AA’s murky history can seem very confusing. Prolific pro-AA author Dick B. continues to present AA’s origin as biblically rooted. But Alcoholics Anonymous is like a pie. One can claim it is made with lemon meringue ingredients, but if tar, rat poison, and glass shards are also in the mix, was it ever really a lemon meringue pie? A little leaven… (1 Corinthians 5:6)
AA’s origin must include AA co-founders Bill Wilson’s and Dr. Bob Smith’s biblically forbidden spiritualism, Dr. Bob’s freemasonry, the meditative Silence/spirit communication learned from the Oxford Group,[1] and the anti-biblical teachings of William James.
It doesn’t stop there. Many other influences helped give birth to AA, including Carl Jung, Emanuel Swedenborg, and the New Thought heresy of Emmet Fox.
Those who have heard early AA’s “roots” were biblically pure might want to investigate Emmet Fox and AA’s use of his heretical book, The Sermon on the Mount. This text was actually used as a teaching manual in AA until AA’s own instructional Big Book was completed.
As pro-AA author Dick B. himself acknowledges, Fox’s “writings were favored by [AA co-founders] Bill W. and Dr. Bob.”[2]
That is correct. And the AA co-founders could not have been Christians if they “favored” and used these writings in AA.
Why? In The Sermon on the Mount, Emmet Fox teaches: “The ‘Plan of Salvation’ which figured so prominently in the evangelical sermons and divinity books of a past generation is as completely unknown to the Bible as the Koran. There never was any such an arrangement in the universe, and the Bible does not teach it at all.”[3]
“But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 10:33)
Fox’s book bristles with “teachings” that sincere Christians would not share with alcoholics.
Like the Gnostics, Fox was a purveyor of “secret knowledge.” He writes, “Wonderful as the ‘outer’ Bible is, it is far less than one percent of the ‘inner’ Bible—the Bible that is hidden behind the symbols. If you have been reading the Bible without the spiritual interpretation, you have not found the real message of the Bible, for that lies below the surface.”[4]
Fox’s influence should always be considered when one hears of references to the Bible in early AA. People assume, logically enough, that if the co-founders were mentioning the Word of God, this must mean they were Christians. But the unsaved Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith viewed the Bible along the lines of Fox’s esoteric spiritual wisdom, rather than believing it to be the literal Word of God. One cannot, after all, promote anti-Biblical heresy and simultaneously believe and obey the Word of God.
And, like many in AA, they looked to the Bible for generic spiritual principles—love your neighbor, help your fellow man, and so on.
Interestingly, Bill Wilson had already been exposed to those who greatly admired the Bible, yet still didn’t believe it to be the Word of God. He married into a Swedenborgian family, and became very familiar with this religion’s Christ-rejecting interpretation of God’s Word.
Fox’s new thought teachings likely strengthened… click here to continue
[Endnotes can be found at end of original article]
Tagged: christian recovery, christian recovery blogs, false religion, Heresy, history, unholy
