Are Jehovah's Witnesses the restoration of first-century, apostolic
Christianity, as they teach? Or are they — like the Latter-day
Saints ("Mormons") and Seventh-day Adventists, whom they themselves
regard as man-made — a religion of fairly recent and human
origin? I spent years inside the organization, including time at its
Brooklyn headquarters, and longer still examining the question from
outside. The honest answer, as I came to see it, is that the Watchtower
is a man-made religion: sincere in its people, but mistaken in its
distinctive claims.
I did not reach that conclusion from a single objection but from a
pattern that surfaces wherever its unique teachings are tested against
Scripture read in context and against the witness of the earliest
Christians. A few of the clearest examples — each taken up at
length in its own page — group naturally into four:
A church that supposedly failed, then restarted on a private
timetable. The Watchtower's whole authority rests on the belief
that the Church Christ founded fell into
total apostasy
soon after the apostles died, and had to be restored in modern times.
On that footing it teaches that Christ began his reign invisibly in
1914, that the
"last days"
started that same year, and that he then
appointed its
leaders as his sole channel on earth in 1919 — dates, and an
arrangement, unknown to every previous Christian century. But Jesus
promised the gates of hades would never prevail against his Church
(Matt. 16:18), and to be with it "to the close of the age" (Matt.
28:20); and the New Testament places the "last days" in the
apostles' own time, not ours. A faith that had to be re-founded in
the twentieth century is, by its own account, one that first
disappeared — the very thing he said would not happen.
Doctrines built on isolated verses. Again and again, a
teaching unique to the Watchtower turns on a handful of texts read
apart from their context, against the plain sense the early Church
always held: the denial that
God is a Trinity;
the claim that Jesus died on a
stake rather than a cross,
and the "corresponding ransom" theory of
why he died
that follows from denying his deity; the insistence that one English
form of the
divine name
("Jehovah") is the badge of true worship — though the Society's
own scholars admit "Yahweh" is the more accurate form; the
redefinition of the
Kingdom of God
and of the
gospel itself;
and the
prohibition on blood
transfusions that has cost lives. Much of this rests on the
organization's own
New World
Translation, a Bible shaped, in key places, to fit beliefs
already decided upon.
One flock divided into two. Perhaps the clearest sign of a
human system is the way the Watchtower splits faithful Christians
into two classes with two destinies — a heavenly "anointed" of
exactly 144,000 who will rule with Christ, and an earthly "great
crowd" of
"other
sheep" who may never share that hope, and who are not even to
take the bread and cup at the Lord's Supper. Yet the very verse this
rests on (John 10:16) ends by declaring the opposite: "there shall be
one flock, one shepherd." Paul knows "one body
… one hope … one Lord, one faith, one baptism"
(Eph. 4:4–6), and the gospel as the tearing down of the
dividing wall to make "one new man" of the two (Eph. 2:14–16).
The two-class system rebuilds inside the Church the very wall Christ
tore down.
Hope narrowed and the dead misread. Following from that
division, the Watchtower teaches that nearly everyone faces simple
annihilation. Its account of the
soul and of what
happens at
judgment
leaves no room for
heaven for the
ordinary believer, denies the reality of
hell, and dismisses
purgatory
— again reading a few verses in a way the Church never did.
I offer these not as a list of accusations but as the honest reasons a
man can come to believe, after long looking, that the Watchtower is not
the first-century Church restored, but a religion made in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries by well-meaning men. The
pages in this section
set out each point so you can judge for yourself.
