Studying the Steps and Looking at Sam Shoemaker’s Language
The Teachings of Rev. Sam Shoemaker That Inspired Each Step
Dick B.
© 2005. All rights reserved
[For more specifics, see my latest
title, Twelve Steps for You; http://www.dickb.com/titles.shtm]
Specific Shoemaker Ideas in A.A.
Every AA who stays in our fellowship
long enough to be exposed to its Big Book, its Twelve Steps, and its meeting
buzzwords will readily recognize thoughts that seem to have come directly from
the books and other writings of Sam Shoemaker.
These include: (1) Self-surrender. (2) Self is not God. (3) God either is, or He
isn’t. (4) “Turning point.” (5) Conversion. (6) Prayer. (7) Fellowship. (8)
Willingness. (9) Self-examination. (10) Confession of faults to God, self, and
another. (11) Amends. (12) “Thy will be done.” (13) Spiritual Experience. (14)
Spiritual Awakening. (15) The unmanageable life. (16) Power greater than
ourselves. (17) God as you understand Him. (18) The “Four Absolutes”-- honesty,
purity, unselfishness, and love. (19) Guidance of God. (20) “Faith without works
is dead.” (21) “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” (22) Clear references to Almighty
God (using Bible terms) as our “Creator,” “Maker,” “Father,” “Spirit,” “God of
our fathers,” and “Father of Lights.” (23) The Lord’s Prayer. (24) Jesus’s
“sermon on the mount.” (25) Self-centeredness. (26) Fear. (27) Grudges. (28)
Quiet Time. (29) Reliance on God. (30) Relationship with God. (31) “Giving it
away to keep it.” (32) “News, not views.” (33) God has a plan. (34) Seeking God
first. (35) Belief in God. (36) Born again. (37) Marvel at what God has done for
you. (38) Let go! (39) Abandon yourself to Him [God]. (40) “Not my will but
Thine be done.” And many others.
You can find, in my title “New Light
on Alcoholism: God, Sam Shoemaker, and A.A.,”
a list of 149 Shoemaker expressions that very closely parallel A.A. language.
Many more can be found in specific quotations from Shoemaker’s books—books which
have been fully reviewed in my New Light on Alcoholism title on Shoemaker.
Shoemaker and our Twelve
Steps
Make no mistake. Whatever Bill
Wilson may have said or implied from time to time, Sam Shoemaker was
not
the only source of A.A.’s spiritual ideas. Wilson often steered his applause in
Sam’s direction in an effort to avoid Roman Catholic and other objections to the
Oxford Group from which A.A.’s ideas also came and of which early A.A. was a
part. Moreover, Bill never mentioned A.A. specifics from Dr. Bob, Anne Smith,
the Bible, Quiet Time, God’s direct guidance or Christian literature that was
daily fare in early A.A.
Remember also! Dr. Bob said he did not write the Twelve Steps and had nothing to
do with writing them. Those Steps represented Bill’s personal interpretation of
the spiritual program that had been in progress since 1935. Dr. Bob emphasized,
on more than one occasion, that A.A.’s basic ideas had come from study of the
Bible. Dr. Bob studied the Bible. Daily, for three months, Anne Smith read the
Bible to Bill and Bob. Bob read the Bible to AAs. He quoted the Bible to AAs. He
gave them Bible literature. And he frequently stressed Bible study, stating that
the Book of James, 1 Corinthians 13, and Jesus’s sermon on the mount (Matthew 5
to 7) were considered absolutely essential in the early spiritual recovery
program. Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob both said that the sermon on the mount
contained the underlying philosophy of A.A.
Nonetheless, Sam’s own imprint is on the Steps. Every one of them. His imprint
was on the presentation of Oxford Group ideas that Ebby Thacher made to Bill
Wilson in Towns Hospital. And we will briefly take a look at just where
Shoemaker’s language parallels the language of the Twelve Steps. In fact, our
third chapter in New Light on Alcoholism provides further details and complete
documentation.
Step One:
Shoemaker spoke of the gap between man and God which man is
powerless
to bridge, man having lost the power
to deal with sin for himself. As to the
unmanageable life,
Sam referred to the prayer in the Oxford Group so often described in “Victor’s
Story” and quoted by Anne Smith in her journal: “God manage me, because I can’t
manage myself.”
Step Two:
Sam spelled out the need for
a “Power greater than ourselves.”
He quoted Hebrews 11:6 for the proposition that
God is.
He declared: God is God, and self is
not God; and that man must so
believe. Sam urged seeking God first,
from Matthew 6:33. He espoused the “experiment of faith” by which man
believes
that God is; seeks
God first in his actions, and then
knows
God by doing
God’s will, and seeing that God provides the needed power. For this idea, Sam
frequently cited John 7:17.
Step Three:
Sam taught about the
crisis of self-surrender as the turning point
for a religious life, quoting
William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. Sam said it involved being
born again;
and declared that man must make a
decision to renounce sins,
accept Jesus Christ as Saviour; and
begin Christian life in
earnest. Sam illustrated the surrender using language similar to that in A.A.:
namely, a “decision to cast my will and my life on God.” Many times, Sam said
one need only surrender as much of himself as he understands to
as much of God as he understands.
A clear precursor of A.A.’s “God as we understood Him”–which has unfortunately
been misunderstood and has been attributed to other sources.
Step Four:
Sam wrote of a
self-examination
to find where one’s life fell short of the
Four Absolute Standards of Jesus: honesty,
purity, unselfishness, and love.
One was to write down
exactly where he had “fallen short.” There was a
“moral obligation”
to face these facts, recognize these as blocks to God, and be
“ruthlessly, realistically honest.”
Step Five:
Shoemaker taught of honesty with self
and honesty with God, quoted James 5:16 for the importance of confession to
others, and stressed the need for detailed sharing of secrets.
Step Six:
Though the fact of Bill’s
borrowing of this “conviction”
step from the Oxford Group 5 C’s seems to have been overlooked, Shoemaker taught
often about the need for man’s conviction that he is suffering from spiritual
misery, has (by his sins) become estranged from God, and needs to come back to
God in honest penitence. Sam urged
willingness to ask God
exactly where one is failing and then to admit that sin.
Step Seven:
Sam clarified this as the “conversion”
step of the 5 C’s. It meant a new
birth, he said. It meant
humility.
It meant, for Shoemaker, the
assumption upon ourselves of God’s will for us and the opening of ourselves to
receiving the “grace of God which alone converts.”
It meant “drawing near and putting
ourselves in position to be converted. . . utter dedication to the will of God.”
Shoemaker often defined “sin” as that which blocks us from God and from others.”
So, originally, did Big Book language. And each of the foregoing life-changing
steps hangs on early A.A.’s definition of sin and the “removal” process of
examining for sin, confessing sin, becoming convicted of sin, and becoming
converted through surrendering it. The conversion experience, according to
Shoemaker and early A.A., established or enabled rediscovery of a “relationship
with God” and initiated the new life that developed from the relationship with
God which conversion opened. Since both the Sixth and Seventh Steps were new to
A.A. thinking and added something to the original “surrenders” to Jesus Christ,
these Steps cannot easily be understood at all without seeing them in terms of
the complete surrender, the new relationship, the new birth, and giving the sins
to God, as Shoemaker saw the process and as Bill attempted to write it into the
recovery path.
Step Eight:
Wilson added this step to the Oxford Group’s “restitution” idea. Bill also
incorporated the Shoemaker talk of
“willingness” to ask
God’s help
in removing the blocks, being convicted of the need for restitution, and then
being sent “to someone with
restoration and apology.”
Step Nine:
Sam said the last stand of self is
pride. There can be no talk
of humility, he said, until pride
licks the dust, and one then
acts to make full restoration and
restitution for wrongs done.
As AAs in Akron did, Sam also quoted from the sermon on the mount those verses
enjoining the bringing of a gift to the altar without first being reconciled to
one’s brother (Matthew 5:22-24).
Restitution was not merely a good deed to be done. It was a command of God from
the Bible that wrongs be righted as part of the practicing the principle of
love. If one understands Shoemaker, one can understand the absurdity of some
present-day AAs’ guilt-ridden suggestions about writing a letter to a dead
person or volunteering help for the down-trodden or making a substitutionary
gift to some worthy cause. Sam taught
that the required amends were not about works. They were not about guilt. They
were about love!
Step Ten:
This step concerned
daily surrender
and the Oxford Group idea of
“continuance.” Sam taught it
was necessary to continue
self-examination, confession, conviction, the seeking of God’s help, and the
prompt making of amends. This continued action was to follow the new
relationship with God and others that resulted from removal of the sin problem
in the earlier steps.
Step Eleven:
Sam wrote eloquently about Quiet Time,
Bible study, prayer, and “meditation”
(listening for God’s guidance). Sam urged daily contact with God for
guidance, forgiveness, strength, and
spiritual growth. So does
A.A.’s Big Book. Quiet Time was a “must” in early A.A. And Shoemaker defined
every aspect of Quiet Time from the necessity for a new birth to a new
willingness to study, pray, listen, and read rather than to speak first and lead
with the chin.
Step Twelve:
This step comprehends: (1) A spiritual
awakening, the exact meaning
of which Shoemaker spelled out in his books and in his talks to AAs. He said it
required conversion, prayer, fellowship, and witness.
(2) A message about what God has accomplished
for us, a phrase which
Shoemaker himself used, saying, in several ways:
“You have to give Christianity away to keep
it.”(3) Practicing the new way of living
in harmony with God’s will and in love toward others,
an idea easily recognized from Sam’s teachings that a spiritual awakening comes
from conversion. And that the gospel message concerns God’s grace and power. And
that the principles to be practiced are defined in the Bible. Accordingly, our
Twelfth Step language, without input from Sam’s own writings, has become
ill-defined and illusory. For A.A. Big Book students know that none of the three
12 Step ideas is set forth or explained in the chapter of the Big Book dealing
with the Twelfth Step. To be frank, A.A. left Christianity in the dust. In so
doing, AAs lost an understanding of what Sam Shoemaker taught and Dr. Bob
emphasized: That conversion, the gospel message, and love and service were
defined in the Book of Acts, the Four
Absolutes, 1 Corinthians 13, Jesus’ sermon on the mount, the Book of James, and
other specific parts of the Bible.
For a comprehensive study of Sam
Shoemaker’s role in the Steps, Big Book, and Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous,
see Dick B., New Light on Alcoholism: God, Sam Shoemaker, and A.A. 2d ed (http://www.dickb.com/newlight.shtml)
©Dick B.
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