07/26/22

Doing My Utmost for Surrender and Sanctification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11/3/20

Bill W. and His LSD Experiences Part 2

Betty Eisner was an American psychologist who pioneered the use of hallucinogens, particularly LSD, as adjuncts to psychotherapy. Along with Sydney Cohen, she originated the practice of using both male and female therapists during psychotherapeutic hallucinogenic sessions. She also served on the board of advisors for the Alfred Hofmann Foundation. Hofmann was a Swiss scientist and the first person who synthesized and then accidentally ingested LSD, thus learning of its psychedelic effects. But it also seems Eisner was present when Bill W., cofounder of A.A., first tried LSD.

In 2002, Eisner completed an unpublished manuscript that documented her recollections and correspondence about the early work with psychedelics, “Remembrances of LSD therapy past.” “Remembrances” contains several references to W. or W. Wilson (Bill W.) and Tom Powers. She said in the fall of 1956 and early 1957, there was a boiling pot of activity surrounding dozens of people who had taken LSD and/or mescaline.

And we discussed them, Sid and I – and Al, and Humphry Osmond when he visited, and people like Tom Powers who came from the east coast to experience LSD, bringing W. Wilson from AA on several trips. Every one of the people wanted to talk about their experiences, experiences which were so unique that each one of us was busy trying to make sense of all the phenomena which were occurring, and to fit them into some intelligible description, category, and understanding.

In a January 12, 1957 letter to Ewing Reilly, who was funding Cohen and Eisner’s research at the time, she mentioned that one of the hypotheses she wanted to test was that when A.A.’s were really close to accepting the Third Step, were they also “really open to what LSD can do for them.” In a February 13, 1957 letter to Tom, Betty said after dropping him off at Miramar, she had the thought that while he spoke well about not being able to help Bill (W. Wilson, co-founder of A.A.), “the words are not yet synchronized to the music.” She closed her letter asking Tom to give Bill her best regards and tell him it was a real pleasure to meet such an interesting, extraordinary, and powerful person—and challenging problem to himself and others.

On February 16, 1957, Sid, Betty Tom and Bill all participated in the very first “group session” with LSD. It had been Betty’s idea, as she wanted “to see what would happen” if everyone simultaneously took LSD, blurring the line between patient and facilitators. Not sure what the result would be, she conservatively proposed that they should all take a low dose of 25-gamma LSD. On previous occasions they had all taken larger doses of LSD. When Bill came into the room, she knew it would be his session.

Sid was waiting for us in his office at the hospital and there were warm greetings to Tom and W. At 12:20 we took the drug… W. had taken 50 gamma — the rest of us 25. When offered the little blue pills and was told by Sid to take what he wanted, he said — ‘Never say that to a drunk,’ and took two… it was 35 minutes later when he said he felt stirred by the music, and 10 minutes after that when he began talking. Throughout the session he rarely would admit feeling the drug or its action, but about the time he started talking quite a bit in a more relaxed way his face changed, he looked much younger, and the tension began to go.

Tom and Betty took turns in the role of therapist; Sid Cohen was mostly quiet. There were two important dynamics to the problem(s) uncovered that she was hesitant to say much about. The issues were Bill’s experience of himself as unloved and the perception that it was because of his parents that this occurred. Bill’s family history noted in Pass It On is consistent with these two interpretations. She thought Tom jumped “too many levels and lost W.” At other times, she thought he was “off the beam.” At around 4 pm, Bill appeared to be coming out of it and rebuilding his defenses. Later at dinner, she thought her husband Will really got through to Bill a couple of times on “the shared bridge between them of depression.”

On February 26, 1957, Tom wrote to Betty, saying her report of their February 16^th session came that day. He said he thought that both her and Will were good for Bill, because they were among the few people who were interested and loving enough to deal with him forthrightly and outside of “the highly forced and artificial context of his position in A.A.” He thought their session did Bill a lot of good— “and I think you and the LSD are very largely responsible.” Bill did not write until March 22, 1957, when he said: “Please forgive this late response in thanking you for all the friendship you gave so freely on my last trip to the coast. More often than you can guess, I have continued to think of you.” He added that since returning home, he felt—and hoped he acted—exceedingly well. “I can make no doubt that the Eisner-Cohen-Powers-LSD therapy has contributed not a little to this happier state of affairs.”

There was further correspondence back-and-forth between Betty and Tom in “Remembrances of LSD therapy past,” but nothing more from Bill. Tom assured Betty in an April 13, 1957 letter that his interest in LSD continued to be very keen and he was looking forward to another planned meeting and an optimum LSD session. He said the total effect of the three sessions had profoundly changed him for the good. He added that Bill was also strongly affected for the good and others noticed how much better he was. “He himself is very happy about it and realizes clearly what it is that has done it.”

In Bill W., Francis Hartigan said Bill’s enthusiasm for LSD convinced his wife Lois and Nell Wing, his secretary, to try LSD. He even convinced Farther Dowling, his spiritual advisor, to try it. Hartigan said under the supervision of a psychiatrist from Roosevelt Hospital, Bill continued with LSD experiments in the late 1950s. The New York participants were all sober. The purpose was to determine if LSD could might produce insights that were preventing people from feeling more spiritually alive. Bill agreed with Huxley’s statement that LSD’s power was that it could open “doors of perception.” He described his first experiences with LSD as similar to what he had experienced in Towns Hospital the night his obsession with alcohol was lifted.

In a long letter Bill wrote to Sam Shoemaker in June of 1958, he discussed his LSD use. He admitted he had taken it several times over the last two years and also collected considerable information about it. He rejected the allegation that LSD was a new psychiatric toy of “awful dangers.” He named several researchers he’d met in his own investigation of LSD, including Sidney Cohen, and said they found no tendency to addiction; no physical risk whatever. “The material is about as harmless as aspirin.”

He thought that prayer, fasting, meditation, despair, and other conditions that predispose an individual to mystical experiences had their chemical components. He then theorized that these chemical conditions helped shut down normal ego drives; and to that extent, “they do open the doors to a wider perception.” Presciently, he saw it would be a huge misfortune if LSD got loose in the general public without careful preparation about what the drug is and what the meaning of its effects could be. “And do believe that I am perfectly aware of the dangers to A.A. I know that I must not compromise its future and would gladly withdraw from these new activities if ever this became apparent.”

As Pass It On noted, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), were experimenting with LSD at Harvard. Until that time, LSD experiments has been quiet and uneventful. Their work erupted in a scandal when two of the students in their studies, both minors, has distressing flashback experiences. Leary left Harvard and went on the be famous for the slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” He tried to get involved with Bill’s LSD work in the late 1950s, but Bill did not want to include him. Bill kept putting him off until eventually, Leary stopped asking.

In “Remembrances of LSD therapy past,” Eisner mentioned Leary in a December 1962 letter to Humphry Osmond, saying it had been fun to see Leary and Alpert. The two of them had been out to California for a weekend of lectures and workshops. She noted there seemed to be quite a movement gathering around Leary and Alpert for personal research in expanding consciousness. She said she was bothered by a separateness, or special sort of language that seemed to be developing with Leary and Alpert. She then mused, “I wonder why so much of the drug work has led to fractionation rather than fusion.”

In a May 26, 1963 letter from Osmond to Eisner, Humphry said he was worried about Tim Leary, and found it hard to maintain contact with him. He said Leary had failed to get an adequate advisor on psychopharmacology and acted as if the powerful chemicals he was experimenting with were harmless toys: “They aren’t.” Osmond said in illnesses like alcoholism they may be harmless relative to the likely outcome, but that was something different.

In March of 1966 Time magazine reported that the US was suffering from an LSD epidemic. By June both California and Nevada had legislated against LSD, and by October, LSD was illegal in the whole country. All this was too much for Sandoz, which had been taking an increasing amount of flack because of LSD and psilocybin, and in April of 1966, Sandoz terminated all research contracts involved with the two drugs and indicated their willingness to turn over all their supplies to the FDA. For 26 years there was no more legal psychedelic research in the United States.

IF you are interested in reading more about Bill W. and LSD, try “Bill W. and His LSD Experiences Part 1,” or “As Harmless as Aspirin?” For more information on the therapeutic use of hallucinogens, see “Back to the Future with Psychedelics;” “The Unique Scientific Value of Ibogaine” Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3; “Ayahuasca Anonymous,” Part 1 and Part 2; “Psychedelic Renaissance?;” “Give MDMA a Chance?” and more.

10/27/20

Bill W. and His LSD Experiences, Part 1

Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, has an acknowledged history of LSD use in the 1950s. This was when LSD was an unknown, experimental chemical, with no regulations or restrictions regulating its use. The A.A. published story of Bill Wilson and how the A.A. message reached the world, Pass It On, openly discussed Bill’s interest in LSD. It mentioned individuals who were known by or became friends to Bill—Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond—and who also happen to be important figures in the history of psychedelics. Yet by 1959, “Bill had personally withdrawn from the LSD experiments,” so that he would not compromise the future of A.A. But there is more to the story of Bill W. and LSD than what is found in Pass It On.

It began in the winter of 1943-44 when Bill and his wife Lois set out on a cross-country trip visiting A.A. groups that had sprouted up since the 1939 publication of the Big Book. According to Susan Cheever in My Name is Bill, Bill and Lois met Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley while they were in Palo Alto, California and there was an immediate attraction between Wilson and Huxley. Heard and Huxley believed the betterment of society would come from an experiment in community and community education. Bill and A.A. were the practical application of that philosophy. Heard and Huxley invited Bill and Lois to spend New Year’s week at Trabuco College, a retreat center in the desert established by Heard to study comparative religion, and research meditation and prayer. The Wilsons returned to New York on January 22, 1944, but an important friendship was formed.

Pass It On said Bill and Huxley had an immediate rapport, one that Bill was immensely proud of. “They had much in common, although Huxley was not an alcoholic.” Huxley would later say he considered Bill to be a “modern saint” and “the greatest social architect of the twentieth century.” It was through Bill’s friendship with Huxley that Bill first heard about, and eventually decided to try LSD.

Humphry Osmond began his research with LSD and mescaline at St. George’s Hospital in London, where he was employed after WW II. In 1951, he moved to Saskatchewan, Canada to join the staff at Weybrun Mental Hospital. At Weybrun he organized the hospital as a design-research laboratory where he conducted a variety of studies into the use of hallucinogenic drugs. He was initially investigating the possibility that schizophrenia arose primarily from distortions of perception similar to those experienced by individuals under the influence of mescaline or LSD. But unexpectedly, Osmond began to see the potential of these drugs to foster mind-expanding, mystical experiences. It was during this time of experimentation that Aldous Huxley began a correspondence with Osmond and eventually asked him if he would kindly supply Huxley with a dose of mescaline.

In May of 1953 Osmond traveled to the Los Angeles area for a conference, where he provided the requested dose of mescaline and supervised Huxley’s experience with mescaline. Huxley would write The Doors of Perception (1954), which enthusiastically described his experience. He wrote: “The mystical experience is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a led self-centered and more creative life.” Gerald Heard tried mescaline in 1954 and then tried LSD in 1955. Heard felt that properly used, these psychedelics had the potential to enlarge a man’s mind, by allowing him to see beyond his ego.

Huxley and Heard would have naturally thought of what LSD could mean for Bill W., but Bill was initially opposed to giving drugs to alcoholics. In Pass It On, Osmond said: “I went down and was introduced to Bill and told him about it, and he was extremely unthrilled. He was very much against giving alcoholics drugs.” Huxley was apparently able to convince Bill of the mystical potential of LSD. Osmond reported that when alcoholics were given LSD, they reported having a new clarity of vision, a new vividness of experience. From his observations of the LSD work with alcoholics, Bill concluded LSD temporarily reduced the forces of the ego, which allowed the influx of God’s grace.

If therefore, under LSD we can have a temporary reduction, so that we can better see what we are and where we are going—well, that might be of some help. So I consider LSD to be of some value to some people, and practically no damage to anyone. It will never take the place of any of the existing means by which we can reduce the ego, and keep it reduced.

While Bill was debating the wisdom of trying it for himself, there were two other individuals taking the LSD plunge—a man and a woman who would have an important role in Bill’s exploration of LSD.

Dr. Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist at Wadsworth VA Hospital in Los Angeles, first took LSD on October 12, 1955, reporting that the “problems and strivings, the worries and frustrations of everyday life vanished; in their place was a majestic, sunlit, heavenly inner quietude.” He immediately began doing his own research with Huxley. And on August 29, 1956 at Trabuco College, he supervised Bill Wilson’s first experience with LSD. Gerald Heard took notes; Aldous Huxley and Tom Powers, an A.A. friend of Bill’s from New York, stood by. According to Susan Cheever in My Name is Bill and the A.A. approved book Pass It On, Bill loved LSD and felt it helped him eliminate many of the barriers erected by the ego that stood in the way of his direct experience of God and the universe. It reminded him of his initial “hot flash” experience in Towns Hospital.

Betty Eisner, a psychology grad student, was Cohen’s initial research subject in 1955. As a result of her intense interest in his LSD work, Betty began meeting periodically with Sidney Cohen. A case report of her LSD experience was included in an article published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in July of 1958, “Subjective Reports of Lysergic Acid Experiences in a Context of Psychological Test Performance.” Eisner completed her Ph.D. by the end of July 1956 and was a coauthor of this paper along with Cohen and Lionel Fichman.

Eisner and Cohen began to think LSD could be helpful in facilitating psychotherapy, as well as curing alcoholism and enhancing creativity. They coauthored, “Psychotherapy with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide,” which was published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders in 1958. For a time, Bill W. was an integral part of their exploration of the psychotherapeutic benefits of LSD. Eisner maintained an active interest in hallucinogens throughout her career. Cohen would eventually become a director for the National Institute of Mental Health, but was always opposed to the counterculture movement’s use of LSD. He thought it was only safe when used under medical supervision.

In Part 2, we’ll look at the time period between the fall of 1956 and early 1957, what Eisner described as a boiling pot of activity surrounding LSD and mescaline. And Bill W. was in the middle of the pot.

10/29/19

Do They Walk Their Talk?

Matthew 7:15 cautions us to “Beware of false prophets.” By their external appearance, they look authentic and may even do or say some of the right things. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they appear to be the real deal on a superficial level, but inwardly they are vicious and destructive. So how can you tell a true prophet from a false one? The answer is, do they bear good fruit—do they walk their talk?

The concluding section of the Sermon on the Mount makes use of the “Two Ways” tradition of early Christianity and Judaism. In three illustrations, Jesus plainly showed there are only two categories of people in the world—those who enter by the narrow gate rather than the wide gate (vv. 13-14), those who bear good fruit rather than bad (vv. 15-20), and those who build their homes on solid rock rather than shifting sand (vv. 24-27). In his commentary Leon Morris commented, “In each case the first category refers to those who hear, obey, and are saved; the second, to those who only hear and so are destroyed.” In other words, not everyone who says they are a Christian, is a Christian. They have to show it.

¹⁵“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. ¹⁶You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? ¹⁷So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. ¹⁹Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:15-20)

The contrast of the two ways is not found in the other gospels, but it does appear in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 30:19; Psalm 1:6, Jeremiah 21:8); in Jewish writings (2 Esdras 7:6-13); and in early Christian literature, like Didache 1:1: “There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways.” Some may verbally affirm that Jesus is Lord, and even preach the gospel, but inwardly are insatiably after their own interests. They are like ravenous wolves. So how can you tell who is a wolf in sheep’s clothing? By their fruits: “Their fruits will in the end betray them.”

Jesus used an illustration from the everyday life of his audience to demonstrate this. Everyone knew that the buckthorn had small black berries that could be mistaken for grapes. And there was a thistle whose flower could be mistaken for a fig, from a distance. However, as D.A. Carson said, “But no one would confuse the buckthorn and the grape once he started to use the fruit to make some wine. No one would be taken in by thistle flowers when it came to eating figs for supper.” The same principle is true of trees—a good tree bears good fruit; a diseased tree bears bad fruit.

Here the thought is that it is not the outward appearance that is important (wolves may be dressed up to look like sheep), but the things the false prophets do, the produce of their manner of thought and life. If the disciples take note of what these false prophets do and refuse to be charmed by their false words, they will recognize them for what they are.

If a tree is healthy, it cannot bear bad fruit. Conversely, a diseased tree cannot bear good fruit. The repetition emphasizes the point. Then Jesus moved to the fate of every diseased trees: “No bad tree is allowed to continue producing its bad fruit.” The consequence is universal; it is cut down and burned.

The burning of a worthless tree removes the possibility that it will infect other trees. But fire is often used of the fire of hell, and this meaning may be not far away. Jesus is making it clear that discipleship means a great deal more than religious activity.

So then, the logical conclusion of Jesus’ teaching here is a repetition of verse 16. “You will recognize them by their fruits.” The good fruit of a person’s life is the evidence of their claim to be a prophet. And since good fruit cannot grow on a diseased tree, you can discern a false prophet by their fruit as well. False prophets, like diseased trees, should be cut down and thrown into the fire.

The Old and New Testaments contain multiple warnings against false prophets. They commit adultery, walk in lies and strengthen the hands of evil doers (Jeremiah 23:14); they are treacherous and do violence to the law (Zephaniah 3:4); they prophesy lies in the name of God, the deceit of their own minds (Jeremiah 14:14). The Bible suggests these false declarations come from their own hearts (Ezekiel 13:2, 4; Jeremiah 23:16, 26). We can suggest that at least one of the ways to uncover a false prophet is to watch and see if they demonstrate their love for God by walking their talk. But what if the false prophet is a wolf in sheep’s clothing—what if they appear good on the outside?

There is a root and fruit connection to our actions (fruit) and our heart (root). A “healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.” The parallel to our Matthew passage in Luke 6:43-45 declared the good person produces good treasure from his heart and the evil person produces evil treasure from his heart, “for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” In Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands, Paul Tripp illustrated this process in his discussion of fruit stapling, where efforts to change behavior ignore the heart behind the actions.

Drawing on the fruit tree metaphor in the Luke passage, he asks us to imagine that he has an apple tree in his backyard. Year after year the apples are dry, wrinkled, brown and pulpy. His wife says it doesn’t make any sense to have an apple tree that doesn’t produce good fruit and suggests that Paul cut down the tree and burn it. Instead, he buys branch cutters, an industrial grade staple gun, a ladder and two bushels of apples. He climbs the ladder, cuts off all the pulpy apples, and staples shiny red apples on every branch of the tree. “From a distance our tree looks like it is full of a beautiful harvest.”

If a tree produces bad apples year after year, there is something drastically wrong with its system, down to its very roots. I won’t solve the problem by stapling new apples on the branches. They also will rot because they are not attached to a life-giving root system. And next spring, I will have the same problem again. I will not see a new crop of healthy apples because my solution had not gone to the heart of the problem. If the tree’s roots remain unchanged, it will never produce good apples.If my heart is the source of my sin problem, then lasting change must always travel through the pathway of my heart. It is not enough to alter my behavior or to change my circumstances. Christ transforms people by radically changing their hearts. If the heart doesn’t change, the person’s words and behavior may change temporarily because of an external pressure or incentive. But when the pressure or incentive is removed, the changes will disappear.

Sooner or later they will show the wolf; a diseased tree always bears bad fruit. They cannot consistently walk the talk because the seemingly “good fruit” does not come from a changed heart.

The root-and-fruit principle applies readily to 12 Step recovery. Several of the sayings used in recovery, such as walking your talk, he’s on a dry drunk, you can’t be clean while living dirty, are illustrations of it. It even applies to judging your spiritual experiences and whether or not you can ever ‘get’ clean.

Bill W. wrote an article originally published in the Grapevine in July of 1962, “Spiritual Experiences.” It was later added to a collection of his Grapevine writings, The Language of the Heart. He said he was the recipient of a tremendous mystic experience in 1934 that was “accompanied by a sense of intense white light, by a sudden gift of faith in the goodness of God, and by a profound conviction of his presence.” He said in retrospect, the only special feature was its electric suddenness and the overwhelming and immediate conviction that it carried to him. “In all other respects, however, I am sure that my own experience was not in the least different from that received by every AA member who has strenuously practiced our recovery program.”

He said when a person approached him to find out how to have a sudden spiritual experience, he tells them that in all probability they have had one just as good, except it was strung out over a longer period of time. If a spiritual transformation over six months had been condensed into six minutes, “well they then might have seen the stars, too!” He failed to see any great difference between the sudden and more gradual experiences; they were certainly all of the same piece. The one sure test of any spiritual experience was, “By their fruits, ye shall know them.”

As Bill Sees It is a collection of selected writings by Bill W. In there was an excerpt from a 1958 letter Bill wrote to a person discouraged over repeated “slips,” lapses back into active drinking. The discouraged individual was thinking of not returning to A.A. because of his lapses. Bill advised him against staying away from A.A. because of feeling of discouraged or shameful of his lapses. “It’s just the place you should be.”

For some reason, Bill said, the Lord seemed to have him on a tougher path. But God was not asking for him to be successfully abstinent, “He is only asking us to try to be.” Here was the key feature in achieving lasting abstinence—a transformed heart; a surrender of your will and life to God after recognizing your powerlessness to do so in your own strength. And whether this spiritual experience was sudden or gradual, the sure test of whether it was real was by its fruit. If there was a true surrender, he would get the program. “It is not always the quantity of good things that you do, it is also the quality that counts.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

04/11/17

Love Your Enemies

Some people mistakenly think that the proverbial saying, “God helps those who help themselves” is some where in the Bible. Well it’s not. Actually, it came from one of Aesop’s fables, Hercules and the Waggoneer. A waggoneer driving a heavily loaded wagon became stuck in a muddy road. The more the horses pulled, the deeper the wheels sank in the mud. So he prayed to Hercules for help, who then replied that the wagoneer should get up off his knees and put his shoulder to the wheel. The moral of the fable was: “The gods help them that help themselves.”

In a similar way, Jesus corrected in Matthew 5:43-48 what had become a misapplication of the commandment to love your neighbor in Leviticus 19:18. In preceding passages of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus introduced teachings from Scripture with the phrase that begins 5:43: “You have heard it said” (Matthew 5:21, 5:27, 5:33, 5:38). But here “what was said” was not from Scripture. Instead of the command to Love your neighbor as yourself,” it seems that what was being taught was “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” Nowhere in the Old Testament does it say, “Hate your enemy.”

There were passages that called for the destruction of Israel’s enemies (Deuteronomy 7:2) or counseled to keep your distance from non-Israelites (Exodus 34:12). Yet you were to feed your enemy (Proverbs 25:21-22) and help them when they were in need (Exodus 23:4-5). The Old Testament teaching on how you were to treat your enemies was complex, according to Leon Morris. In his commentary on Matthew, he said:

All this means that those who summed up Old Testament teaching as calling for love for neighbors and hatred for enemies were oversimplifying. The call for hatred is certainly the kind of addition to the command that many have put into practice.

Again, instead of lowering the bar to the common social standard he quoted in 5:43, Jesus said his followers were to love their enemies and pray for them!

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)

Jesus named two groups who were widely seen as enemies by the ordinary Jew—tax collectors and Gentiles (non-Jews). Don’t they take care of their own; don’t they love one another? So if you love only those who love you; if you only greet others like you (your brothers), how are you different from the tax collectors and the Gentiles?

While tax collectors are never popular in any culture (think of the Internal Revenue Service in the U.S.), in first-century Palestine they were particularly unpopular. Not only would they collect taxes for the Romans, they would also be sure to get some extra for themselves. Leon Morris commented, “In the eyes of Jesus’ audience there were no more wicked people than tax collectors as a class.” That’s the point of the encounter Jesus had with Zacchaeus, who was a tax collector (Luke 19:1-10). They were the last ones you would expect to show love to others. The implied question is shouldn’t your love for others be greater?

The verse about greeting your brother is deeper in meaning than most people realize. When first-century Jews greeted one another, they would say “Peace,” which was in fact like saying a prayer; something like this: “May the peace of the Lord be upon you.” In our culture we say “good-bye” without remembering we are actually saying a shortened form of: “God by with you.” So making a sincere greeting meant you expressed goodwill and welcome to your brother. Shouldn’t your wishes and greetings to others be more sincere than the Gentiles?

The final command in verse 48, “to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” seems to set an unreachable standard—be as perfect as God the Father. But that’s not what it means. The sense of the Greek word for “perfect” here pertains to you being fully developed in a moral sense. Look, your Father in heaven lets the sun rise and the rain fall upon both the evil and the good; the just and the unjust. Shouldn’t you do the same? The command to love your neighbor as yourself includes loving your enemies. Isn’t that the same message as in the parable of the Good Samaritan?

There is an interesting grammatical structure in verse 5:45b called a chiasm, named after the Greek letter chi, which looks like an “X.” The verse reads: “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” The crossing/chiasm is between the “evil” and “unjust” as well as the “good” and the “just.” The crossing pattern is accomplished by taking the first pair of contrasting words, evil and good, and then reversing the position in the second pair of contrasting words: just and unjust. So the chiasm looks like this:

The chiastic structure helps to reinforce the point of the passage. It gives a visual warning to the followers of Jesus: they are not to follow the contrasting advice of loving their neighbor and hating their enemy. Rather, just as their heavenly Father sends sun upon the evil and the good, and rain upon both the just and the unjust, they are to love and not hate their enemies. This action of God’s is known as the principle of common grace, where the good things of the world like sun and rain fall equally upon the evil and the good; the just and the unjust. God does not withhold the gifts of rain and sunshine from people who are evil or unjust. So followers of Christ should NOT withhold love from their enemies.

In an active addiction, addicts and alcoholics make a lot of enemies. The hostility in these relationships can be either a one-way or a two-way street. You resent one another in mutual hostility. But you resent what someone did—or they resent what you did—in one-way hostility. The remedy for this in recovery is stated in Matthew 5:44: love and pray for your enemies. In order to do so, you have to let go of your resentment.

When discussing the Fourth Step in the “How It Works” chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill W. said: “Resentment is the ‘number one’ offender It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.” It leads to various forms of spiritual disease—“a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness.” If the alcoholic is to live, they have to be free of anger. Realize that the people who wronged you were perhaps spiritually sick as well. “We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.”

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)

Faith Seeking Understanding

Charles Sigler, D.Phil.

Tag: Bill W.