What about Jehovah’s Witnesses?

Question 60019.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are probably the group my church members ask me about most, for the simple reason that they are the ones who knock. Few movements are so widely recognised and so little understood. Most people know the door to door work, the magazines, the refusal of blood transfusions and the absence of Christmas, and almost nobody knows what is actually being taught underneath all that.

I want to treat the people fairly and the doctrine honestly, and those two things belong together. The men and women who come to my door are sincere, hard working and often deeply kind. They are also carrying a message about Jesus that the New Testament will not recognise, and love for them requires me to say so rather than to close the door politely and think no more about it.

Who they are and where they came from

The movement began in Pennsylvania in the 1870s with Charles Taze Russell, a young businessman convinced that the churches had lost the truth and that the end was close. He gathered Bible students, published prolifically, and built an organisation around his teaching. After his death in 1916 the leadership passed, after a struggle, to Joseph Franklin Rutherford, a lawyer whose gift for organisation shaped almost everything that followed. The name Jehovah’s Witnesses was adopted in 1931, taken from a phrase in Isaiah 43.

Today Jehovah’s Witnesses are governed from Warwick, New York, by a small Governing Body whose teaching is distributed worldwide through the Watch Tower Society. That centralisation matters for understanding the group. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not hold private opinions about doctrine. Belief is defined centrally, published, and expected, and what was truth in one decade can be revised in the next as what they describe as new light.

There are roughly eight and a half million active members worldwide, and the growth has come almost entirely through the field work that everyone recognises. It is worth saying plainly that this is impressive commitment. Very few of us give the hours to our own convictions that ordinary Jehovah’s Witnesses give to theirs.

What they teach about God

The heart of the matter is here. Jehovah’s Witnesses are unitarian. They teach that God is a single Person, whose name is Jehovah, and they regard the doctrine of the Trinity as a pagan corruption imported into the church in the fourth century. Everything else in the system follows from that denial.

I do not think the historical claim survives scrutiny. Long before Nicaea, believers were praying to Jesus, baptising in the threefold name given by Jesus Himself, and dying rather than call Caesar Lord. The Council of Nicaea did not invent the deity of the Son; it defended what the churches had confessed from the start against a new denial. I have set out the biblical case at length in what the doctrine of the Trinity actually teaches.

There is also a strong insistence on the divine name, so that using Jehovah is treated as a mark of true worship. I have no quarrel with love for the name of God. My quarrel is with the idea that pronouncing a form of it correctly identifies the true church, when the New Testament makes confession of the Son the dividing line.

Who they say Jesus is

This is where the conversation has to go, because it is where everything is decided. Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that Jesus is a created being, the first and greatest of God’s creatures, whom they identify with Michael the archangel. He is called a god in a lesser sense, was made flesh, died on a stake rather than a cross, and was raised as a spirit creature rather than bodily.

Take the whole New Testament and that will not stand. Thomas falls before the risen Jesus and says my Lord and my God, and Jesus commends him rather than correcting him. Paul writes that by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, which leaves nothing for Him to have been created within. Hebrews has the Father address the Son directly as God, and puts angels expressly beneath Him in the same chapter.

On the bodily resurrection the disagreement is just as sharp. Jesus told the disciples to handle Him, because a spirit does not have flesh and bones as they saw He had, and He ate in front of them. A movement that spiritualises that has not adjusted a detail; it has dismantled the event on which the gospel rests.

The New World Translation

Jehovah’s Witnesses use their own Bible, the New World Translation, produced by an anonymous committee and published from the 1950s. Some of it reads perfectly well. The difficulty is that at the very points where doctrine is decided the rendering consistently moves in one direction.

The famous instance is John 1:1, where the Word was God becomes the Word was a god. The Greek has theos without the article in that clause, and the argument runs that the absence of the article makes it indefinite. That is not how Greek works, as anyone can see a few verses later where the same construction is used of the Father without anybody proposing a god. The construction indicates what the Word is by nature, which is exactly what John is asserting.

In Colossians 1 the translation inserts the word other four times, so that the Son creates all other things, a word that is simply not in the Greek and which reverses the argument Paul is making. When a translation has to add words to protect a doctrine, the doctrine is in trouble. I would not build a case on this alone, but it is worth asking a friend at the door why those particular verses needed help.

Salvation, the 144,000, and the two hopes

The system divides believers in two. A limited group of 144,000, taken from Revelation 7 and 14 as a literal number, go to heaven to rule with Christ. Everyone else, described as the great crowd, hopes for everlasting life on a restored paradise earth. Only the smaller group are said to be born again, and only they take the bread and wine at the annual Memorial, which most members attend without partaking.

Read Revelation 7 in its own setting and the great crowd is standing before the throne and before the Lamb, which is not a description of life on earth at a distance from God. I hold a strong distinction between Israel and the Church, so I have no difficulty with a numbered company from the tribes of Israel appearing in the tribulation period. What I cannot find anywhere is a two tier Christianity in which most believers are outside the new covenant looking in.

Salvation itself is presented as a process to be maintained by faithful service, association with the organisation, and endurance to the end. Assurance in the New Testament sense is therefore not really available. Ask a Witness whether he knows he has eternal life and you will usually be told that it depends on faithfulness, whereas John wrote his letter so that those who believe may know that they have eternal life.

The dates that did not arrive

Jehovah’s Witnesses have a long history of announcing the end. 1914 was proclaimed as the year of the visible end of the Gentile times, and when nothing visible happened the event was reinterpreted as an invisible enthronement of Christ in heaven. Later expectations gathered around 1925, and then around 1975, and each disappointment was followed by explanation rather than repentance.

I hold to a genuine and imminent hope, and I preach it, but Jesus said plainly that no one knows the day or the hour, and Scripture forbids date setting for exactly this reason. A movement that has repeatedly told its people to arrange their lives around a specific year, and has then adjusted the story, has given us the clearest possible demonstration of why that prohibition is a mercy.

Blood, shunning and the cost of membership

The refusal of blood transfusions rests on the instruction in Acts 15 to abstain from blood, read as a medical prohibition. Whatever one makes of the exegesis, and I think it plainly concerns eating rather than transfusion medicine, the pastoral consequences are severe and have cost lives, including the lives of children.

Then there is disfellowshipping. A member who leaves or is expelled is shunned by family and friends who remain, often for the rest of their life. I have sat with people carrying that grief and it is a particular kind of loneliness. Paul’s instruction about church discipline was aimed at restoring a brother, and it was never designed as a device to make leaving unthinkable. Where a community makes the exit door cost you every relationship you have, something has gone badly wrong regardless of the doctrine on paper.

How to talk with them at the door

Slow the conversation down and be a human being first. Offer them a drink. Ask their names and use them. They are so used to being dismissed that ordinary courtesy is disarming, and they are far more likely to remember you than any argument you deploy.

Then go to Jesus and stay there. Do not try to cover the Trinity, the 144,000, blood and 1914 in one afternoon. Ask what they make of Thomas calling Jesus his God, or how a created being can be the one by whom all things were created, or where they find assurance of eternal life. Ask questions rather than making speeches, and let the text do the work. It is also worth knowing what a cult actually is so that you use the word accurately rather than as an insult.

Expect the long game. People who leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses usually do so slowly and at enormous cost, and they nearly always tell you afterwards that somebody was consistently kind to them for years. Be that person. Keep your door open, keep praying, and keep believing that the Jesus who is far greater than they have been told is entirely able to reach them.

Why Jehovah’s Witnesses find it so hard to leave

From the outside, walking away looks simple. From the inside it is close to unthinkable, and understanding why will make you a great deal more useful to anyone in that position. A member who leaves is not changing churches. He is losing his parents, his children, his oldest friends and every social connection he has, because those who remain are expected to shun him.

There is a theological weight too. Jehovah’s Witnesses are taught that the organisation is God’s channel of communication, so that leaving it is not a disagreement about doctrine but a departure from God Himself, with Armageddon in view. Put those together and you have a cost most of us have never had to weigh. When somebody does leave, they often arrive with nothing: no friends, no church, and a deep suspicion of religious authority of any kind.

So if such a person turns up in your congregation, go slowly. Do not rush them into commitments and do not be offended when they flinch at anything that looks like control. What they need first is unhurried friendship and the freedom to ask questions without consequences, which may be the first time in their life they have had either.

The history that is not taught

One question worth asking gently is a historical one. The teaching of the organisation has changed repeatedly across its life, on the identity of the great crowd, on vaccination, on organ transplants, on the significance of particular dates, and on who exactly constitutes the faithful and discreet slave. These are not small adjustments, and each was presented at the time as truth from God.

The published explanation is that light grows brighter, and there is a verse in Proverbs pressed into service for it. But the prophetic test in Scripture is not whether an organisation later revises itself; it is whether the word spoken in God’s name came true. A body that has repeatedly asked its members to reorder their lives around a teaching, and then quietly replaced it, has a serious question to answer about the authority it claims.

I raise it as a question rather than a weapon. Ask a friend at the door what the organisation taught about a given subject fifty years ago, and what changed, and who was responsible. Then leave it with him. Questions that a person cannot unask have done more to bring Jehovah’s Witnesses to the real Jesus than any argument I have ever made.

What Jehovah’s Witnesses put the rest of us to shame over

Let me finish with something uncomfortable. Whatever I think of the doctrine, the ordinary member gives hours every week to telling strangers what he believes, in the rain, on doorsteps, knowing he will be refused. Most of the Jehovah’s Witnesses I have met know their own literature thoroughly and can find their way around a Bible faster than a good many church members.

I have wondered more than once what would happen if believers who actually hold the truth were half as committed to sharing it. It is a strange thing that a movement teaching a created Jesus should be so much more visible in our streets than the churches teaching the risen Lord, and that comparison ought to sting rather than be explained away.

So take the challenge as well as the caution. Jehovah’s Witnesses are wrong about the most important thing there is, and they are working harder at it than we are. Their zeal is not an argument for their theology, and our lack of it is not an argument for ours either.

So, now what?

If Jehovah’s Witnesses call at your house this week, do not panic and do not perform. You do not need to win. You need to be kind, to know who Jesus is, and to ask one good question that will still be there when they walk away. That is genuinely enough.

And if you are reading this as a Witness, or as someone who has left and is not sure what is left, I would say only this. Read John’s Gospel from beginning to end without a commentary and without the footnotes. Watch what Jesus says about Himself and what people do in front of Him. He is not an angel. He is the one Thomas fell before, and He receives people who come to Him without a single condition attached.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

John 1:1 to 3 (ESV)

For Further Study

For the biblical case on the Person of Christ, Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology both set out the deity of the Son with clarity and without heat, and Erickson’s The Word Became Flesh goes deeper for those who want it. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology remains valuable on the eternal Sonship. For the prophetic material behind the 144,000, J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come and John Walvoord’s The Revelation of Jesus Christ handle Revelation 7 and 14 from a dispensational standpoint, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s The Footsteps of the Messiah is worth reading alongside them.