Books by Glenn F

CHANGED BY GRACE — PAGE 1 Changed by Grace CHANGED BY GRACE — PAGE 2 Hindsfoot Foundation Series on Spirituality and Theology CHANGED BY GRACE — PAGE 3 Changed by Grace V. C. Kitchen, the Oxford Group, and A.A. Glenn F. Chesnut CHANGED BY GRACE — PAGE 4 CHANGED BY GRACE — PAGE 5 Contents Preface 1. The Oxford Group and the Eighteenth Century Evangelical Movement Victor C. Kitchen Frank Buchman, founder of the Oxford Group The modern evangelical movement Psychotherapy and religion The attack of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment on traditional Christianity The chink in the Enlightenment philosophers’ armor Jonathan Edwards Marty Mann’s spiritual experience in A.A. V. C. Kitchen’s spiritual experience in the Oxford Group 2. Power to Heal the Soul John Wesley’s discovery of the religion of the heart God’s grace as power to change The Oxford Group on the newly-given power to change The changes which Kitchen saw in his life Change in A.A. — replacing resentment with agapê love 3. House Parties, Confession, Surrender, and Guidance Kitchen’s First Visit to an Oxford Group House Party Confession Surrender and the power to resist sin Behavior based on divine guidance instead of legalism Salvation by faith, not by legalism and works of the law 4. Quiet Time, Guidance, and God-Bearers Quiet time and group guidance F. B. Meyer, Henry Burt Wright, and H. A. Walter General Protestant belief in receiving guidance through prayer The potential dangers of believing that we are carrying out the will of God The A.A. Traditions as guards against the misuse of the concept of guidance Quiet time and individual guidance CHANGED BY GRACE — PAGE 6 Show me your glory The God-bearers: my story is my message The Oxford Group and the modern evangelical movement 5. The Four Absolutes and the Dangers of Legalism Bill W.’s rejection of the Four Absolutes Works righteousness and legalism Absolutist thinking, resentment, and depression Grace as the great healing power God’s gracious acts of loving kindness (hesed) in Judaism The healing power of grace in nontheistic religions The Apostle Paul’s discovery 6. The Balanced Life: Seeking the Golden Mean Seeking the Golden Mean between the two extremes The Bicycle Principle The Pancake Principle The Myth of Perfection: St. Augustine and Paul’s letter to the Romans Martin Luther and Paul’s letter to the Romans The Calvinists The Anglicans and the letter of James The grounds for Bill W.’s opposition to the Four Absolutes 7. The Names of God and God as Truth Itself The one absolute which cannot be discarded: Absolute Honesty The four Names of God 1. The divine Glory and the experience of the Sacred Bill W.’s first conversion experience 2. The Spirit 3. The Good Itself and the Moral Law The Moral Law as the face of God unveiled 4. The Truth Itself Being Itself Truth and Absolute Honesty A.A.’s great debt to the Oxford Group Notes Bibliography CHANGED BY GRACE — PAGE 7 Preface A number of wise commentators have already uttered the judgment that Alcoholics Anonymous was the most important new spiritual movement of the twentieth century. It used its extremely effective spiritual tools to give a workable solution to the problem of chronic alcoholism, the third leading cause of death in the United States, and it also gave birth to a number of other twelve step programs which demonstrated that this kind of approach would work with many other human problems as well: Al-Anon, for example, for the families and friends of alcoholics, was born out of the A.A. movement, along with Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and programs for people who suffered from spending addictions or from out-of- control sexual behavior. The group called Emotions Anonymous adapted the twelve steps to deal with a whole range of different crippling emotional problems. But the praise given to the Alcoholics Anonymous program arose for even more important reasons. Their twelve step approach to spiritual development also successfully navigated the sweeping transformation in our understanding of the world which took place over the course of the twentieth century, and did it far better than most religious and spiritual groups of that period. During that century, the rapid development of the new physics and the new biology made deep and basic changes in the way the world looked to human beings and the way they thought about it. The new psychological systems which appeared likewise forced people to look at the life of the mind and the spirit in totally different terms. Basic explanatory modes were completely altered. It was the biggest shift in human understanding since the ancient Greeks CHANGED BY GRACE — PAGE 8 destroyed the old mythological world view over two thousand years ago. The twelve step program learned how to work smoothly with these new ideas and this new morality of knowledge. Instead of fighting the new science, A.A. learned how to express fundamental spiritual concepts in ways which men and women of the new scientific era could understand and accept. Ancient spiritual ideas came back to life again with a bold new power when expressed in twelve step terms. Alcoholics Anonymous, the group which accomplished all this, did not however suddenly appear out of nowhere. Both of the founders of A.A., prior to meeting one another, were members of the Oxford Group, an early twentieth century Christian evangelical movement. Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith used a number of important Oxford Group concepts as the basis upon which to build their new method for working with compulsive alcoholics and their new, highly detailed system for producing human spiritual growth. This book is an attempt to arrive at a better understanding of precisely what Alcoholics Anonymous learned from the Oxford Group. And we are interested not just in the Oxford Group itself, but also in the entire preceding evangelical tradition, for the most important of these ideas can be traced back step by step to discoveries originally made during the 1730’s when Jonathan Edwards in colonial America and John Wesley in England were laying out the basic principles of the modern evangelical movement. What Edwards and Wesley discovered was that human character could be changed. One could take the story of a person’s life, and with the aid of God’s grace, change the way the story ended. It could be changed from a tale of angry and despairing men and women going helplessly to their tragic doom, and CHANGED BY GRACE — PAGE 9 converted into a tale of great personal victory. One could produce stories with a happy ending instead of a sad one. Alcoholics Anonymous learned how to accomplish those same extraordinary things in the modern age. A.A. took into its healing embrace people filled with resentment and anger and fueled with fear and anxiety, who were clawing their way through life as though the entire world was their enemy, flailing away at all their foes both real and imaginary, and leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. It took these people and transformed them into men and women filled with love, unselfishness, kindness, and compassion, who approached life with smiles and laughter and an unbreakable faith and courage. A.A. revitalized the great discovery, made by Edwards and Wesley in the 1730’s, that human character could be changed. That is what this book is about. My own research in this area goes back a great number of years, and there are a number of people who have helped me along the way. It would only be right to give acknowledgement to some of them in this preface. I owe perhaps the greatest debt of gratitude to Prof. Albert C. Outler at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, for giving me my first introduction to John Wesley’s thought. Outler was one of the founders of modern Wesleyan studies, and in fact came out with his first major work on that figure in 1964, when I was a young seminary student in my twenties and he was my mentor and advisor. I continued to learn about John Wesley in later years as I gave lectures on his life and theology to the Methodist students at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, and gave public lectures under their aegis on topics such as “John Wesley’s Aldersgate Experience: What Was He Converted From and To?” and “Methodists and Obsessions: John Wesley’s Use of John CHANGED BY GRACE — PAGE 10 Locke’s Theory of the Association of Ideas to Deal with the Problem of Obsessive Thoughts and Compulsive Behavior.” I am also grateful to Prof. Donald B. Marti, my colleague for over thirty years at Indiana University, for all the things he taught me about Calvinist theology in colonial New England — Jonathan Edwards’ world — and about the history of American religion in general. I should also thank Prof. Henry Warner Bowden at Rutgers University for asking me to do a chapter in the book he edited in 1988 on A Century of Church History, which forced me to learn a good deal about the major currents in nineteenth century Christian theology. While doing that, I was able to explore in more detail some of the immediate precursors of the ideas which the Oxford Group taught. My student days at Oxford University put me there thirty years too late to experience the peak of the Oxford Group, but it enabled me to recognize the colleges and the atmosphere in which students and faculty were attracted into the movement by Frank Buchman’s missionary work in Oxford.

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