The Long and Winding Road

Rich and Suzanne

“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Romans 8:38–39 (Ignatius Study Bible)

For thirty-five years I was active as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was an appointed Elder for over thirty years and a Pioneer for two years. I spent seven years at the organization’s world headquarters in Brooklyn, New York — known as Bethel — where I was appointed a Bethel Elder and worked in the Service Department as secretary to Harley Miller, the Service Department Overseer. While at Bethel, I contributed to articles in The Watchtower and Our Kingdom Ministry. I gave circuit- and district-convention talks to audiences as large as forty thousand people in Tiger Stadium (Detroit, Michigan) and the SilverDome (Pontiac, Michigan). I served for years as Accounts Overseer for circuit assemblies and News Service Overseer at district conventions. I even served on one occasion as a substitute circuit overseer. All this simply to say that what follows cannot be dismissed as the complaint of an outsider who never understood the religion: my standing as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses was, by any internal measure, unimpeachable. What’s more, neither I nor my wife Suzanne were ever disfellowshiped even after ceasing association with the religion in 2000. (We did, however, lose friends and family.)

We left because, after honestly analyzing the teachings and practices of the Organization, we concluded that “the Truth,” (as Witnesses call their faith) was not authentic historic Christianity at all, but simply another man-made “restorationist” sect, of a kind with the Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the Seventh-day Adventists, and others born of the same era and the same impulse. The Protestant Reformers, whatever one makes of their reforms, set out to correct a Church they believed had gone astray. Restorationists, on the other hand, begin with the premise that Jesus did not preserve His Church at all, but allowed it to become totally corrupt, leaving it to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bible readers or ‘prophets’ to finally restore what Christ had not managed to protect. The consequence is visible in the record. Doctrines assembled by human reasoning must be revised whenever that reasoning shifts — or when a previous teaching simply becomes untenable.

I have noticed over the years that young people raised as Jehovah’s Witnesses very often leave the religion as adults and became agnostics or atheists. Their faith was cultivated in an organization rather than in Jesus Christ, and once they lost faith in the organization, they were left “inoculated” against Christianity itself. Sadly, they knew nothing about the grace of God that The Watchtower never revealed to them. (See also sanctifying grace and actual grace.)

The purpose of this website is to point Witnesses and others to the source of that divine grace, Jesus Christ, offered in the Church He founded and to which He promised, “behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matt. 28:20). It is my particular hope to help the dear souls for whom the Watchtower “poisoned the well” with respect to the Catholic Church and the Christian faith.

I invite your engagement with me on the questions below. Please bear in mind that I do not have the perfect answer for every question — in some cases I may have an answer but not the best wording for it. And in some cases I may not have an answer at all; that does not mean none exists, any more than a person’s refusal to accept an answer makes the answer inadequate. People are not always convinced by good arguments or the truth — often our will overrides our reason, and we select what we choose to believe based on what we want to be true … not all the time, but sometimes. So I realize that even the best arguments and facts may not convince one of Jehovah’s Witnesses or a skeptic to set aside their confirmation bias or fear of change and give honest consideration to what follows here. But I feel committed to present what many years of honest investigation and personal experience have proven to me.

You may leave comments or questions below, but be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

The Watchtower vs The Catholic Church

Are Jehovah’s Witnesses the restoration of first-century apostolic Christianity, as they claim — or a man-made religion, a restorationist sect of the kind they themselves say the Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists are? The answer turns on a handful of specific questions. Each is worth asking honestly, and each is examined in its own page on this site:
  • Did the apostles warn of a coming ‘great apostasy’ that would eradicate the entire Church founded by Christ, leaving authentic Christianity unidentifiable until Bible students restored it eighteen centuries later? Or did they warn of heretics and lax Christians who would trouble the Church but never destroy it?
  • Did Jesus foretell a future “faithful and discreet slave” class that would be given authority to govern His people — and is today’s Governing Body that class? Or did He simply give a teaching parable to illustrate that every Christian should be a faithful steward, prepared at all times for His return?
  • Is the Kingdom of God a political government that began ruling invisibly in heaven in 1914? Or is it a spiritual reign, extended by preaching and making disciples wherever a soul consents to the will of God — the Great Commission Jesus could give because “all authority in heaven and on earth” had already been given to Him?
  • Did Jesus foretell two classes of Christians — a “little flock” of 144,000 to rule in heaven and unlimited “other sheep” to live on earth under their rule? Or did He foretell that a “little flock” of Jewish Christians would be joined by unlimited Gentile “other sheep” to become one flock under one shepherd?
  • Is heaven restricted to a literal 144,000 redeemed humans? Or is that number symbolic — a figure of completeness rather than a quota — with the great crowd of Revelation standing before God’s throne in heaven along with them?
  • Did the apostles foretell a distant future “last days” to begin in 1914? Or did they believe they were already living in “the last days” of a present age that was leading to an age to come at Christ’s return?
  • Before creation, was God an solitary monad with no one to love? Or is His very nature relational, an eternal communion of love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ?
  • Does using the divine name “Jehovah” mark the one true religion? Or is “Jehovah” the result of a medieval mistranslation of the Tetragrammaton, which was never used in the Septuagint or by the writers of the Christian Scriptures?
  • Is the New World Translation a faithful rendering of Scripture? Or is it translated to fit the Watchtower Organization’s doctrines?
These and other questions are taken up, one by one, in the pages herein. My hope is only that each is weighed honestly — on the Scriptures, on the historical record, and on the plain sense of Jesus’ own words — and that an unbiased mind, asking them in good faith, will find that the questions very nearly answer themselves.

Atheism vs Christianity

Beneath the question of which church is true lies a deeper one: which worldview better explains the world we actually live in — the Christian one, or the materialist one that says matter and energy are all there is? Belief in God is often dismissed as a leap in the dark, contrary to reason. But is it? Each of the following questions is worth asking honestly, and each is examined in its own page on this site:
  • Why is there something rather than nothing? Does a universe that need not have existed at all — and that did not always exist — explain its own being? Or does its existence point beyond itself to a cause that must exist of its own nature?
  • Why is the universe finely balanced for life, in ways that grow more striking the closer we look at the constants that govern it? Is such exquisite calibration better explained by blind chance, or by a Mind that intended it?
  • Why is the cosmos intelligible to the mind — orderly, written in the language of mathematics — and why are we the kind of creatures who can read it? Is that a happy accident, or just what we should expect if reason stands behind the world?
  • Are right and wrong objectively real? Most of us know that cruelty is genuinely wrong, not merely unfashionable. But can objective good and evil, real meaning and real purpose, be grounded in a universe of mere particles? Or do they point beyond matter to their source?
  • Has God acted in history? The Christian claim is not only philosophical but historical: that God revealed Himself, supremely in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus — events with real evidence behind them, recorded in documents we have good reason to trust. Is that evidence better explained by a risen Christ, or explained away?
  • And what of the honest objections — above all the problem of suffering and evil? Do they overturn belief in God? Or, weighed fairly, do they trouble the believer without dissolving the reasons for belief?
None of this is meant to belittle the honest doubter; I take the hardest questions seriously and weigh them in these pages too. I simply find that, taken together, the world we actually meet — its existence, its order, its moral weight, and the figure of Christ at the center of history — is better accounted for by a reasonable Christian faith than by materialism. The pages in this section make the case.

Summary

Adult converts to Jehovah’s Witnesses are generally very impressed by the apparent biblical knowledge of the Witness who conducted a ‘Bible study’ with them. The convert likely had very little knowledge of the Bible and orthodox Christian teaching, so they find ‘discoveries’ like Psalm 83:18 (the name “Jehovah”) and logical assumptions such as ‘how could a loving God condemn people to an eternity in hell?’ convincing. But these ‘discoveries’ are in fact very superficial and ignorant of the theological depth of traditional Christian teaching.
In fact, Jehovah’s Witnesses are like your local postal carrier. Just as a postal carrier knows the addresses and associated names along a route, but knows little about the people living at those addresses, so Jehovah’s Witnesses know all the Bible verses they can ‘cherry-pick’ to support their beliefs (as these inevitably change), but they are ignorant of the Scriptural and historical context of those verses. The postal carrier may believe that Mrs. Jones of 1547 Main Street is a senior because she receives mail from AARP, but he knows little else: he does not know, for example, that Mrs. Jones has been a widow for five years, has three adult children living in other states, and her late husband’s name was Arthur. He does not know Mrs. Jones’ actual age or her interests in life. (Okay, he may know she likes quilting because she receives monthly issues of “Quilting Today” magazine.) But you get the point: he knows only superficial things about the people to whom he delivers mail. What he thinks he knows about Mrs. Jones is merely his human reasoning based on limited information, and nothing more. If Jesus founded a Church and gave the Holy Spirit to enlighten and direct that Church, then what that Church believes and teaches does not have to change and can rightly be said to be “infallible” since neither Jesus nor the Holy Spirit can err or lie.
Most Witnesses who have been to Bethel (Brooklyn) know of the Bethel Library and the Gilead Library. But few are aware that there was a third library, located near the Writing Department, that was ‘off-limits’ to the Bethel Family and Gilead Students. This was a library containing hundreds of Christendom’s commentaries, which were only to be read and used by the Writing Department. The Watchtower writing staff have always used Christendom’s Biblical commentaries, simply picking and choosing those findings that align with the organization’s current beliefs and practices. They have little to no genuine scholarship of their own.
In other words — and as I can testify, having worked at Bethel in the Service Department and in contact with the Writing Department during those years — the only correct understanding Jehovah’s Witnesses have of Christianity is found in those beliefs that align with mainstream Christian doctrines, while those beliefs that are peculiar to Jehovah’s Witnesses are contrary to Scriptural and historical truth.
I believe an honest investigation leads inevitably to the conclusion that Jehovah’s Witnesses are a man-made religion born of fallible human interpretation and a superficial understanding of Scriptural and historical context, a natural product of its time and human reasoning similar to other ‘restorationist’ sects such as the Latter-day Saints (“Mormons”) and the Seventh-day Adventists.