I've just finished posting through the 19 chapters of the Jehovah's Witnesses primary study text, What does the Bible really teach? You'll find a table of contents for those blog posts in the post that opened the sequence of them: http://www.oakleys.org.uk/blog/2010/01/what_the_bible_really_teaches_int....
Now that I've finished, there are a few more things that need to be said.
That book is not a systematic theology for the Jehovah's Witnesses train of thought. It has been written with a proselytic purpose, and will reflect that. One of the things that Jehovah's Witnesses seem to stress a great deal today is the amount they have in common with (what I would term) mainstream Christianity. In talking to Christians, they want to present themselves as fellow Christians, who basically worship the same God in the same way, and they are only trying to help us untangle the details.
I tried to give credit where credit was due; where they say things in that book that are biblical, I was careful to acknowledge that. The trouble is, the common ground only serves to confuse. In 2 Corinthians, Paul warns the Christians in Corinth of those who preach "another Jesus". What makes the teaching of those novelists so dangerous is precisely that the man they talk about is called Jesus. What's more, he had the same basic biographical data, he was killed on a Roman cross, raised on the third day, ascended into heaven. They didn't teach another religion about somebody other than Jesus. They still talked about Jesus, but it was a different Jesus they talked about. That means it is not enough to talk about God, Jesus, the crucifixion, baptism, faith, hope, love and the return of Jesus. We must ask which God, Jesus, the crucifixion, baptism, faith, hope, love and the return of Jesus we are talking about. Is it the same one, or a different one? That was what the great Christological debates of the 4th Century were all about.
I have to say that, whilst there is much common ground with the Jehovah's Witnesses, there is much ground that is not common. The common ground is helpful, because it gives us a shared vocabulary to have a conversation. It means our worldviews touch, and there is space to explore the internal consistencies of each other's systems. But we mustn't be confused by that into thinking that the points of difference are only minor. They are not. That is not to make a pronouncement on where any individual JW stands before God; I'm sure it is possible to be a JW but to trust in Christ, the Divine Son of the Living God, alone for salvation. It's just that, at those points, you would not be a very good JW. It is to say that the doctrines taught by the Watchtower Society and by its literature, and probably by most of its doorstep proponents, is not the same religion as mainstream Christianity.
There is one other important facet in the tendency to stress the common ground. For the sake of maintaining that presentation, they have not presented every detail that a Christian would find hard to accept. Some of the more biblically divergent teachings are glossed over. At this point, I don't know enough about the Jehovah's Witnesses. I commend to readers of this blog the extensive response to What does the Bible Really Teach over at freeminds.org. That was written by somebody who knows a lot more about the Witnesses than I do, and can fill you in on the background behind lots of those chapters.
All glory be to God on High, Father, Son and Holy Spirit!
Add new comment