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

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 over 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 the writing of 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 local circuit assemblies and News Service Overseer at regional district conventions. I served on one occasion as a substitute circuit overseer.

All this simply to say that what follows cannot be dismissed as the complaint of a disgruntled underachiever who never really understood the religion: my standing as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses was, by any reasonable 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.

Summary

Adult converts to Jehovah’s Witnesses are usually impressed by how well the Witness who conducted their ‘Bible study’ seemed to know the Bible. Most arrive knowing little of it themselves and less of orthodox Christian teaching, so a verse like Psalm 83:18, carrying the name “Jehovah,” lands as a revelation, and a question like ‘how could a loving God condemn anyone to an eternity in hell?’ sounds unanswerable. Both are shallower than they look. Neither engages the teaching it claims to correct.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are like your local postal carrier. A carrier knows every address on the route and the name that goes with it, but almost nothing about the people behind those doors. In a similar way, Witnesses know every proof text that can be ‘cherry-picked’ in support of their beliefs, while remaining strangers to the Scriptural, historical, and literary context those verses came from.

Whenever a conversation turns to who Christ is, a Witness will cite Colossians 1:15, where Christ is called “the firstborn of all creation,” and treat the verse as settling it: firstborn, therefore made, therefore a creature. The citation is accurate. It is the name on the envelope, read off correctly. The household behind it is another matter. In Hebrew usage firstborn is a title of rank and inheritance rather than birth order, which is why Psalm 89:27 can call David the firstborn though he was the youngest of Jesse’s sons. The very next verse forecloses the reading the Witness has taken from it: “all things were created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16). If Christ created all things, He is not among the things created. The New World Translation meets that difficulty by adding a word the Greek does not have, so that all things becomes “all [other] things.”

The result is consistent. Where Watchtower teaching agrees with historic Christianity it is sound but not distinctive; where it is distinctively its own it runs against Scripture and history alike. What is true in it is not theirs alone, and what is theirs alone is not true.

I believe an honest investigation of the questions this website addresses leads to one conclusion: Jehovah’s Witnesses are a man-made religion — a product of their century, and of the private interpretations of charismatic leaders, like the other ‘restorationist’ sects that grew up beside them.

Nothing here impugns the sincerity or goodness of individual Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are in the main devout, moral, and courageous in their convictions. The argument concerns the organization’s handling of evidence, not the character of its members; one may hold that a system is mistaken, even man-made, while holding its adherents in genuine respect. “Speaking the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15) requires both halves.