From writing The Big Book by William Schaberg, page 462-463:

 

Hank Loses the argument to Completely Remove God from the Steps 

    ...Once Fitz's pleas for a Christian book had been successfully demolished, Parkhurst began to attack Wilson for his constant, explicit references to God in both the Steps and throughout the book.  He was convinced this would not only drive people away from their solution, but even worse, destroy any hope of the book being a bestseller. Despite the fact that so much was already written, Hank still had not given up hope that they would publish a psychological book, one that "would lure the alcoholic in" and that "once in, the prospect could take God or leave Him alone as he wished." Bill found this to be a shocking proposal and refused to even consider it...

    Finally, after a "hellish fight," Hank realized there was no hope of convincing Bill all of these references to God should be removed from the Steps and he adopted a fallback position: 'Could we at least,' he argued, 'get rid of this demand that people get down on their knees in the Seventh Step and then tone down the rest of this religious language by using some more general, less theologically specific synonyms for the word "God"?' Parkhurst proposed  using "Higher Power" and "a Power greater than ourselves" as general, open-ended substitutes and suggested that the first appearance of the word "God" be followed by the more expansive and explicitly flexible phrase "as we understood Him."

    Besides arguing that they needed to provide some way for agnostic and atheist alcoholics to find an entry point into the steps, Hank's strongest contention for these changes would have been the fact that Bill had already used the phrases "power greater than myself" and "God, as I then understood Him" in his own "Story." If these beliefs and perspectives had been so essential to Wilson's own recovery, why shouldn't they be offering that same level of openness to all the new people who were trying so desperately to get sober?...

    It would take sometime before Wilson realized and acknowledged how critical these phrases were to their success and finally conceded that Hank Parkhurst had been right - especially about his insistence on adding "as we understood Him" to the Third Step...

    However, when Bill finally did realize how important these changes were, he enthusiastically embraced them, calling them a "terrific ten-strike," noting that "as we understood Him" was "perhaps the most important expression to be found in our whole AA vocabulary." That and the phrase "Higher Power," he said, "have proved lifesavers for many an alcoholic. They have enabled thousands of us to make a beginning where none could have been made had we left the Steps just as I originally wrote them." Most especially, he acknowledged that adding the phrase "as we understood Him" to the Third Step had made "a hoop big enough so that the whole world of alcoholics can walk through it." It was a change that "enabled people of fine religious training and those of none at all to associate freely and to work together. It made one's religion the business of the A.A. member himself and not that of the society." A ten-strike indeed.