A Reply to Mark Hunter

On 12 February 2010, I received a comment under the Frequently Asked Questions section. The remarks were offered by Mark Hunter, a former Jehovah's Witness elder who, having converted from their group to orthodox Christianity, is now affiliated with FreeMinds and blogs on their site at Watchtower Teachings; he tells a few elements of his personal exit narrative here. I hope he posts more soon; he hasn't done so since this past August, and I enjoy reading his material. His comment here contained a number of points deserving response, and now that I have the opportunity, I'd like to offer a reply. I'll quote the entirety of his comment first:

I wonder if you really see what the problem with the Watch Tower Society actually is?

They claim to be chosen by God and that they alone speak for Him on earth. All other Christians are branded as "so called" and are slurred in Watch Tower publications as being "false" and "evil doers".

At communion everyone is encouraged to refuse the sacraments.

Jesus is reduced to a mere created messenger boy.

What I find surprising in your blog is the number of times you find their teaching unobjectionable. You also found the Memorial enjoyable.

I know you've researched Russell and Rutherford. Surely you can see the demonic influence these men were under when they came up with their "unique teachings". The Watch Tower Society is a Christ-denying, high control religious group who claims to speak for God. I'm sure you know about the lives that have been lost due to the prohibitions of vaccines, organ transplants, and blood transfusions.

Our battle isn't against flesh and blood. The Kingdom is not a matter of talk. Scoring points against JWs intellectually helps no one. They need prayer and the breakthrough of the Holy Spirit, not theological debates.

While I've found your blog interesting, sadly I'm disappointed that you don't talk more about praying for the JWs. You mention you pray before they arrive. What do you pray for? Their salvation or your ability to show off your theological knowledge?

And now to the response, which I'll strive to offer in an irenic manner. To a great extent, I concur wholeheartedly with what he's said. One of the greatest problems with the Watch Tower Society is their strong sectarian attitude, their claim to uniquely be Jehovah's chosen people to the exclusion of all other Christians, who are dismissed as being unfaithful to God. And that is a serious problem, not something trivial. Their take on communion reflects a class system in which only the 'elite', the 144,000, are in the New Covenant--and that is not only a grave theological error, but a spiritual trainwreck, because all Christians are in the New Covenant, without exception. Only in the context of that grave error is their approach to the eucharist even intelligible; and to encourage any Christian to abstain from the table of the Lord for any reason other than being spiritually unprepared (i.e., having unrepented sin) is absolutely outrageous. And while describing the Jehovah's Witness view of Jesus as a "mere [...] messenger boy" is a bit of a caricature, Jehovah's Witnesses do not do justice to the honor that Christ deserves, as their boast about minimizing songs devoted to him shows quite clearly. It does no good to 'damn with faint praise', as it were, by extolling Christ as the highest created thing, the instrumental cause of the cosmos, and the ruler of God's theocratic domain; Jesus is no less than the almighty and uncreated God the Son, the efficient cause of the cosmos, and the absolute Lord of heaven and earth. To quote three verses from one of my favorite Wesleyan hymns:

See there! The newborn Savior see,
By faith discern the great I AM;
'Tis he! The eternal God! 'Tis he
That bears the mild Immanuel's name.

The Prince of Peace on earth is found,
The child is born, the son is given;
Tell it to all the nations round,
Jehovah is come down from heaven!

Jehovah is come to raise
Dying creatures from their fall,
And all may now receive the grace
Which brings eternal life to all.

The Jehovah's Witnesses, regardless of how much they get right (when contrasted with, e.g., the Islamic repudiation of Jesus as the unique Son of God or as the ultimate and final self-revelation of God to mankind), profoundly fail to do adequate justice to Christ.

Now, Mark next expresses a note of surprise at "the number of times [I] find [JW] teaching unobjectionable", and that I even "found the Memorial enjoyable". And I can see the reason for this surprise. However, one of my goals when engaging in interfaith dialogue is to be as charitable as reasonably possible. I want to understand Jehovah's Witnesses on their terms, not merely my own, and to appreciate everything that can be said in their defense. And so I seek to be generous. (Besides, I have to note that many of the criticisms I have of their group - other than their heresies and the authoritarian hierarchy - are valid criticisms of a number of evangelical groups.) Much of what they teach is unobjectionable. (And, I will add for the sake of making myself perfectly clear, a great deal of what remains is dangerous heresy.) I suppose that it would make for a more productive dialogue about the topic if Mark were to point out an instance in which I found something unobjectionable where, in his opinion, I should have objected. As for my enjoyment of the Memorial service, yes, I did enjoy it, as I mention in my account of the eighteenth 'study' meeting. Mostly, however, this was the enjoyment of an observer studying a religious movement from the outside. The spiritual significance I derived from it was only because communion itself is such a moving thing; however, because of the manner in which Jehovah's Witnesses have perverted it, that power was remarkably blunted, as I noted in my account of the Memorial.

Mark next says that "surely [I] can see the demonic influence [Russell and Rutherford] were under when they came up with their 'unique teachings'". "Demonic influence"? Possibly. I'm not one inclined to see demonic involvement in most places (Todd Bentley excepted...). A number of the "unique teachings" of Jehovah's Witnesses that originated in the Russell era were derived from streams of thought present within sectarian Anglo-American Protestantism, as thoroughly documented by M. James Penton in his Apocalypse Delayed. A number came from George Storrs; as Penton notes:

An examination of the Bible Examiner indicates clearly that Russell earned the doctrines of the ransom atonement of Christ and the restitution of mankind to a paradise earth directly from Storrs and his associates plus, of course, the doctrine of conditionalism. It is evident, too, that the practice of celebrating the Memorial of the Lord's Supper once a year on the supposed date of the Jewish Passover, 14 Nisan, as is done by Jehovah's Witnesses today, was learned by Russell from the editor of the Bible Examiner. Then, finally, Russell's negative feelings towards churches and religious organizations may have come directly from Storrs. (Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, pp. 16-17)

Russell's heretical deviation from the physical resurrection of Christ most likely came from Joseph Seiss, a Lutheran minister from Philadelphia, whose Prophetic Times was very prominent in the millenarian milieu in which Russell's theology was formed; and Russell took his understanding of the parousia of Christ from the Emphatic Diaglott, while some of his early thought on Revelation was rooted in interpretations by Adam Clarke and Isaac Newton. Russell's chronological speculation came largely from Nelson Barbour, who himself modified a great deal of it from John Brown's 1823 book Even-Tide, which put the fall of Judah in 604 BC and hence calculated that the end of the Gentile times would occur in AD 1917, which Barbour pushed back to 1914. And, of course, Russell's anti-Trinitarianism is hardly anything new; such movements have been around for quite some time, and Unitarianism has had a sadly important role in the history of American religious thought. Perhaps Russell and Rutherford were under demonic influence; I would hesitate to pronounce a verdict either way. But it is clear that they, as flawed men, adopted many errors from their predecessors in Anglo-American millenarianism and added further errors unto them. And while calling the Watch Tower Society "Christ-denying" might be a bit strong, there's no doubt that the Watch Tower Society has serious problems and has, through their pronouncements on various medical issues, caused untold death and suffering among its followers. Whether this is proportionately greater than similar issues in various orthodox Christian ecclesial bodies, I don't know, but the blood transfusion issue is founded on a ridiculous misunderstanding on their part, while the vaccine and organ transplant issues are merely further nails in the coffin of the Watch Tower Society's credibility.

Mark finally ends with a few paragraphs challenging me, suggesting that perhaps I value "scoring points against JWs intellectually" over their salvation. Allow me to dispel that notion quickly. I must first, of course, add the caveat that I don't think that all Jehovah's Witnesses are outside of the body of Christ; or, at least, I see no reason that their heresies should of necessity exclude them from salvation. Nevertheless, the Watch Tower Society is more of an obstacle than a help for them, and they profoundly need the truth of God. And I do pray before I meet with them--not a prayer that I'd trounce them or have a rhetorical advantage or anything of the sort, but that God would send his Spirit to work in their hearts and to open their eyes to the truth of the faith delivered once for all to the saints, and that they would if at all possible be led out of their heretical sect and into the freedom of the sons and daughters of God. It's not about me or anything that I can do; it's all about God and what he can do in their lives, if they'll not harden their hearts against him and if they'll show a willingness to abandon their teachings in exchange for the pure truth of the Scriptures. True, I don't usually go into the details of my prayers before they arrive, though I may try to do so a bit more often now. The reason is mostly that it would be about the same on every occasion, and since it also transpires before they arrive, I generally omit it from the account, which I typically begin with their arrival.

Let there be no mistake: Jehovah's Witnesses do need prayer. Not prayer for a merely human triumph, as though they were the opponent, but prayer for their deliverance from grave error and instead turn more fully to Christ. And I hope that this response to Mark Hunter has both been seasoned with grace and dealt with his concerns about what he's read here; and, of course, I thank him for his counsel.