Jehovah’s Witnesses
Jehovah’s Witnesses are well known for the door-to-door pairs who encourage people to join Bible studies and purchase Watchtower literature. They have produced more than thirty billion pieces of literature and spend over a billion hours annually distributing it. The Watchtower magazine is published in nearly two hundred languages and has a worldwide circulation that more than doubles that of Reader’s Digest.
Jehovah’s Witness theology is based on the writings of Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916), who, influenced by certain Adventist preachers as to the second coming of Christ, founded the Zion’s Watch Tower and Herald of Christ’s Presence magazine in 1879. He wrote articles teaching that Christ had returned invisibly in 1874 and would establish God’s visible kingdom in 1914. Soon after, he established Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society, the forerunner of the current Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. As they do today, Russell’s followers sold books, magazines, and other literature door to door. In 1904, he completed his six-volume Studies in the Scriptures.
Then 1914 passed without Russell’s prophecies coming true, and he died in 1916. His successor was Joseph Rutherford, a prolific writer of nearly a hundred books and tracts. Rutherford taught that Christ’s invisible return began, rather than ended, in 1914, and that God’s kingdom would arrive in 1925. This also failed.
When Rutherford died in 1942, his replacement was Nathan Knorr, best known for (1) his training programs for door-to-door work and (2) the New World Translation of the Bible, which “restored” the name Jehovah to the New Testament (Jehovah is based on an Old Testament Hebrew word, translated LORD in most English versions. It does not exist in Greek, the primary original New Testament language). The New World Translation also differs from recognized scholarship in altering the translation of passages that touch on the deity of Christ.
Even before Knorr’s death, in 1977, major reorganization of the Watchtower Society and its entities occurred. Under his leadership, the Society had predicted Christ would return in 1975 and establish an earthly paradise. When this likewise failed, many Witnesses were disillusioned. A second restructuring followed in 2000, separating administrative duties from the “ministry of the word.” Subsequent leaders have sought to downplay the setting of dates and create explanations for the “seeming” failure of previous prophecies.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are discouraged from questioning their leaders’ teachings. The Watchtower has admonished, “We should seek for dependent Bible study rather than for independent Bible study” (e.g., 09/15/11, 4885). Central to these teachings are that God the Father is Jehovah and that he, the only true God, must be referenced by this name alone. Jesus is a lesser god, created by Jehovah as the Archangel Michael; through him the world and everything else was created. The Trinity, therefore, is a false teaching with origins in ancient Babylonian theology.
Jesus’ earthly life was not an incarnation—his birth was as an ordinary human. Thus his sacrificial death on the cross cancelled out Adam’s sin but no one else’s. Further, his resurrection was as an angelic spirit being, not with a glorified body. His bodily appearances to his disciples were in a temporary form, as angels can sometimes take on a temporary body. And finally, with regard to the nature of God, Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force (not the third person of the Trinity).
With regard to humanity, Jehovah’s Witnesses speak of Christ’s ransom as applying only to those who earn it through adherence to Watchtower doctrine and practices. Among the righteous are two classes of people. The “anointed class” numbers 144,000 (taken from Revelation 7:4). This group is variously described as either very righteous Witnesses who died before 1935, or who were already alive, even as infants, in 1918.
The anointed class will rule in heaven with Christ. The “other sheep” (see John 10:16) are the rest of the faithful Witnesses. They will not go to heaven, but will live forever in an earthly paradise. Humans have no eternal spirit that lives on after physical death. The body simply lies in the grave until the resurrection. At Christ’s return the dead are raised and the great battle of Armageddon takes place, followed by the Judgment. The anointed ones go to heaven, the other sheep go to the earthly paradise, and all the rest are annihilated and cease to exist.
Socially, the Jehovah’s Witnesses face a number of challenges. They do not celebrate any holidays, religious or national, or even birthdays, since they view a holiday as giving honor to someone or something other than Jehovah. For the same reason, they refuse to salute the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance. More controversially, Witnesses refuse to have blood transfusions, believing the Bible prohibits it. The Supreme Court ruled that religious conviction does not allow someone to refuse blood transfusion if it is court-ordered, but court intervention has been rare, and many have died in need of a transfusion.
An Extra Minute
The idea that the highest God created the universe through a lesser god is not new with Jehovah’s Witnesses’ teaching. The ancient Greeks believed spirit was pure, and flesh (the material world) was evil. In order to avoid contamination by proximity to material things, the high God created a lesser god through whom the world was created. This philosophy crept into some early Christian heresies as an attempt to explain how Jesus could still be “god” yet not equal to God the Father. The essential unity and equality of the Father, Son, and Spirit is well supported in Scripture, however, meaning that Jehovah’s Witnesses are not (nor have they ever claimed to be) just another Christian denomination.
Morgan, G.R. (2012) Understanding World Religions in 15 Minutes a Day. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, pp. 158–161.
