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 historical, literary, and Scriptural
context those verses came from.
And the carrier is no fool; that is what makes the picture exact.
From the mail itself he can reason his way to conclusions that
sound like knowledge — the fishing magazine suggests a
sportsman, the diaper coupons a young family, the large-print
digest an aging eye — and some of his guesses will even be
right. But they are human interpretations of artifacts, not
knowledge of persons, and no cleverness at the mailbox can turn
inference into acquaintance. Knowledge of the families comes one
way only: by historical association — living on the street,
entering the homes, sharing the table, hearing the stories from
the people who lived them. So it is with Scripture. A reader
alone with the text can reason his way to conclusions that sound
right, and some will be; they remain private interpretation,
inference from the artifact. Accurate and full understanding
comes the way knowledge of a household comes: by historical
association — the deposit of faith Christ entrusted to His
apostles, clarified by the Holy Spirit, and handed down through
their successors: the Sacred Tradition of the Church, which has
lived in the house from the beginning. A religion assembled at
the mailbox, however diligent, is a man-made religion. The faith
of the household is another thing entirely.
Consider an example. 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.”
Colossians 1:15 is not an isolated slip. The questions herein trace
the same pattern through every distinctive Watchtower teaching:
what is true in it is not unique, and what is unique in it is not
true. That is the mark of a man-made religion. Like the Latter-day
Saints (Mormons) and the Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s
Witnesses are simply another
“restorationist”
group arising in nineteenth-century America on the claim that
authentic Christianity was lost in the early centuries, and
their charismatic founder’s private interpretation of
Scripture was the restoration.
Everything in this section turns on that one claim and its
consequences. The Watchtower teaches that the Church Christ founded
died with the apostles and was restored in the modern era. That is
a claim about history, and history can be consulted.
Start with the apostasy. If the Church never fell, a movement
founded to restore it has nothing to restore, and the rest of the
system loses its warrant to be ‘truth’. The
page on the great apostasy
is therefore the first thing to read, and the
page on authority the
second, since the two together decide who may teach and on what
grounds.
Then the questions that follow from it. Who God is, who
Christ is, what becomes of us at death, whether these are the last
days, and what the New World Translation does to the text. Each has
its own page, each states the Watchtower position from Watchtower
sources, and each can be read on its own.
Some of it is not academic. The blood doctrine, shunning, and
the refusal of Christmas and Easter shape how families live and,
in the first case, whether some of them live at all. Those pages
are written with that weight in mind.
In short: the case here is not that Jehovah’s Witnesses are
bad people, which they are not, nor that they are stupid, which
they are not either. It is that a system can be sincerely held and
still be misleading — and that these particular questions,
asked honestly and followed where they lead, very nearly answer
themselves. Abraham Lincoln is purported to have said, “If
you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five? No;
calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.” And calling a
religion ‘the Truth’ does not make it the truth.
“Speaking the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15) requires
both truth and love; these pages attempt both.
