DID YOU KNOW?
This week’s DYK column is continued from a South Bend history professor’s latest book, Changed by Grace: Modern Scientific method tells us to assemble objective data and make an empirical check on all our theories. If a bridge falls down, no matter how logical the engineer’s theories sounded, they were incorrect, but if his bridge remains standing, no matter the load, his theories were correct.
The early evangelical movement agreed with this new science totally in this regard. In particular, to verify empirically whether a real soul change had occurred, one had to see how that person reacted under pressure. When people were suddenly plunged into truly difficult and trying situations, and were threatened by loss of money, property, power, prestige, or were viciously attacked, it would become clear that some who claimed to had spiritual awakenings were fakers and hopeless hypocrites, but there were others whose lives and behavior, even in the midst of enormous problems, concretely and objectively showed by their words, deeds and reactions that their spiritual awakening, religious experience or complete psychic change, was the real deal.
John Wesley made many new discoveries at Aldersgate, but the most important thing was that, when the old dark feelings started to overcome his mind, all he had to do was quietly ask God for help and turn the matter over to His care, and he could then resist the temptation of going deeper and deeper in the bad place where these thoughts were leading him. It is important to note that our character defects do not totally disappear, as Wesley observed in the aftermath of his Aldersgate experience, which means that they can still, at times, cause us trouble. The difference is that without the help of God’s power, our character defects used to have power over us, but with the mysterious power that comes from humbling ourselves before God, as Wesley discovered, we can use His power to push our character defects to the back of our minds, and we can keep them from controlling our actions.
And, this has also been discovered in A.A. experience over the past seventy years. People in the A.A. fellowship do not become perfect little saints, without spot or flaw, but they can regain their sanity if they surrender and align their will with that of a “Higher Power.” “Surrender to win,” is another of A.A.’s paradoxes, but the important thing to note however, is that we can use objective external data to distinguish between authentic psychic change and subjective emotionalism. We can distinguish between the real living God and the imaginary false gods. The grace of the real God, the one who can be experientially verified, is a real healing power which gives us the power to make real soul changes.
In the 1930s, the early A.A. people were first introduced to these Wesleyan ideas by the new terminology that the Oxford Group devised for teaching them. Then however, the A.A.’s quickly stopped reading most of the Oxford Group’s literature, and began using The Upper Room, for their daily meditations which was published in Nashville, Tennessee, by the Southern Methodists. The Southern Methodists were some of Wesley’s followers, who had been nicknamed the “Methodists” because of the methodical way they went about praying, meditating and singing hymns, and because they kept spiritual journals in which they searched for any character defects that needed to be uprooted from their souls, and they systematically worked at continually learning and growing spiritually for all their remaining days.
So, The Upper Room put A.A. people into direct contact with the living Wesleyan tradition and its emphasis upon the religion of the heart and its ability to bring about real soul change and a genuine psychic change that transformed human life at the deepest level. To be continued…
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