In Part 1 of this article, we looked at Bill Wilson’s spiritual encounter in December of 1934 at the Towns Hospital. At first, he described it as him being reborn or born again. Yet, by the time the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, was published in 1939 there was no mention of his being “born again” or Jesus Christ in the Big Book. Here we’ll see how Bill moved away from understanding his spiritual experience as an encounter with the God of the Preachers.
In Writing the Big Book, the historian William Schaberg said Bill Wilson was a consummate storyteller, that his stories were almost always “liberal simplifications of the facts.” The point for Bill was the story had to convey an important message about the program of recovery, “and it needed to be dramatically delivered for maximum effect.” Referring to some of Bill’s stories as “parables,” Schaberg said Bill was at times “a conscious and deliberate mythmaker.” He noted the author of Pass It On said something similar: “Bill was never likely to pass up the opportunity to deliver a parable where he thought it could do some good … never reluctant to stretch a fact for the sake of emphasis” (p. 238).
Nevertheless, we can trace how Bill moved from the God of the Preachers to God as You Understand Him. But first, we need to note the influence of the Oxford Group on Bill at the beginning.
The Influence of the Oxford Group
Schaberg said Bill was committed to the Oxford Group’s approach to religion for the first two years of his sobriety. He attended their meetings, witnessed about his personal experiences, participated in group “guidance” sessions, and typically followed the Four Absolutes (absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love) as guidance in how to live his life. Notice how the following description of the Oxford Group parallels many of the customs still practiced in A.A. today.
The Group had no formal membership, no dues, no hierarchy, no churches, no paid leaders, and no theological creed. “It was instead a loose confederation of friends who identified themselves as having ‘surrendered their lives to God” in order ‘to lead a spiritual life under [His] Guidance’ and to ‘carry their message so that others could do the same.’”
Wilson would formally break with the Group in 1937. Pass It On said Bill wrote he was glad to say privately that some of the Oxford Group’s presentation and emphasis on the Christian message saved his life. Yet it was equally true other attitudes nearly got him drunk again. Bill said A.A. discovered if they were to approach alcoholics successfully, those attitudes had to be abandoned. Some examples of what Bill said they needed to abandon were: the absolute principles of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love; and making religious demands upon people. Bill said:
We found that when the word ‘absolute’ was put in front of these attributes, they either turned people away by the hundreds or gave a temporary spiritual inflation resulting in collapse . . . All people having an alcohol problem who wish to get rid of it and make a happy adjustment with the circumstances of their lives, become A.A. members by simply associating with us. Nothing but sincerity is asked of anyone. In this atmosphere, the orthodox, the unorthodox, and the unbeliever mix happily and usefully together, and in nearly every case great spiritual growth ensues.
Bill’s “Hot Flash” Experience
Pass It On said Bill began to doubt the reality of his spiritual experience soon afterwards (see Part 1 for a description). He started to think he had been hallucinating, so he called for Dr. Silkworth. After describing his experience to the doctor, Bill asked: “Doctor is this real? Am I still perfectly sane?” Dr. Silkworth reassured him he was sane but had been the subject of a “great psychic occurrence.” Silkworth had read about these things, but never had one himself.
“You have had some kind of a conversion experience.” Whatever the experience was, Silkworth thought Bill was already a different person. “So, my boy, whatever you’ve got now, you’d better hold on to. It’s so much better than what had you only a couple of hours ago.” This encouragement “put the seal on Bill’s experience,” making it acceptable to the part of his mind that had been resistant to the idea of God.
When Bill’s friend Ebby came back to visit after three days, Bill told him about his experience. But Ebby didn’t know what to say about Bill’s description of what happened. He’d not seen bright lights or stood on a mountaintop with his “conversion experience.” But he brought Bill a book recommended by Oxford Group members that offered further clarification of Bill’s experience: The Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE) by William James. Bill would later say William James, although dead, was a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Bill said he started reading the moment Ebby left. It was difficult going. James, a Harvard professor and a founding father of American psychology, had made a detailed analysis of a wide number of religious or conversion experiences. . . James’s objective was to show that these conversion experiences had validity and value.
A Spiritual Experience Could Take Many Forms
From reading the VRE, Bill learned an appeal to a Higher Power, a cry for help could take many forms, “and it might not be in religious terms.” Some people had “thunderbolt experiences” like St. Paul; others had slow, gradual transformations. Whatever the experience, “it brought the sufferer into a new state of consciousness, and so opened the way to release from the old problems.” James provided the explanation Bill needed to understand what had happened to him—”and gave it to him in a way that was acceptable to him.”
In Lecture/Chapter II of VRE, James said the religious field was divided into the institutional and personal branches. “Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch.” He proposed in his lectures to ignore institutional religion entirely and confine himself as far as he could to personal religion.
He said some in his audience would object to his distinction, thinking the term religion should refer to the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution, for the Church; in short, for what he said was personal religion. James was willing to accept any other name instead of personal religion for what he proposed to discuss. “Call it conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion.” But he warned, whatever you see as personal religion will prove to be more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. “The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.”
Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case;—so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.
Personal religion, as he asked his audience to understand it should mean: “The feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” Since this could be either moral, physical, or ritual, it was evident that out of religion, in the sense he defined it, “theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.” This made the individual’s spiritual experience of the divine the primary, defining characteristic of the encounter. According to James. theology, philosophy and ecclesiastical organizations were secondary, and of less importance.
Conversion for James was a personal spiritual experience apart from the theology of an ecclesiastical organization. In Lecture IX (titled Conversion) of VRE, he opened with the following description of what he thought was meant by the term converted:
To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to bring such a moral change about.
James gave Bill Wilson permission to acknowledge his encounter with the God of the Preachers in a way that didn’t require that he fit it into a Christian theological box. Bill didn’t have to believe in his heart and confess with his mouth that Jesus was Lord (Romans 10:9). He wasn’t required by James to confess Jesus as the only way to God the Father (John 14:6). Bill didn’t have to understand his experience to be an evangelical conversion experience to a relationship with Jesus Christ.
In New Wine, A.A. member Mel B. said Bill Wilson thought his 1934 “hot flash” experience was a true illumination. He always took the broad view that there many paths to such growth. He thought it could be seen as a kind of “born again” experience, but not one that fit within Christian religion. Bill wrote to Mel B. that Christ was the leading figure for him.
Yet I have never been able to receive complete assurance that He was one hundred percent God. I seem to be just as comfortable with the figure of ninety-nine percent. I know that from a conservative Christian point of view, this is a terrific heresy. But it must be remembered that I had no childhood conditioning in religion at all . . . So, what shall I do? Of course I don’t know—except to try to be open-minded.”
In Part 1 we saw where Bill Wilson described his initial spiritual experience as being “reborn” or born again. The fruit of his life demonstrated he wasn’t truly born again or converted in an evangelical sense. We’ve seen here that William James helped Bill recognize his “hot flash” didn’t have to be viewed as an evangelical conversion experience to Jesus Christ. He could acknowledge it as an individual experience of the divine without defining it with Christian, biblical theology.
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life (Romans 6:1-4).
