went out except to replenish his supply. Then an old drinking buddy came by, but declined Bill’s offer to drink. When asked what had got into him, his friend said: “I’ve got religion.”
Getting religion was the last thing Bill was interested in. Yet it was working with his friend. The last he’d heard, the friend was to be committed to the state asylum in Brattleboro, Vermont. “Instead, here he was in Bill’s own kitchen, sober and showing a confidence he hadn’t displayed in years.” He told Bill his story simply, without any attempt to convert him, and then he left. Bill continued to drink, but he was engaged in an “endless interior dialogue with himself.”
Eventually he found his way to Towns Hospital. His friend visited him there and they talked as they had in Bill’s kitchen. When the friend left, Bill fell into a deep depression. There was nothing ahead of him but death or madness. He had reached a state of total, absolute surrender. Without faith or hope, he cried: “If there be a God, let Him show Himself!”
Suddenly my room blazed with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. . . . Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clear strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought: “You area free man.” . . . . I became acutely conscious of a Presence, which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. “This,” I thought, “must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.”
Bill never drank again. He would eventually meet Dr. Bob and together they would form Alcoholics Anonymous. That which is born of the flesh (the physical body) is flesh (depraved and given over to wickedness). The story of Bill’s “white light” experience was taken from Pass It On, an account of how the A.A. message reached the world.
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, etc.), if you want to read them in the order they were originally intended. This article is (07) in the series. Enjoy.