DID YOU KNOW?
The early A.A. people learned from the Oxford Group what the Apostle Paul meant when he declared, in the Book of Romans (3:28), the central core of the gospel which he preached: For we hold that a person is justified by faith and not by works of the law. We human beings spend a good deal of time trying to justify our actions, particularly the ones which clearly seem evil and destructive in some fashion. One strategy is to say, “but look at what the other person did to me first, and you can see I was completely right and the other person was wrong.” When we say that, we expect the person we are conversing with, to respond by saying something like, “Well, I don’t blame you; I would have done the same thing myself.” And the stratagem which is often used as an alibi for the worst and most destructive actions of all is to look around for some rule or law given in a holy book somewhere, or spoken by some supposedly holy person, and then say, “But I was only following the rules.” Like the worst kind of sleazy lawyers, we act like little shysters and mechanically follow the carefully-selected law in order to obtain something that has nothing to do with real morality or care for other people.
We attempt to stand before God’s throne and justify our behavior with various kinds of clever arguments, not realizing that it can never be done that way, because we are justified by faith alone. Faith is the key. It is through faith that we will be saved. And what that word means in Paul’s writings is trust. To be more precise, faith in the Pauline sense means trusting in God’s grace, that is, trusting that if we turn our will and our lives over to God—letting go and letting God run the universe and make decisions—that He will love us and heal us and shower us with His blessings, and lead us at the end into His heavenly kingdom.
Faith to Paul meant trust, not belief in complicated intellectual doctrines and dogmas. The faith that saves us through grace did not mean belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, or belief in the virgin birth, or people walking on water and making the Red Sea divide in two, or belief in theological theories about what happened to the bread and wine during the communion service, or beliefs about whether the Bible was or was not infallible.
And in particular, what Paul said was that in the first century Christianity we were justified by faith alone, faith did not mean belief in the theory that Jesus Christ died on the cross as a substitutionary atonement which paid the penalty due to God for our sins. He could not possibly have meant that because that was a theory which did not appear until a thousand years later. It was a theologian named Anselm who first came up with that theory in 1098 in a work titled, “Cur Deus Homo,” “Why the God-Man?” That kind of substitutionary doctrine of the atonement was totally unknown to early Christianity.
In Paul’s letters, the work of Christ was to open the gates of heaven and descend down to us as the God-bearer, humbling himself in order to reach out to us and act as a channel of God’s grace, and then lead us back up the path that lead to the heavenly realm of the immortal sunlight of the spirit, where the God of grace and love sits eternally enthroned. It is that God—the Highest Power which rules the whole universe—who saves us by His grace.
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