Aa history Lovers 2004 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page

website at http://hindsfoot.org ).

The Oxford Group of course had the largest single influence on early A.A. Many

of the twelve steps were simply developments of Oxford Group teachings.

However, the second most important influence may well have come from The Upper

Room. For the first thirteen years, A.A. members studiously read it every

morning and thoroughly internalized its values, and its conception of the

spiritual life. These ideas became so totally ingrained in the spirit and

traditional teaching of A.A. that they survive even now, well over half a

century after A.A. people stopped using these little meditational books.

Glenn C. (South Bend, Indiana)

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++++Message 1926. . . . . . . . . . . . The Early Akron A.A. Reading List,

Part 1 of 5

From: Glenn Chesnut . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/20/2004 11:56:00 PM

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================================

The Early Akron Recommended Reading List:

The Works It Contained and their Significance for Understanding Early Akron

A.A.

Glenn C. (South Bend, Indiana)

================================

PART ONE:

A pamphlet entitled A Manual for Alcoholics Anonymous, often referred to as

the Akron Manual, was written and published by early Akron A.A. at a very

early period, as an introductory booklet to hand to newcomers when they began

the detoxification process. [Note 1] Based on things that are mentioned in the

Manual, it was most probably put together during the summer or fall of 1939,

and certainly no later than 1940. A copy of it can be found at

http://hindsfoot.org/AkrMan1.html (the first half) and

http://hindsfoot.org/AkrMan2.html (the second half) on the Hindsfoot

Foundation website ( http://hindsfoot.org ). So this small pamphlet is an

extraordinarily valuable document. It is a little window opening into the

world of early Akron A.A. shortly after the Big Book first started coming off

the press.

~~~~~~~~~~

At the very end of the Akron Manual it says "the following literature has

helped many members of Alcoholics Anonymous," and then it gives a list of ten

works as a kind of recommended reading list:

Alcoholics Anonymous (Works Publishing Company).

The Holy Bible

The Greatest Thing in the World, Henry Drummond.

The Unchanging Friend, a series (Bruce Publishing Co., Milwaukee).

As a Man Thinketh, James Allen.

The Sermon on the Mount, Emmet Fox (Harper Bros.).

The Self You Have to Live With, Winfred Rhoades.

Psychology of Christian Personality, Ernest M. Ligon (Macmillan Co.).

Abundant Living, E. Stanley Jones.

The Man Nobody Knows, Bruce Barton."

~~~~~~~~~~

THE BIBLE was the second item on the list, right behind the Big Book. But

earlier in the pamphlet it was made clear that there were certain places in

the Bible that they wanted the newcomers to especially focus on: the Sermon on

the Mount in Matthew 5-7, the letter of James, 1 Corinthians 13, and Psalms 23

and 91. This was a typical early twentieth-century Protestant liberal

selection of passages to emphasize, but they were also especially useful for

A.A. purposes because none of them required the newcomer to believe in the

divinity of Christ or that salvation could only be found by praying to Jesus.

~~~~~~~~~~

EMMET FOX, The Sermon on the Mount, is still well known to A.A. people today.

He was a major representative of an American religious movement called New

Thought, which was connected to, but also different from, Mary Baker Eddy's

Christian Science movement. Among present-day American religious

denominations, Unity Church is the largest group using that basic kind of

approach. Emmet Fox's position was strongly Christian in its orientation,

although the kind of Protestantism he represented was clearly in the liberal

camp.

Please note that nineteenth and early twentieth-century New Thought was most

definitely NOT the same as "New Age," which was a late twentieth-century

movement involving claims that its practitioners were able to do spirit

channeling and use the mystical properties of crystals, and things of that

sort. New Age sometimes include beliefs drawn from Wicca -- that is, ancient

witchcraft -- and other unconventional religious ideas. Or to put it another

way, New Thought was fundamentally Christian in its orientation, whereas New

Age is for the most part extremely hostile to Christianity.

~~~~~~~~~~

JAMES ALLEN, As a Man Thinketh (34 pages long). He published his book in 1908

or a little before. I would also put his ideas in the same general category as

New Thought, even though he was English. He may or may not have read any of

the American authors in the general New Thought genre, which is why I hesitate

to call him "New Thought" in the narrow sense of the term.

~~~~~~~~~~

HENRY DRUMMOND, The Greatest Thing in the World (45 pages long). His book was

a beautiful commentary on 1 Corinthians 13. He was closely associated with

Dwight L. Moody in the 1870's, so we might describe him as one of the best

examples of the richness and depth of thought which we can find in some parts

of the nineteenth century evangelistic movement.

Drummond was a Scotsman, who was Professor of Natural Science at the College

of the Free Church of Scotland, and had written a book (famous in his lifetime

but forgotten today) called Natural Law in the Spiritual World, which was an

attempt to make peace between science and religion. This is important, because

early A.A. had no sympathy whatsoever with religious people who were

completely anti-scientific in their attitudes and who tried to deal with

modern science by rejecting its findings. Early A.A. realized that there was a

spiritual dimension of reality which went beyond anything which the scientific

method could investigate, but they also realized that the profound discoveries

of modern science could neither be denied nor neglected.

The modern evangelical movement, at its beginnings in the 1730's and 40's, had

an enormously respectful attitude toward the new science. Both Jonathan

Edwards and John Wesley, the movement's two greatest theologians, were deeply

interested in Newtonian physics, the new biological discoveries, modern

medicine, electricity, and modern psychology. The evangelical movement

remained positive in its attitude to modern science down through most of the

nineteenth century, as we see in Henry Drummond. But then the Fundamentalist

movement, with its often negative attitude toward modern science, began

developing in a series of events which took place in 1895-1919. [Note 2]

~~~~~~~~~~

E. STANLEY JONES, Abundant Living (first came out in 1942, 156 pages long).

Chapter 6-10 is one of the best discussions of prayer that I have ever read.

He ends up that section with a discussion of guidance and entering the Divine

Silence. If Richmond Walker did not read this book, he read something in that

tradition (there were similar kinds of material in The Upper Room for

example). At any rate, this book helps enormously in understanding more of

what Walker was doing in his selection and modification, in the fine print

sections of Twenty-Four Hours a Day, of various passages from God Calling by

Two Listeners.

Chapter 6 of E. Stanley Jones' book begins with a section on "Prayer is

Surrender," and Chapter 8 is entitled "The Morning Quiet Time." Jones gives a

good deal of detail on what we are supposed to be doing during this Morning

Quiet Time, including talking about the role of the subconscious in the

process, how to deal with the problem of "wandering thoughts," and what to do

when we are confronted with what the medieval tradition called aridity (where

it doesn't "feel" like we are in real contact with God, and where we have

extraordinary difficulty forcing ourselves to pray at all). On both of these

latter issues, I suspect that he as a Methodist had read John Wesley's

Standard Sermons, including especially Wesley's sermons on "Wandering

Thoughts" and "Heaviness through Manifold Temptations."

John Wesley in the 1740's was one of the two major theoreticians of the modern

evangelical movement during its beginning years. He was an Anglican priest who

taught theology and classics at Oxford University in England for a number of

years, but ended up becoming a traveling revival preacher who founded the

Methodist movement. His work was thoroughly scripturally grounded - - he knew

the New Testament by heart in the original Greek, and knew not only Old

Testament Hebrew, but also several other ancient Semitic languages. Yet he and

Jonathan Edwards (the other major formative evangelical thinker of the 1730's

and 40's) both made skillful use of the work of the seventeenth-century

British empiricist John Locke, who invented modern psychology, and both of

them knew that a knowledge of psychology was necessary for understanding how

to preach the gospel effectively and produce real moral change in people's

lives. It is totally incorrect to believe

that good evangelical theology and modern psychology are opposed to one

another. What gave the evangelical movement so much power during its early

period was its use of the best psychology of its period.

John Locke had discovered not only the basic principles of behavioral

psychology and operant conditioning, but had also discovered the way early

childhood traumas could continue to influence adult behavior in negative ways.

And he also made the first serious studies of the profoundly psychologically

disturbed who were confined in insane asylums and discovered "the inner logic

of insanity" which affected these people.

Wesley, who knew Locke's work forwards and backwards, was the first person I

have read in the modern period who used the term "psychotherapy" - - though of

course as a teacher of classics at Oxford University, it was used by him in

the original Greek form as psyches therapeia (!!!) Wesley said that good

psychotherapy (which meant "the healing of the soul") was what true scriptural

Christianity was actually about. And although he did not use the word

subconscious, he anticipated Sigmund Freud by over a century in his

understanding of the distinction between conscious thought and the

subconscious layer underneath which creates so many of our spiritual problems.

And like Freud he realized that this subconscious material came out in both

free association and dreams.

Around fifty years ago, Protestant seminaries all over the country began

putting people on their faculties with professional degrees in psychology and

psychotherapy to teach counseling techniques to their students. I had to pass

an exam in psychotherapy and counseling to obtain my degree from the seminary

at Southern Methodist University, and that was back in 1964. The best books

and articles on practical psychology today are being published by conservative

evangelical theologians, who seem to have a better understanding of what is

important. But most Christian pastors in the United States today know that

there is no conflict between good spirituality and good psychotherapy.

~~~~~~~~~~

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++++Message 1927. . . . . . . . . . . . The Akron Reading List Part 3 of 5

From: Glenn Chesnut . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/21/2004 12:06:00 AM

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[The Akron Reading List Part 3 of 5]

================================

PART TWO:

But simply on the basis of what has been learned from this Akron reading list

so far, and from other things we know about the period, we can definitely

state that early Akron A.A. was influenced by all the following six strands of

thought:

1. VIA THE OXFORD Group and we know not what other sources, it was strongly

influenced by the Augustinian tradition of salvation sola gratia (by grace

alone) and the concept of Original Sin. The latter implied the necessary

imperfectibility of human beings after Adam and Eve's fall from grace, and

also the horrendous potential for evil which lay in the human heart. This

could have come from good Roman Catholic theology and spiritual literature, or

works involving a good sixteenth-century Protestant understanding of salvation

(Luther's Bondage of the Will, etc.) mediated through a Methodist synergistic

understanding of the relationship between God and man in the work of

salvation. But it is very strong Augustinianism which we see in the Big Book:

pride is the central sin, and so on and so forth. It was this which saved A.A.

from the central weakness of classical Protestant liberalism.

The Protestant Neo-Orthodox movement had in fact already begun, and Reinhold

Niebuhr (its greatest American representative) taught at Union Theological

Seminary in New York from 1928 till his retirement in 1960. Protestant

Neo-Orthodox thinkers put the Augustinian doctrine of salvation by grace

alone, the doctrine of Original Sin, and the concept of human pride as the

root of all evil, at the heart of their theology and stressed the importance

of these three concepts in everything that they wrote. Father Sam Shoemaker,

Bill Wilson's early spiritual supporter and guide, would have certainly known

about what was going on at Union, which was after all right there in the same

city, because of its extraordinary importance within American theological

studies. The five top doctoral degree granting schools in the field of

theology at the national level were Yale, Union in New York City (which was

associated with Columbia University), Chicago, Harvard,

and Princeton. I am increasingly beginning to think that some sort of contact

with the Protestant Neo-Orthodox movement via first or second-hand contact

with Union Theological Seminary in New York would have been a very likely way

that early A.A. could have developed some of the ideas that A.A. historian

Ernie Kurtz has written about: the strong emphasis upon (a) our human

imperfectibility and (b) that we human beings are Not-God but simply finite

and limited members of the created realm, which means that as long as we keep

on trying to play God we will continue to sink into ever greater evil. As Karl

Barth put it in the Romsbriefe (his famous commentary on the Apostle Paul's

Letter to the Romans, published in 1919, which began the twentieth-century

Neo-Orthodox movement), we will never be able to hear God's "Yes" until we

first hear God's "No" to all our human presumption and arrogant claims to be

the masters of the universe ourselves.

2. CLASSICAL Protestant liberalism: see the article I have written which is on

the Hindsfoot Foundation website at http://hindsfoot.org/ProtLib.html And

behind these nineteenth and early twentieth-century Protestant liberals lay

the thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: authors and philosophers

like Voltaire, Kant, and Jonathan Swift in Europe and the British Isles, and

in America major leaders like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George

Washington. A.A. people were very much children of the Enlightenment from the

very beginning, and even more so by the late 1940's and 50's, when a good many

of the remaining connecting links to Christianity began rapidly to be broken.

A.A. is committed to the basic Enlightenment philosophy down at the visceral

level. This is what they will instinctively fight for above all else. There is

no way that a historian who is not deeply familiar

with the principles of the Enlightenment can understand A.A. at all.

3. NEW THOUGHT: this is very important, and has to be studied in order to

understand a good deal of what was going on in early A.A. And one of the

influences lying behind the New Thought movement was New England

Transcendentalism, so that the study of figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Henry Thoreau and Louisa M. Alcott can also help in understanding some of the

ideas that many early A.A. people took for granted. [Note 5]

4. THE OLD EIGHTEENTH and nineteenth century evangelical movement (including

in the United States the Great Awakening and Frontier Revivalism), which was

NOT the same as the ideas of the Fundamentalist movement which arose in the

twentieth century. It was also NOT the same as most of what one sees among the

televangelists who are preaching on various television channels at the present

time. The old classical evangelical movement meant people like Dwight Moody

(originally a Congregationalist) and General William Booth (originally a

Methodist), and so on. It was Mel B.'s New Wine which first started me looking

at their importance. Their influence, and the books they wrote, were still

around during the early twentieth century.

5. MODERN PSYCHOLOGY and psychiatry. Although the names of Carl Jung and

William James were frequently bandied about in early A.A. circles, it was the

American Neo-Freudians who seem to have had the greatest influence. We see

this in Akron A.A.'s recommendation of Ligon's book on personality

development, and we see the same kind of influences affecting the work of Sgt.

Bill S., who got sober on Long Island in 1948, and was closely associated with

Marty Mann and early New York A.A. In other words, there was no real

difference between Akron and New York A.A. on this issue - - this is another

modern myth that has developed - - because in both places they realized that

some knowledge of modern psychology could be useful in better understanding

A.A., and in both places it was the Neo-Freudians whom they looked to as the

kind of modern psychology which was most compatible with A.A.

In both the midwest and on the east coast, some A.A. people put greater stress

on the spiritual aspects of the program, and some put greater emphasis on the

psychological aspects of the program. There could sometimes be real tension in

early A.A. over this issue, but it was not one region of the United States

pitted against another - - the issues affected A.A. almost everywhere.

Sgt. Bill S. is especially important because he was the early A.A. figure who

is our best representative of the kind of early A.A. which stressed psychology

more than spirituality. In fact he was the ONLY early A.A. figure who wrote

about this at length. See his book with Hindsfoot:

http://hindsfoot.org/kBS1.html

Also see http://hindsfoot.org/kBS4.html and http://hindsfoot.org/kBS5.html on

the Lackland Model of alcoholism treatment which he and Dr. Louis Jolyon

"Jolly" West devised in the early 1950's, a strongly A.A. related treatment

method which achieved a fifty percent success rate even in the rather hostile

environment of a major military base, where military people at that time

fiercely denied that they had any alcoholics at all in the U.S. armed

services, and did everything they could to discourage any kind of real

treatment of suffering alcoholics.

On the general issue of psychological vs. spiritual emphases in early A.A.,

see http://hindsfoot.org/PsySpir.html

The chapter in Sgt. Bill's book entitled "The Effects of Alcohol on Our

Emotional Development" has been praised to the skies by every surviving good

old-timer who has read it. Bill, they say, managed to get into that chapter

the heart of the way we understood the psychological dimension of the program

back in the old days. In fact, I would recommend that the modern A.A. reader

should spend more time studying that little chapter than reading Ligon's book,

because Bill translates all the psychological terminology into A.A. language

that is easy to read and understand, and gives concrete examples from his own

drinking years to illustrate all his points.

Neo-Freudian psychiatry therefore seems to have been the kind of psychological

theory which most influenced early A.A. There were nevertheless exceptions, in

particular Ralph Pfau in Indianapolis (who wrote the Golden Books under the

pen name of Father John Doe and was the third most widely read early A.A.

author). Father Ralph made use of an interesting new psychiatric approach,

developed by a psychiatrist in Chicago named Abraham A. Low. Dr. Low had also

rebelled against the orthodox Freudian psychoanalysts, but unlike the

Neo-Freudians, Low had developed one of the earliest cognitive-behavioral

theories as his own alternative. [Note 6]

6. THERE WAS A STRONG Roman Catholic (and Episcopalian Anglo-Catholic)

influence on early A.A. The Akron List mentions The Unchanging Friend, which

Mel B. tells us came from a Roman Catholic press. We are searching hard to see

if we can find some copies.

We also know from Mary Darrah's work that Sister Ignatia was handing out to

each person who came through St. Thomas Hospital either Thomas a Kempis'

Imitation of Christ (a work which came out of the late medieval devotio

moderna, with its scepticism about the scholastic theologians at the

universities and all their minute theological distinctions in their

discussions of doctrines and dogmas) and (even more significantly) a little

meditational book composed of excerpts from St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual

Exercises, which had an important influence on the way early A.A. regarded the

tenth step, among other things. Although Roman Catholics only made up about

one sixth of the general American population at that time, let us not forget

that as early A.A. spread, it tended to center on large American cities, many

of which had large Roman Catholic immigrant populations which made the

percentage far higher. At Father Ralph Pfau's

weekend A.A. spiritual retreats, it often tended to be around 60% Protestant

and 40% Roman Catholic.

We also must not forget that the Episcopalians (the Anglo-Catholics or

Anglicans) regarded themselves as Catholics, not Protestants. They usually

celebrated a sung mass every Sunday morning as their regular Sunday morning

service, which was basically just an English translation of the Roman Catholic

mass. They had the Stations of the Cross on the walls of the sanctuary, a holy

water font beside the door, kneeling benches on the backs of the pews,

medieval vestments and incense, and so on. Father Sam Shoemaker was an

Episcopal priest (who wore the priestly black suit and clerical collar if you