The Good Book and The Big Book

Chapter One

Lest We Forget Early AAs and Their Bibles!

Alcoholism, substance abuse, and their often attendant addictions can be, and frequently are, deadly, terrifying, productive of despair, financially devastating, and morally destructive. A recent annual report from the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University declared, as to the American people alone:

18-and-a-half million are addicted to alcohol or abuse it.

Some 12 million abuse legal drugs, such as tranquilizers, amphetamines and sleeping pills.

Two million use cocaine weekly, including at least half a million addicted to crack.

Up to one million are hooked on heroin.

Half a million regularly use hallucinogens such as LSD and PCP.

Some 1 million, half of whom are teenagers, use black-market steroids.

The financial costs of substance abuse approach a staggering $400 billion annually.

To these figures, the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse has added that some seventy-five million American lives are impacted by the disease of alcoholism. Technical reports and newspaper accounts of the day make it clear that interdiction, prohibition, prevention, punishment, intervention, treatment, therapy, counseling, and "self-help" groups are not even close to eradicating these problems.

Such was not the picture as it looked on June 10, 1935, and continued through the early 1940's. In that period, an age-old solution had been rediscovered out of the helplessness of medicine, the message of assured deliverance in the Bible, and the desperate experimentation of a handful of drunks who sought to rely exclusively on the power of God.

If one is prepared to accept the following verdict from a staff member of a world-renowned hospital, many doctors and psychiatrists agree to the following:

What you [the staff member said to several AAs] say about the general hopelessness of the average alcoholic's plight is, in my opinion, correct. As to two of you men [in Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930's], whose stories I have heard, there is no doubt in my mind that you were 100% hopeless, apart from Divine help. Had you offered yourselves as patients at this hospital, I would not have taken you, if I had been able to avoid it. People like you are too heartbreaking. Though not a religious person, I have profound respect for the spiritual approach in such cases as yours. For most cases, there is virtually no other solution.

The spiritual solution was most definitely the power of God Almighty. A.A. co-founder Bill Wilson said the following:

God knows we've been simple enough and gluttonous enough to get this way, but once we got this way [became real alcoholics], it was a form of lunacy which only God Almighty could cure.

A.A. was not invented Nobody invented Alcoholics Anonymous. Who invented AA? It was God Almighty that invented AA.

What is this but a miracle of healing? Yet its elements are simple. Circumstances made him [the real alcoholic] willing to believe. He humbly offered himself to his Maker-then he knew. Even so has God restored us all to our right minds.

We never apologize to anyone for depending upon our Creator. We can laugh at those who think spirituality the way of weakness. Paradoxically, it is the way of strength.... All men of faith have courage. They trust their God. We never apologize for God.

A.A.'s other co-founder Dr. Bob was equally explicit in his personal narrative in A.A.'s Big Book editions:

If you think you are an atheist, an agnostic, a skeptic, or have any other form of intellectual pride which keeps you from accepting what is in this book, I feel sorry for you .... Your Heavenly Father will never let you down!

In an article published in A.A.'s official publication in July 1951, shortly after Dr. Bob's death, the famous medical writer Paul de Kruif wrote:

The medicine the AAs use is unique. Though it should be all-powerful, it has never been tried with any consistent success against any other major sickness. This medicine is no triumph of chemical science; has needed no billion dollar scientific foundation to discover it; does not come in capsules or syringes. It is free as air-with this provision: that the patients it cures have to nearly die before they can bring themselves to take it. The AAs' medicine is God and God alone. This is their discovery.

And there is no doubt that the foregoing names for God and comments about Him were a direct product of the Bible study which took place daily in early A.A. Let's look at Dr. Bob's comments:

Dr. Bob, noting that there were no Twelve Steps at the time [from mid-1935 to early 1939] and that "our stories didn't amount to anything to speak of," later said they were convinced that the answer to their problems was in the Good Book .... As Dr., Bob recalled: "I didn't write the Twelve Steps. I had nothing to do with the writing of them.... We already had the basic ideas, though not in terse and tangible form. We got them ... as a result of our study of the Good Book."

He [Dr. Bob] cited the Sermon on the Mount as containing the underlying spiritual philosophy of A.A.

If someone asked him, [Dr. Bob] a question about the program, his usual response was: "What does it say in the Good Book?"

Dr. Bob donated that Bible [the one he carried to meetings] to the King School Group [A.A. Group No.1], where it still rests on the podium at each meeting. Inside is an inscription: "It is the hope of the King School Group-whose property this is-that this Book may never cease to be a source of wisdom, gratitude, humility, and guidance, as when fulfilled in the life of the Master" [Jesus Christ]. It is signed "Dr. Bob Smith. "

Bill Wilson, a former atheist, was gun-shy when it came to mentioning the dominance of the Bible in the early scene. But the following is reported in A.A.'s official biography of him:

Bill [when he moved in with Dr. Bob and his wife Anne in the summer of 1935] now joined Bob and Anne in the Oxford Group practice of having morning guidance sessions together, with Anne reading from the Bible. "Reading from her chair in the corner, she would softly conclude, 'Faith without works is dead. ,,, The Book of James was considered so important, in fact, that some early members even suggested "The James Club" as a name for the Fellowship.

Dr. Bob's wife Anne wrote in the journal she shared with A.A. pioneers:

Of course, the Bible ought to be the main Source Book of all. No day ought to pass without reading it.

Clarence Snyder, who founded A.A. in Cleveland and was responsible for its tremendous growth in 1939 and the early 1940's, said: "Everything in this program came from the Bible."

Wrapping up his 1938 survey of the early recovery program,

A.A.'s Trustee-to-be Frank Amos reported to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.:

He [the alcoholic] must have devotions every morning-a "quiet time" of prayer and some reading from the Bible and other religious literature. Unless this is faithfully followed, there is grave danger of backsliding.

A word or two about the Bible in our society today. The Bible still appears to stand as America's Number One authority on the matter of "divine help." A recent survey by George H. Gallup, Jr., and Robert Bezilla (issued by the Princeton Religion Research Center), which appeared in The Maui News on September 16, 1994, bears the headline" Bible still best seller, but lessons being lost." Gallup and Bezilla began their article as follows:

It never appears on the bestseller lists, but the Bible is the nation's perennial best-selling book.

And we believe that, just as the Bible still stands as America's top best seller, it stood in the 1930's as number one on the early AAs' reading and study list for information on divine help.

We believe those concerned with preventing and treating the devastating problems of alcoholism and drug dependence will want to consider two questions: (1) Is a knowledge of the Biblical roots of A.A. of major importance today in Twelve Step programs, the religious community, and in the treatment arena? (2) Is there substantial, credible evidence that early AAs took most of the basic ideas for their highly successful recovery program of the 1930's from the Bible, which they affectionately called the "Good Book"'] One will not understand the importance of knowing the biblical roots of the Twelve Steps without also understanding that A.A. (the Number One success group) is undergoing a plummeting rate of recovery while being asked to process vastly increasing numbers of alcoholics and addicts. Let's examine the success rate of the 1930's and compare it with widely reported failures in the alcoholism and addiction arena today.

Early A.A.'s Success Rate Compared to Today

Early A.A. claimed at least a seventy-five percent success rate among those who really tried. Early AAs, who were deemed "medically incurable" in the late 1930's, actually recovered from their seemingly hopeless disease at that very high percentage rate. And many observers in and out of A.A. underlined, and/or corroborated the early AAs' seventy-five percent claims. Bill Wilson himself contended there was an 80 % success rate. Early Cleveland AAs actually recorded a 93% success rate there. And in his famous 1941 Saturday Evening Post article about A.A., Jack Alexander said AAs claimed 100 % success among non-psychotic drinkers.

Yet these high percentage rates of yesteryear do not depict the A.A. success rate today-a fact to which any active AA can attest. Those of us who regularly attend A.A. "birthday," "chip,"...