01/7/20

On the Road of Happy Destiny

Continuing with his imagery of the Two Ways tradition (See, “Do They Walk Their Talk?”), Jesus contrasts the difference between real and merely nominal discipleship here in Matthew 7:21-23. Just as there are only two ways in life, the way to life and the way to destruction (Matthew 7:13-14), in the end there are only two destinations—eternal life or eternal punishment (Matthew 25: 31-46). In Matthew 7:21 Jesus says when the kingdom of heaven (or kingdom of God) is realized, it will not be a person’s acknowledgement of Christ’s Lordship that counts, but whether their profession is shown in the way they live. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” Simply saying, “Lord, Lord,” is not enough.

²¹“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ²²On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ²³And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

The word Lord (kyrios) had various meanings. It could mean the owner of something, as in Matthew 20:8; or even a conventional form of polite address, much like how we use “Sir” (Matthew 21:30). The Romans used it in reference of their emperor (Acts 25:26), and even when speaking of the gods people worshiped (1 Corinthians 8:5). When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, Lord was used consistently as the translation for the divine name Yahweh. Here, given the reference of what will happen on Judgement Day, it likely has overtones of divinity. In his commentary on Matthew, Leon Morris said:

On Judgment Day Jesus will be seen for what he really is, and the greeting here implies that the people in question will be claiming to belong to him. But their claim will be of no avail, Jesus says, unless their lives back it up. It is doing the will of the Father that matters, not the words we profess.

Morris went on to say this was not salvation by works, but the contrast between profession and way of life. If someone really trusted Christ for salvation, their lives would no longer be self-centered. “Jesus is not saying that those saved will have earned their salvation, but that the reality of their faith will be made clear by their fruitful lives.” Many on Judgement Day will try to affirm Jesus is their Lord by referencing the things they did. “To be active in religious affairs is no substitute for obeying God.” You can be active in doing the things for God, without being in submission to him as Lord. “It is easy for anyone to profess loyalty, but to practice it is quite another thing.”

Another point to notice in 7:21 is the reference of the Father by Jesus as “my Father who is in heaven.” It was said for the first time in the gospel of Matthew. God had already been referred to several times in Matthew, but always as your Father or our Father (in the Lord’s Prayer). From this point forward, excluding two exceptions, Jesus will always say ‘my Father who is in heaven.’ In his commentary on Matthew, John Nolland said this phrase brought into focus Jesus’ capacity to mediate a link with the heavenly Father. In the Sermon on the Mount, it pointed to Jesus’ role in making clear the Father’s will. In 7:28 it is stated the crowds were astonished at his teaching, “for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.” The phrase is also suggestive of his identification as son of God (Matthew 3:17; 4:3, 6).

But on that day (Judgment Day), there will be many who claimed to have done things as evidence that Christ was truly their Lord—they prophesied in the name of Jesus, they cast out demons, and did many other works (miracles). Yet Jesus said he never knew them. He had no connection to them and calls them “workers of lawlessness.” You may profess loudly with your lips your faith in God, and even invoke Jesus as Lord, yet deny him by thoughts, words and acts. Such a person is a nominal disciple.

Returning to the opening remark about how Matthew 7:21-23 contrasts the difference between real and nominal discipleship, let’s consider what significance this passage may have for A.A. and recovery. In the ancient world, a disciple actively imitated the life and the teaching of a great teacher or master. In the New Testament, the term disciple functioned as a technical term for followers of Jesus. The Lexham Bible Dictionary said Jesus’ disciples were not to choose another master or become a master themselves. Rather, they were to go and make disciples of the nations (Matthew 28:19-20)— “to teach them what Jesus had taught them.” Similar to this this sense of a disciple, there isn’t a central master or teacher in A.A.; but there is a Fellowship.

Written in 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous hoped that someday every alcoholic would find an A.A. Fellowship at his destination. The intent was to replicate these Fellowships. By 1983 there were almost 48,000 A.A. groups, in 110 countries. Today, there are more than 118,000 A.A. groups around the world, in about 180 countries, whose primary purpose is to carry the message of A.A. Tradition Five of A.A. says: “Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry the message to the alcoholic who still suffers.” You could say this primary purpose is to make ‘disciples’ of A.A. recovery.

You won’t find the words disciple or discipleship in the A.A. Big Book. But you will find chapters on “How It Works,” “Into Action,” and “Working with Others.” In other words, you will find a way to imitate and then replicate the way of life described in the Big Book—to learn and teach others what you have learned, bringing them into the Fellowship. And as you travel along this Road of Happy Destiny, it can lead you to a further abandonment to God the Father. The closing paragraph of the chapter, “A Vision for You” reads:

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. We shall be with you in the Fellowship of the spirit, and you will surely meet some of us as you trudge the Road of Happy Destiny. May God bless you and keep you until then.

When you abandon yourself to God, you may find that you are also compelled to surrender to the will of the Father. When that happens, the Road of Happy Destiny will lead you to the kingdom of heaven. May God bless and keep you until then.

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.”

04/2/19

The Narrow Gate

Bill W., the cofounder of Alcoholic Anonymous, heralded the compromise of ‘God as we understood Him’ as “The great contribution of our atheists and agnostics. They had widened our gateway so that all who suffer might pass through, regardless of their belief or lack of belief.” Yet he also personally met weekly with Monsignor Fulton Sheen for the better part of a year and took his instruction seriously. Ultimately he did not convert to Catholicism, irked by how all organized religions “claim how confoundedly right all of them are.”

Every time this dubious principle of religious rightness takes a firm grip on men’s minds, there is hell to pay, literally. In a sense, it’s worse than nationalistic rightness or economic rightness, those scourges of the moment. The ungodly might not be expected to know any better. But men of religion should. Yet history shows that they just don’t. It seems to me that the great religions survive because of their spirituality and in spite of their infallibility.

He was also hesitant to convert because he was seen as a symbol of A.A. “And A.A. as a whole does not make any endorsements or commitments. There is the rub.” He lamented churches didn’t have a fellow-traveler department: “Oh, if the church only had a fellow-traveler department, a cozy spot where one could warm his hands at the fire and bite off only as much as he could swallow. Maybe I’m just one more shopper looking for a bargain on that virtue—obedience!”

Ultimately, it seems Bill hesitated because Christianity requires a complete commitment to Christ; there is no fellow-traveler department: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one come to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). In New Wine: The Spiritual Roots of the Twelve Step Miracle, Mel B. said that Bill took the broad view that there were many paths to spiritual experience and growth; and he did not think adherence to Christian religion was a prerequisite. In a personal communication to Mel, Bill said while Christ was the leading figure to 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.

This cozy spot by the fire, where someone could warm his hands and only take as much as he could swallow, is known as nominal discipleship—something not possible for a follower of Christ. In Matthew 7:13-14, Jesus said: “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” Note the formal structure of the verses, beginning with the command to enter by the narrow gate:

Enter by the narrow gate.

For the gate is wide and the way is easy

that leads to destruction,

and those who enter by it are many.

For the gate is narrow and the way is hard

that leads to life,

and those who find it are few.

This passage begins the concluding section of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus clearly says there are only two ways of life. The three illustrations that follow contrast those who select the narrow rather than the wide gate (13-14), those who bear good fruit rather than bad (15-23) and those who build their homes on solid rock rather than sinking sand (24-27). The contrast of this “two-ways” genre is found in other Jewish literature (2 Esdras 7:1-16), the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 30:19; Jeremiah 21:8), and early Christian literature (Didache 1:1; Epistle of Barnabas 18:1). Craig Blomberg in his commentary on Matthew said: “By these three illustrations, Jesus makes plain that there are ultimately only two categories of people in the world, despite the endless gradations we might otherwise perceive.” In his commentary on Matthew, John Nolland said:

Matthew has probably chosen the imagery of narrowness to suggest the constriction of one’s choices involved in taking the challenge of Jesus’ teaching: there is a very sharply defined mode of entry. The narrow gate throws up images of the need to make a choice which is not obvious (this is not where the crowd is going to go), to be attentive to where the gate is located, perhaps to experience the discomfort of squeezing through a narrow space, and possibly to wait patiently while others are going through the gate.The alternative to the narrow gate is a wide gate: the unstated assumptions are that everyone must go through a gate and end up somewhere and that only two gates exist. The default choice is clearly seen to be the wide gate: a wide gate beckons in a way that a narrow gate does not; a wide gate suggests an important destination; a wide gate (such as the main gate of a city) is set up to deal with the movement of large numbers of people.

But Bill W. and A.A. were not trying to promote a broader, easier way to Christ. They sought to “widened our gateway so that all who suffer might pass through, regardless of their belief or lack of belief.” They sought to follow the distinction made by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience between personal and institutional religion. He defined personal religion/spirituality for his purposes as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of [the] individual . . . in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” In the broadest sense possible, this religion or spirituality consisted of the belief that there was an unseen order to existence and supreme good lay in harmoniously adjusting to that order.

Worship, sacrifice, ritual, theology, ceremony, and ecclesiastical organization were the essentials of institutional religion. Limited to such a view, religion could be viewed as an external art of winning the favor of the gods. Within the personal dimension of religion, the inner dispositions of human conscience, helplessness, and incompleteness were of central importance. Here the external structures for winning divine favor took a secondary place to a heart-to-heart encounter between the individual and his or her maker.

Bill’s view of religion fits within this Jamesean distinction between personal and institutional religion—a distinction we see today as spiritual and religious. The widened gateway for the Twelve Steps of ‘God as we understood Him’ is consistent with the wide gate Jesus described in Matthew 7:13. It is not the way to life. However, it does provide a way to abstinence—a way out from the powerlessness of alcohol and drugs. It will crisscross the narrow way at many points, but needs to be seen as a distinct path. See “A Common Spiritual Path” and the other reflections under the category link “Romans Road to Recovery” for more on this issue.

There is a way and a gate that leads to life and a way and a gate that leads to destruction. The wide gate and way is easy, leading to destruction, while the narrow way and gate is hard, leading to life. Many find the wide gate, but few find the narrow one.

02/5/19

Another Bozo on the Bus

“For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22-23a). The main thing alcoholics have in common is they all drink to get drunk. Just as there is nothing to serve as a possible ground for someone being a ‘lesser’ or ‘worse’ sinner before God, in Twelve Step recovery there are no differences among alcoholics or addicts, since all are powerless over alcohol. In “Just Another Bozo on the Bus,” an anonymous AA said in his Grapevine article that the story of his sobriety was one of a growing realization of all the ways he was exactly like others in Alcoholics Anonymous. “That experience of being ‘the same as,’ of being ‘one among many,’ of being ‘just another bozo on the bus’ is critical to the maintenance of my spiritual condition.”

This sense of ‘no distinction’ lies at the heart of Twelve Step recovery: “We are either all alcoholics with no distinction (and therein lies our power) or we might as well shut up shop.” It is truly is a matter of life and death: “There are no distinctions made for color, race, economic status, or education. We are all equal and have to reach out to one another in order to survive.” Felicia G. recalled how two women first talked to her about what she would find in AA: “It is a pattern and you are not alone. You are not the only woman who has been like this. Thousands and thousands of men and women have been like this. And now they are sober.” An anonymous twenty-year old AA put it this way:

To me, God is an artist and he sculpts people into what they really are. He accomplishes this through the Twelve Steps. I can see he has done this, and is still doing this, with my friends and me. Although we are all sculpted differently, there is a certain fact that holds us all together. That fact is alcoholism. I have heard it referred to as the “great equalizer.” Now AA is the great equalizer in my life because no matter what people have done, thought, or felt, if they are alcoholics, we have a common bond.

The self-same sense of oneness exists within Narcotics Anonymous (NA). Like “a lifeboat in a sea of isolation,” NA is: “a fellowship of people with a common bond of recovery.” They all have one thing in common: “All of us, from the junkie snatching purses to the sweet old lady hitting two or three doctors for legal prescriptions, have one thing in common: we seek our destruction a bag at a time, a few pills at a time, or a bottle at a time until we die.” The common problem was addiction and no one was greater (or less) than any one else: “No member is greater or lesser than any other member.” Herein lies its power: “We found that no matter what our past thoughts or actions were, others had felt and done the same. Surrounded by fellow addicts, we realized that we were not alone anymore.”

This common bond—whether it is sin or addiction/alcoholism—this great equalizer cuts across all peoples. We do not understand our actions. We do the very thing we hate. We 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” (Romans 7:15-20). We are powerless; we are sinful.

There are no social or cultural distinctions made by God with regards to the universal sinfulness of all people; regardless of their particular sin, they all fall short. “There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek” (Romans 2:9). Here, and other places in Scripture ‘Greek’ can be an equivalent for those who are non-Jews or ‘Gentiles.’ Everyone who sins, Jew or non-Jew (Greek or Gentile), faces tribulation and distress.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addressed the human tendency to deny or minimize personal sinfulness when He said that whoever relaxed one of the least of the commandments and taught others to do so, would be least in the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 5:19). Anger has the same liability for judgment before God as murder; a man who looks lustfully at a woman has already committed adultery in his heart (Matthew 5:21-30). Paul clearly had this sense in mind when he said that the “dividing wall of hostility” has been broken down in Christ (Ephesians 2:14). But we need some context to fully understand the significance of Paul’s statement here.

Paul traveled to Jerusalem and was counseled by James and others to demonstrate his obedience to Jewish religious law by purifying himself in the temple. Jews from the province of Asia had spread the rumor that Paul taught Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses by not circumcising their children; to stop keeping Jewish religious customs (Acts 21:21). The Christian leaders wanted Paul to demonstrate this was not true; that he even continued to follow Jewish religious law himself. Some Ephesian Jews saw Paul in the temple as he completed this rite of purification and assumed he had dared to bring an Ephesian Gentile named Trophimus into the temple with him. They raised an alarm, seized Paul and beat him (Acts 21:27–32).

The inner court area of the temple in Jerusalem was raised slightly above the outer court of the Gentiles and surrounded by a barrier. Notices in Greek and Latin warned that no responsibility would be taken for the probable death of any Gentile who ventured within. According to The IVP Background Commentary: New Testament, taking a Gentile beyond the dividing wall of the outer court in the temple was considered to be such a serious breach of Jewish law that the Romans permitted Jewish leaders to execute those who violated this law. The Ephesian Jews accused Paul of violating this law.

Paul was imprisoned and later transferred to Caesarea when a plot to assassinate him was discovered. He remained in prison there for two years. Eventually he appeared before the newly appointed governor, Festus. Another plot to ambush and kill Paul during his transport back to Jerusalem to stand trial before Festus was thwarted by Paul’s appeal to Caesar.

Paul said he had done nothing wrong against the law of the Jews, the temple, or against Caesar. He was willing to die if found guilty of anything deserving death but rejected Festus’s request to return to Jerusalem for trial. Since the charges against him were not true (the Jews could not prove any of their charges), Paul said no one had the right to hand him over to the Jews, so he appealed his case to Caesar (Acts 23:20-33; 25:1-12). Paul was transferred to Rome, where he wrote the epistle to the Ephesians from prison. This set of circumstances has a somewhat poetic circle to it: the riot in Ephesus; the Ephesian Jews accusing him in Jerusalem; Paul’s appeal to Caesar; and then his writing the epistle to the Ephesians from Rome.

The believers in Ephesus would have been aware of the circumstances of Paul’s arrest and imprisonment. So his statement in Ephesians 2:14 about Christ breaking down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles had a special meaning to them, since a dispute over Paul violating the dividing wall in the temple was what had precipitated his arrest. Originally separated from Christ and strangers to the covenant of promise, Gentile believers have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Breaking down the dividing wall of hostility in his flesh, Christ has created in himself one new man, reconciling both Jew and Gentile in one body through the cross (Ephesians 2:11-16). So the divisions between Jew and Gentile, the circumcision and uncircumcision are no longer valid in the body of Christ. The dividing wall of hostility has been destroyed.

If somewhere within human diversity, there is a people group whose sinfulness is less than (or more than) others, there cannot be a universal need for salvation in Christ. Charles Hodge said that the universal nature of sin is “one of the most undeniable doctrines of Scripture, and one of the most certain facts of experience.” Until this fact is admitted, there is no place or need for the Gospel. Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord, whether they are Jews or Greeks (non-Jews), will be saved (Romans 10:12-13). “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave free; but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11). “For God shows no partiality” (Romans 2:11). And I am just another bozo on the bus.

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 the 8th in the series. Enjoy.

01/15/19

Born of the Flesh

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.

11/27/18

I Must Have Another Drink!

If we suppress the “fundamental idea of God” that lies within us, then God gives us up to the lusts of our heart. There is war between the flesh and the spirit; we don’t do what we want to do; our lives become unmanageable. We are powerless over sin—and if that powerlessness involves mind-altering substances, alcohol or drugs becomes our god. As Paul quotes in a flurry of verses beginning at Romans 3:10: “as it is written: None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)

Although we are powerless over sin, God has provided a way out through faith in Jesus Christ. And this righteousness is available for all who believe. In his commentary on Romans, John Murray said: “There is no discrimination among believers—the righteousness of God comes upon them all without distinction.” The Old Testament itself (the Law and the Prophets) bears witness to this. In fact, it can be shown that God had this plan for salvation in mind even before the sin of Adam and Eve.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, . . . (Romans 3:21-24)

The root meaning of the Greek word for redemption is to deliver by paying a price. So our deliverance from sin through Jesus Christ is more like a ransom than liberation. We were bought at a price and not simply liberated from the concentration camp of sin and death. So there is a contrast here between the freely given gift of grace and the costliness of the ransom paid by Christ to release us.

Not only have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but all are justified by grace, free of charge, through the redemption in Christ Jesus. “By his grace as a gift” emphasizes the unmerited nature of God’s justification and is the solution to the conclusion of verse 3:20, namely that “by works of the law no human being will be justified.” Nothing we do, not even what we possess as creatures made in His image, can predispose God to cause us to be free from sin and in right relationship with Him. Yet He gives it freely as a gift.

. . . whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:25-26)

Here the gospel and mere recovery take different paths, because of the significance of Christ for salvation. Both the gospel and recovery can acknowledge the powerlessness we have over sin (addiction), but Paul asserts that our release from sin was at the cost of Jesus’ death as an atoning sacrifice. In mere recovery there is no redeeming sacrifice; no ransom paid for the release from addiction. Faith in God to deliver from addiction leads to a liberation from addiction, but not to the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

This idea of a costly ransom is further asserted in referring to Christ Jesus as a propitiation in verse 25. The Greek word used here is only found one other time in Scripture, in Hebrews 9:5 where it refers to the mercy seat, the covering over the Ark of the Covenant. On the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur in modern Jewish worship, the high priest would enter into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the mercy seat with the blood of a sacrifice to make atonement for the sins of all the people (Leviticus 16). The sprinkling of blood over the mantle of the homes of the Israelites was also done so that the angel of death would “pass over” their homes as it brought judgment to Egypt (Ex. 12:1-20). The Passover meal celebrates this deliverance.

So Paul is presenting Jesus Christ as the redeeming sacrifice that takes away the sins of all who believe in him. Our sins are atoned for because of the blood of his sacrifice.

Paul has been unpacking several phrases in these last few verses; and he does so again in verse 3:26. The righteousness of God in verse 21 is noted to be the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ in verse 22. The redemption (ransom) in Christ Jesus noted in verse 24 was specified to be a result of our willingness to believe that he was the true expiatory sacrifice (verse 25). Not only was this to show the righteousness of God because He passed over our former sins (verse 25), but that God did so at this present time, in Christ Jesus (verse 26), because there was no other way. In Jesus Christ alone do we receive forgiveness of our sins and justification from God. Jesus himself was not only righteous, but also the one who declares that all who have faith in him are righteous themselves.

Notice the similarity between the powerlessness over sin noted above and how Bill W. described the powerlessness over alcoholism faced by the alcoholic in the “Step One” essay of Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: “Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that . . . we have warped our minds into such an obsession [for destructive drinking] that only an act of Providence can remove it from us.”

In Twelve Step recovery there is a saying that once you are powerless over addiction, continued drug and alcohol use will ultimately lead to jail, institutions, or death. There is no hope for an addict or alcoholic who remains in an active addiction. Ultimately, they will die in their addiction. Some sociologists even liken addiction to indirect suicide. But sometimes, the suicidal impulse is more direct. Here is a quote from “An Inner Truth,” from the AA Grapevine:

One night, I decided that I couldn’t live with alcohol anymore–but I couldn’t live without it. So, I devised a fail-proof plan to take my life. I took a vacuum hose and connected it to the exhaust of my truck, taped and sealed the windows, started the truck, finished my fifth (I wouldn’t want to leave any behind), and prepared to die. I awakened the next morning in my truck, very sick, with an empty fifth, and very much alive. I looked at the gas gauge and there was still a quarter tank of gas left. The key was in the “on” position and the fail-proof plan had failed. The truck died during the night, and I didn’t. Somehow, a few months later, I ended up at an AA meeting sitting across the table from a man who had attempted suicide with a shotgun and blown his face off. He looked across the table at me and said, “Welcome,” and then, “Boy, you look like crap.” Coming from a man without a nose and a lot of facial damage, this statement stuck in my mind.

Proverbs 23:29-35 captures the clear cycle of unmanageability in alcoholism. It explicitly describes the spiral of progressive sin in alcoholism:

Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaining? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes? Those who tarry long over wine; those who go to try mixed wine. Do not look at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup and goes down smoothly. In the end it bites like a serpent and stings like an adder. Your eyes will see strange things, and your heart utter perverse things. You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea, like one who lies on the top of a mast. They struck me, you will say, but I was not hurt; they beat me, but I did not feel it. When shall I awake? I must have another drink.

In My Utmost for His Highest (which was used by early members of A.A), Oswald Chambers noted there is something in human nature that laughs in the face of every ideal you have. “If you refuse to agree with the fact that there is vice and self-seeking, something downright spiteful and wrong in human beings, instead of reconciling yourself to it when it strikes your life, you will compromise with it and say it is of no use to battle against it.” So it’s not just that we do wrong things—that we sin, drink or use drugs—but that there is something in human nature that is opposed to our ideals.

There is something within us that seeks to resist the good we want to do. Sinful behavior is an expression of a sinful heart (cf. Mark. 7:20-23; Proverbs. 4:23; 23:7). John Calvin said in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, “The human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols.” We dare to imagine a god suited to our own understanding and substitute “vanity and an empty phantom” for the true God. The god whom we have thus conceived inwardly, we then attempt to embody outwardly.

Oswald Chambers said if we repeatedly run after self-serving desires, eventually they become our gods. For the addict and the alcoholic, their drugged state becomes their god. Sin in this sense is wrong being, not wrong doing. It is deliberate, emphatic independence of God:

The revelation of the Bible is not that Jesus Christ took upon Himself our fleshly sins, but that He took upon Himself the heredity of sin which no man can touch. God made His own Son to be sin that He might make the sinner a saint. All through the Bible it is revealed that Our Lord bore the sin of the world by identification, not by sympathy. He deliberately took upon His own shoulders, and bore in His own Person, the whole massed sin of the human race—“He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin,” and by so doing He put the whole human race on the basis of Redemption. Jesus Christ rehabilitated the human race; He put it back to where God designed it to be, and anyone can enter into union with God on the ground of what Our Lord has done on the Cross.

Remember that in his divine forbearance, God passes over our former sins—even those we don’t remember doing while in a blackout. This shows His righteousness, for He is the justifier of those who have faith in Jesus (Romans 3:25-26).

08/17/18

Ask, Seek, Knock

Mount of Beatitudes and the Sea of Galilee; credit: BiblePlaces.com

When you pray, what should you pray for? Should you pray specifically and persistently for what you need? In his essay on Step Eleven in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Bill W. said this type of prayer could be done, “but it has hazards.” The problem is the thoughts that seem to come from God may not really be His answers. They may be “well-intentioned unconscious rationalizations.” Bill warned the person who tried to run their life by this kind of prayer could create havoc without meaning to.

He may have forgotten the possibility that his own wishful thinking and the human tendency to rationalize have distorted his so-called guidance. With the best of intentions, he tends to force his own will into all sorts of situations and problems with the comfortable assurance that he is acting under God’s specific direction. Under such an illusion, he can of course create great havoc without in the least intending it. . . .Our immediate temptation will be to ask for specific solutions to specific problems, and for the ability to help other people as we have already thought they should be helped. In that case, we are asking God to do it our way. . . . As the day goes on, we can pause where situations must be met and decisions made, and renew the simple request: “Thy will, not mine be done.”

If you want biblical guidance on how to pray, you could turn to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-11), where Jesus said we should ask, seek and knock. If human fathers know how to give good gifts to their children, “how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

⁷“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ⁸For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. ⁹Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? ¹¹If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:7-11)

Leon Morris said in his commentary on Matthew the central point of these verses is that prayer to a loving Father is effective. “The point is not that human persistence wins out in the end, but that the heavenly Father who loves his children will certainly answer their prayer.” So when we ask, seek and knock we can confidently believe God will answer our prayer, because Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:8).

Craig Blomberg, in his commentary on Matthew, said Jesus presupposed his listeners would remember his teaching on the Lord’s Prayer when he told them to ask, seek and knock. Jesus said we should pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven” (6:7-13). The asking, seeking, knocking in 7:7-11 highlight the effectiveness of prayer and not some name-it-and-claim-it mantra that compels God to gave us what we want when we want it. Blomberg added:

Those who today claim that in certain contexts it is unscriptural to pray “if it is the Lord’s will” are both heretical and dangerous. Often our prayers are not answered as originally desired because we do not share God’s perspective in knowing what is ultimately a good gift for us.

James confirmed this when he said: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:3). Sometimes our own wishful thinking will lead us to ask wrongly. Bill W. agreed: “We discover that we receive guidance for our lives to just about the extent we stop making demands upon God to give it to us on order and on our terms.”

In Matthew 6:9-10 Jesus makes the same point—that God will certainly answer our prayer because He is a Father who loves His children—by approaching it in a different way. Here he uses the analogy of a human father and son and asks his audience if they would give their own son a stone if he asked for bread or a serpent if he asked for a fish. The rhetorical questions imply a negative answer: of course they wouldn’t! No human parent would treat a son this way. Reasoning from the lesser human father to God as the greater Heavenly Father, Jesus said if an “evil” (morally bankrupt or degenerate) human father would not think of treating his son in this way, certainly God would not so mistreat His children.

Returning now to Bill W. and his essay on Step Eleven, he said those in A.A. who have come to make regular use of prayer “would no more do without it than [they] would refuse air, food, or sunshine.” Just as the body would fail if it did not receive nourishment, so will the soul. “Pray and meditation are our principle means of conscious contact with God.”

In A.A. we have found that the actual good results of prayer are beyond question. They are matters of knowledge and experience. All those who have persisted have found strength not ordinarily their own. They have found wisdom beyond their usual capability. And they have increasingly found a peace of mind, which can stand firm in the face of difficult circumstances.

Those who were reluctant to pray because they did not see any evidence of “a God who knew and cared about human beings” were likened to a scientist who refused to perform a certain experiment “lest it prove his pet theory wrong.” When they finally tried the experiment of prayer, they felt and knew differently. “It has been well said that ‘almost the only scoffers at prayer are those who never tried it enough.’”

In the A.A. Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill W. wrote about putting prayer into action with Step Eleven. He suggested you begin each day by considering your plans for the day. First, you should ask God to direct your thinking, “especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.” Be careful to never pray for your own selfish ends. Your thought life will be placed on a higher plane when it is cleared of wrong motives.

As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action. We constantly remind ourselves we are no longer running the show, humbly saying to ourselves many times each day, “Thy will be done.”

So ask, seek, and knock. Everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds. God knows what you need even before you ask. And if you ask wrongly, seeking what you want and not what He knows you need, He won’t give you a stone or a snake. Rather, He will give you the bread and fish you need because he is the Father who gives good gifts. “Thy will, not mine be done.”

11/21/17

Cunning, Baffling, Powerful

Vincent Dole was one of the three physicians who originated methadone as a maintenance drug treatment for heroin addiction in the 1960s. Rather unexpectedly, he was asked to serve as a Class A, non-alcoholic, trustee for the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous. He thought they had made a mistake so before accepting the position, he discussed his research into “chemotherapy for narcotic addiction” with executives of the A.A. Fellowship. They didn’t see any problem or conflict of interest with his appointment and Dr. Dole served as a trustee for A.A. for eleven years, from April of 1965 until April of 1975.

At one point in his tenure as a trustee, he served as a co-chair for the General Service Board. In his farewell letter to the A.A. GSO, printed in the August-September issue of Box 4-5-9, the newsletter from the General Service Office of A.A., he said he would always remain identified with A.A. “My heart is with the Fellowship.”

Like most in A.A., I have gained more in the association than I have been able to give. Especially, it has been a privilege to witness the power of love when focused and unsentimental. I have seen that: Salvation is found in helping others; help stems from knowledge, humility, compassion, and toughness; success is possible.My greatest concern for the future of A.A. is that the principle of personal service might be eroded by money and professionalism. Fortunately, most of the membership of A.A., especially the oldtimers, know that A.A. cannot be commercialized. It is not a trade union of professional counselors or an agency hustling for a budget. The mysterious wisdom of A.A. will discover how to cooperate in reaching out to sick alcoholics while maintaining its Traditions.

In a 1991 article he wrote for the journal Alcoholism, “Addiction as a Public Health Problem,” Dr. Dole said that throughout his time as a trustee he was puzzled by why he specifically was asked to serve. He ended by assuming he had been “brought in as a smoke alarm, a canary in the mine” to guard against “the Fellowship being distorted by aggressive person with dogmatic opinions.” Then, in the late 1960s, he believed a more specific reason emerged, not long before Bill W.’s death. An excerpt from that article is available here: “The Methadone/AA Link.”

A more specific answer, however, emerged in the late 1960s, not long before Bill’s death. At the last trustee meeting that we both attended, he spoke to me of his deep concern for the alcoholics who are not reached by AA, and for those who enter and drop out and never return. Always the good shepherd, he was thinking about the many sheep who are lost in the dark world of alcoholism. He suggested that in my future research I should look for an analogue of methadone, a medicine that would relieve the alcoholic’s sometimes irresistible craving and enable him to continue his progress in AA toward social and emotional recovery, following the Twelve Steps. I was moved by his concern, and in fact subsequently undertook such a study.

Dr. Dole went on to say he unsuccessfully sought to find that analogue in his laboratory until it closed in 1991. But he thought the work had just begun. Other laboratories and investigators would continue to work on the analogue problem. “With the rapid advance in neurosciences, I believe that Bill’s vision of adjunctive chemotherapy for alcoholics will be realized in the coming decade.”

Since Dr. Dole made that optimistic prediction, several different medications have been used as a harm reduction strategy for individuals with alcohol dependence or alcohol use disorders. Two opioid antagonists, nalmefene and naltrexone and three drugs acting on the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)ergic system (baclofen, acamprosate and toprimate) has been used formally or informally to reduce alcohol consumption or maintain abstinence. Recently in the journal Addiction, Palpacuer et al. did a meta-analysis of 32 double-blind randomized controlled trials of these five medications. The studies were published between 1994 and 2015, and had a combination of 6,036 patients between them. They concluded:

There is currently no high-grade evidence for pharmacological treatment to control drinking using nalmefene, naltrexone, acamprosate, baclofen or topiramate in patients with alcohol dependence or alcohol use disorder. Some treatments show low to medium efficacy in reducing drinking across a range of studies with a high risk of bias. None demonstrates any benefit on health outcomes.

There was no evidence of any significant reduction in serious adverse events or mortality. Studies that sought to assess the efficacy of these medications as maintenance drugs, similar to how methadone is used, “were inadequate to investigate” whether they reduced serious adverse events. “In addition, any pharmacological approach that might benefit patients by reducing their alcohol consumption might also harm them because of safety issues.” As a result, the researchers advocated for long-term mega-trials exploring health outcomes.

To conclude, our results suggest that no treatment currently has high-grade evidence for pharmacologically controlled drinking in the treatment of patients suffering from alcohol dependence or alcohol use disorders. At best, some showed low to medium efficacy in reducing drinking, but across a range of studies with a high risk of bias. Although based on all available data in the public domain, this meta-analysis found no evidence of any benefit of the use of drugs aiming for a controlled drinking strategy on health outcomes. We invite researchers and stakeholders to set up a coherent agenda to demonstrate that pharmacologically controlled drinking can be translated into genuine harm reduction for patients. From the clinical perspective, while this new approach is often presented as a ‘paradigm shift’ in terms of therapeutics, doctors and patients should be informed that the critical examination of the pros and cons of the evidence clearly questions the current guidelines that promote drugs in this indication.

Reporting for The Guardian, Sarah Boseley further noted that one of the reasons for the inconclusive findings in Palpacuer et al. was because of the high drop out rates in the studies. “So many people dropped out of the trials that 26 of the 32 studies – 81% of them – had unclear or incomplete outcome data.” The lead author for the study, Clément Palpacuer, said the report did not mean the drugs weren’t effective. “It means we don’t yet know if they are effective. To know that, we need more studies.” There have also been concerns raised about the drugs by some studies already.

Bosley cited Fitzgerald et al., a review of the trial evidence used to approve nalmefene for use in the NHS. The researchers said at best, there was only modest evidence of efficacy in reducing alcohol consumption. This was despite stacking the deck in how the data was analyzed for approval of the drug.

Important weaknesses in nalmefene trial registration, design, analysis and reporting hamper efforts to understand if and how it can contribute to treating alcohol problems in general practice or elsewhere. The efficacy of nalmefene appears uncertain; a judgement of possible limited efficacy in an unusually defined and highly specific post‐hoc subgroup should not provide the basis for licensing or recommending a drug.

There are issues noted with baclofen as well. A co-author of Fitzgerald et al. noted one French study raised concerns with the safety of baclofen, with more deaths in the treatment group (7 of 162) than the placebo group (3 of 158). A further study by France’s medicines safety agency drew attention to additional adverse effects: “In particular, the risk of intoxication, epilepsy and unexplained death [on the death certificate] increases with the dosage of baclofen.” See “Sure Cure for Drunkenness” and “A ‘Cure’ for Alcoholism” and “The End of Alcoholism?” Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 for more concerns with baclofen and nalmefene.

Vincent Dole’s search for a methadone analogue or adjunctive chemotherapy for alcoholism is unlikely to be successful. As Carleton Erickson pointed out in The Science of Addiction, alcohol is different than other drugs. He said: “Unlike other drugs, alcohol has no specific receptor to activate in the brain.” Cocaine works on the dopamine transporter. Heroin and other opioids work on the opioid receptor; and marijuana works on the cannabinoid receptor. “Alcohol is known to affect the GABA receptor, the NMDA receptor, and probably others.”

There isn’t a hand-in-glove fit between a receptor and alcohol as there is with the opioid receptor and heroin or other opioids. So there isn’t a medication that can single handedly block alcohol as there is with heroin and other opioids. As Bill W. knew from personal experience, alcohol is cunning, baffling and powerful.

03/10/17

Let Your Yes Be Yes

While some oath-breaking leads to serious consequences, oaths just don’t seem to have the same significance in the modern person’s life as they did in biblical times. Most people know oaths occur in legal proceedings, where witnesses swear to tell the truth before giving testimony. Willfully give false testimony in this context is considered to be the crime of perjury. But outside of this sphere, taking an oath in modern times is largely reserved for times of ritual or ceremony.

In American culture, we see a newly appointed or elected government official swear an oath before taking office. Immigrants take an oath of citizenship when they become naturalized citizens of a country. When reciting the American Pledge of Allegiance, citizens pledge or swear loyalty to their country. Doctors and medical personnel take the Hippocratic oath, swearing to practice medicine honestly. So how are we to apply what Jesus says about oaths in the Sermon on the Mount?

Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, “You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.”But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God,or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black.Let what you say be simply “Yes” or “No”; anything more than this comes from evil. (Matthew 5:33-37)

In his commentary on the gospel of Matthew, Leon Morris noted this passage was peculiar to Matthew, who returned to the theme when He confronted the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23:16-22. “Clearly he [Jesus] was interested in the fact that people seemed very ready to swear oaths.” Oaths played a significant role in the life and culture of the Jews. The Mishnah, the first written record of the oral law, contains a complete treatise on oaths. In biblical and ancient times, oaths bound the person to his or her word.

According to the Lexham Bible Dictionary, oaths imposed a great sense of obligation on the individual; and breaking an oath was unthinkable. They were used to confirm the truthfulness of a person’s word, bind individuals in a contract, or confirm God’s intent to act according to His word. “Even rash oaths were binding and required confession of sin and sacrificial compensation if broken” (Leviticus 5:4-6). Yahweh served as the guarantor of a person’s oath, and here it had its greatest power. Breaking an oath was tantamount to breaking faith with Yahweh. Doing so took His name in vain (Exodus 20:7; Leviticus 19:12).

In this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was addressing how a series of quotations from Scripture should be understood. In Matthew 5:33, the Old Testament command to not break an oath (Leviticus 19:12; Numbers 30:2, etc) was paraphrased by Jesus. Then He said his followers should not swear an oath at all! However, sometimes it was necessary—Jesus himself responded when the high priest put him on oath (Matthew 26:63-64). So Jesus is not forbidding Christians from taking an oath, as some individuals apply the restriction today.

Rather, he is saying in the strongest terms possible that his followers must speak the truth. They should never adopt the sense that only when an oath is sworn do they need to be truthful.

The Jews held that unless the name of God was specifically mentioned the oath was not binding; there were lengthy discussions about when an oath is or is not binding, and people would sometimes swear by heaven or earth or a similar oath and later claim that they were not bound by that oath because God was not mentioned. Jesus rejects such casuistry.

This was why Jesus mentioned the forms of oaths used to sidestep telling the truth in Matthew 5:33-37. Remember the Mishnah had an entire treatise on oaths. Heaven, earth, Jerusalem, your head, were all somehow linked to God. You cannot escape the requirement to tell the truth by using these hair-splitting differences. Keep your pledges without insisting that a certain form of words was necessary to make it binding. Essentially Jesus is saying: “No oath is necessary for a truthful person.”

The conclusion of the matter is that it is never necessary for Christ’s people to swear an oath before they utter the truth. Their word should always be so reliable that nothing more than a statement is needed from them. God is in all of life, and every statement is made before him.

The importance of honesty in 12 Step Recovery is well known. Self-honesty begins with recognizing whether or not you are an alcoholic. In chapter 3, “More About Alcoholism,” it says A.A. doesn’t like to pronounce anyone as alcoholic. The suggestion is to try some controlled drinking—more than once. “It will not take long for you to decide, if you are honest with yourself about it.”

The manner of life demanded of the person who admits being an alcoholic is even qualified further as rigorous honesty. In discussing what to do after making a personal inventory (the Fourth Step) in chapter 6, “Into Action,” of the Big Book it says: “We must be entirely honest with somebody if we expect to live long and happily in this world.”

As Bill Sees It, a collection of thoughts by Bill W. on the A.A. way of life, cites a 1966 letter he wrote. Bill said that only God can fully know what absolute honesty is. The best we can do is to strive for a better quality of honesty. Sometimes we have to place love ahead of indiscriminate ‘factual honesty.’ In the name of ‘perfect honesty’ we can cruelly and unnecessarily hurt others. “Always one must ask, ‘What is the best and most loving thing I can do?’”

In an August 1961 article for the AA Grapevine, “This Matter of Honesty,” Bill W. observed how the problem of honesty touched nearly every aspect of our lives. While his intended audience was other A.A. members, I think what he said applies to everyone. After commenting on the extremes of self-deception and reckless truth-telling, he noted there were countless situations in life where nothing less than utter honest will do, “no matter how sorely we may be tempted by the fear and pride that would reduce us to half-truths or inexcusable denials.” He concluded the article with:

How truth makes us free is something that we AAs can well understand. It cut the shackles that once bound us to alcohol. It continues to release us from conflicts and miseries beyond reckoning; it banishes fear and isolation. The unity of our Fellowship, the love we cherish for each other, the esteem in which the world holds us–all of these are products of such integrity, as under God, we have been privileged to achieve. May we therefore quicken our search for still more genuine honor, and deepen its practice in all our affairs.

02/17/17

The Adultery of Addiction

In 1948, at the First International Convention of Alcoholics Anonymous, Dr. Bob gave his last major talk. He related for those in attendance his recollections of the beginnings of A.A. He recalled that in the early days they were groping in the dark. The Steps and the Traditions didn’t exist; the A.A. Big Book hadn’t been written yet. But they were convinced the answer to their problems was in the Good Book. And one of the absolutely essential parts of the Bible for them, according to Dr. Bob, was the Sermon on the Mount. But there are two verses in there whose application to 12 Step recovery may seem to be a bit strained.

Matthew 5:31-32, which expresses Jesus’ thoughts on divorce, follows right after he addressed how his followers should understand and apply biblical teaching on adultery and lust. As is typical of his teachings in other areas of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus turns the Jews understanding of what the Law said about divorce upside down. The passage says:

“It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

Jesus began by referring to Deuteronomy 24:1-4 from the Law of Moses, where if a man wanted to divorce his wife, he was required to give her a formal certificate declaring he was divorcing her. At that time, a man was permitted to divorce his wife, but a wife was not allowed to divorce her husband. She could petition the court, and if her plea was accepted, the court would direct the husband to divorce her. Culturally, to moderns this appears to be an unfair, patriarchal practice. But there was a loose interpretation of that section of the Mosaic Law that made it even more one-sided.

Deuteronomy 24:1 said a man could write his wife a certificate of divorce if she fell out of favor in his eyes “because he found some indecency in her.” The word for “indecency” in Hebrew can have a sexual connotation, but here it referred vaguely to some failing or sin. By the time period in which Jesus lived, the grounds for divorce could be a failing as trivial as a wife burning the food she cooked for her husband. We could almost say this was an ancient sense of a husband-centered “no fault divorce.” This was the interpretation of the followers of Hillel, a rabbi and teacher during the time of Herod the Great. The school of Shammai, a conservative Pharisee from around the same time period, limited the sense of the Hebrew word for “indecency” to its sexual sense and only permitted divorce for adultery.

Regardless of how an individual understood divorce, it was an accepted practice in Judaism for a man to divorce his wife. However, her husband could not put her outside of his home on a whim; he had to formally release her from her marriage vows. The certificate of divorce was a protection for the woman, indicating she could legally marry someone else. Remarriage for a widowed or divorced woman provided security in the culture of her time. Leon Morris observed: “In first-century Jewish society how else could she live?”

But, Jesus said divorce should not be granted at the whim of the husband; it’s not simply the right or privilege of a man to dispose of his wife whenever he tires of her. Such capriciousness was sin. Jesus said not only does this kind of husband force his wife to commit adultery by her remarriage, but also the man she marries. In God’s eyes the indecency to justify a divorce had to be serious to break the covenant bond of marriage. Apathy towards the wife of your youth or the desire for a younger, prettier “trophy wife” were not acceptable reasons for divorce.

Clearly Jesus saw marriage as a lifelong union between a man and a woman. Addiction can destroy that bond as effectively as adultery. In fact to a spouse, drug and alcohol addiction often feels like the addict or alcoholic is in an adulterous relationship—even when there isn’t another human being involved. There are frequent promises to their partner they are finished with alcohol … cocaine … heroin. Then the partner discovers those were promises without teeth. The addict didn’t follow through with a permanent breakup with their drug/lover.

Farther on in the Sermon on the Mount, in the midst of discussing treasures on earth or in heaven, Jesus tells his audience that whatever they treasure has their heart. Since no one can serve two masters (or lovers), they will be devoted to one or the other, but not both (Matthew 6:19-24). Being with an addict can feel like that. Your partner is in a relationship with something else; and you can’t compete.

In the A.A. Big Book, chapter 8 is “To Wives.” Counter-intuitively, that chapter was written by Bill W.; not his wife, Lois. In Pass It On, Lois said she was hurt Bill insisted on writing it himself. His given reason, so that it would be in the same style as the rest of the book, seems a bit weak. There was, in fact, a section included in the A.A. Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, that was written by another hand. “The Doctor’s Opinion” was written by Dr. Silkworth, the doctor who treated Bill at the end of his drinking. I think it is fair to say Bill W. had a strain of chauvinism in him and it showed up here.

Another way to apply Matthew 5:31-32 to recovery is to reflect on how adultery and divorce were frequently used as metaphors to describe idolatry or unfaithfulness to God in the Old Testament prophetic literature. Here, the adultery would be spiritual adultery; a violation of the individual’s relationship with God.

Ezekiel 16:15-35 frames the unfaithfulness of Jerusalem to God as adultery. Jeremiah 3:1-10 similarly describes how Israel polluted the land with her lovers. Israel and Jerusalem are the unfaithful wives. In Malachi, the priests are described as being faithless to the wife of their youth. Adultery, whether it was literal or a metaphor for spiritual unfaithfulness, violated the individual’s covenant before God.

The Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.“For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.” (Malachi 2:14-16)

11/20/15

Powerless Over Lust

Francis Hartigan, a biographer of Bill W., described him as seemingly being unable to control himself sexually. Despite knowing how his philandering was a potential threat to A.A., Bill couldn’t/wouldn’t stop. At times his despair and self loathing over this issue left him feeling unworthy to lead A.A. There was a “Founder’s Watch” committee of friends who would keep track of Bill during the socializing that took place at A.A. functions. When they saw “a certain gleam in his eye,” they would steer Bill off in one direction and the young woman he had been talking to in the other. “Sexual fidelity does not seem to be something Bill was capable of.”

Matthew 5:27-32 in the Sermon on the Mount addresses the issue of adultery. The passage begins rather clearly: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Jesus begins with a repetition of the Seventh Commandment’s restriction against adultery to his largely Jewish audience. The understanding to his audience and to other men in the ancient world was that the commandment forbade having sexual intercourse with a married woman. Leon Morris’s comment on this matter was that: “A married man could have sexual adventures as long as they did not involve a married woman.”

But as was typical of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, he challenges the restricted interpretations of Old Testament commandments given to God’s people. “But I say to you,” even looking lustfully at a woman means you have already committed adultery with her in your heart. Even the great rabbis stopped short of making such an important declaration about the importance of fidelity in marriage. In effect, Jesus was doing away with the old “double standard.” Men and women were equally required to be faithful in their marriages.

Note that Jesus includes matters of the heart—the thoughts, emotions and desires—as equal to overtly sinful behavior. Craig Blomberg said: “Christians must recognize those thoughts and actions which, long before any overt sexual sin, make the possibility of giving in to temptation more likely, and they must take dramatic action to avoid them.” Elaborating on this point, Jesus pointed to two of the primary bodily offenders in sexual sin outside of adultery—eyes and hands. With figurative and hyperbolic language, he said it was better to lose an eye or a hand, “one of your members,” than to end up in hell as a consequence of your sin. The message is to do whatever it takes “to control natural passions that tend to flare out of control.”

Alcoholics Anonymous, the A.A. Big Book, spent a good bit of time talking about sex. Given that Bill wrote the “How It Works” where that the section on sex appears, we may get some insight into his views on his problems with sexual fidelity and why he struggled with depression and self-loathing over his inability to control this compulsion.

Bill began by saying: “Now about sex. Many of us needed an overhauling there.” He then noted the extremes of human opinion between a view of sex being “a lust of our lower nature” and the voices who cry for sex and more sex; those who “bewail the institution of marriage.” And those who see most of human troubles traceable to sexual causes. He said A.A. didn’t want to be the arbiter of anyone’s sexual conduct. “We all have sex problems.” It’s part of being human. But what can we do about it?

The answer begins with an inventory of your sexual conduct. Where were you selfish, dishonest, or inconsiderate? Who have you hurt? Where did you unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion or bitterness? Where were you at fault and what should you have done differently? “We got this all down on paper and looked at it.” The test of each relationship was whether or not it was selfish. “We asked God to mold our ideals and help us live up to them. We remembered always that our sex powers were God-given and therefore good, neither to be used lightly or selfishly not to be despised and loathed.”

Whatever your ideal was, you should be willing to grow toward it. Be willing to make amends, provided that doesn’t bring about more harm than good. God alone can judge your sexual situation. Counsel with others, but avoid hysterical thinking or advice. Suppose you fall short of the chosen ideal and “stumble.” Does that mean you are going to get drunk? Some people say that will happen, but it is only a half-truth. It depends on our motives.

If we are sorry for what we have done, and have the honest desire to let God take us to better things, we believe we will be forgiven and have learned our lesson. If we are not sorry, and our conduct continues to harm others, we are quite sure to drink. We are not theorizing. These are facts out of our experiences.

To sum up about sex: We earnestly pray for the right ideal, for guidance in each questionable situation, for sanity, and for the strength to do the right thing. If sex is very troublesome, we throw ourselves the harder into helping others. We think of their needs and work for them. This takes us out of ourselves. It quiets the imperious urge, when to yield would mean heartache.

Hartigan said a close friend and confidant of Bill’s thought that his guilt over his infidelities was a large part of his struggle with depression. Bill would always agree with the friend that he needed to stop. But just when the friend thought they were getting somewhere, Bill would say he can’t give it up and start rationalizing. “Bill’s behavior caused some of his most ardent admirers to break with him.”

Bill seems to have kept himself on the razor’s edge of not drinking over his sexual conduct. He didn’t drink, but he suffered from depression for a number of years. He also didn’t seem to have true sorrow or repentance for his actions and an honest desire to let God take him to better things sexually. Returning to the Matthew passage, I wonder if Bill never really accepted that he needed to stop lusting after women in his heart (Matthew 5:28). While he practiced and wrote about doing whatever it took to not drink, he failed to apply that principle to his sex life. We could even say, perhaps, he never truly applied the First Step to his sexual conduct.

Faith Seeking Understanding

Charles Sigler, D.Phil.

Tag: A.A.