What My Neighbor Believes: Jehovah’s Witnesses

By Dan King, Guest Blog­ger On the Horizon

I have recently had sev­eral vis­its from some very faith­ful peo­ple who came to share the hope of their sal­va­tion with me. But as a Min­istry Leader, and an Instruc­tor at a small Bible Col­lege, why would they be so inter­ested in me? Well, accord­ing to them, I’ve got it all wrong! While I read the “same” Bible as them, we have very dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions about what we believe.

So I wanted to dig in a lit­tle bit and fig­ure out what I should believe. And as a stu­dent of the Bible, I wanted to try to stay as objec­tive as I could. I really wanted to dis­cover the truth in the dif­fer­ences between what we believed. What I dis­cov­ered is some­thing that I hope helps you to under­stand these dif­fer­ences, but also gives you some­thing prac­ti­cal to take with you when it comes to deal­ing with these differences.

I also have to say that my views have drawn praise and harsh crit­i­cism. But rather than tak­ing my word for it, and judg­ing what I have writ­ten, I sim­ply chal­lenge you to take it to the Word your­self. The best way to get to the truth is to find it on your own. Just ask the Holy Spirit to guide you in find­ing it. Here is a sum­mary of what I learned, with links to the full posts on each of these topics.

The Trans­la­tion Problem

Before I got into any fun­da­men­tal beliefs, it was impor­tant for me to under­stand the dif­fer­ence in where we were get­ting our infor­ma­tion. Tech­ni­cally, we read the “same” Bible, but dif­fer­ent trans­la­tions. The Jehovah’s Wit­ness orga­ni­za­tion uses what it called the New World Trans­la­tion, and they believe that it is the only cor­rect ver­sion. While I was not able to get my hands on one while writ­ing this series, I did read a bunch of their own mate­r­ial about this trans­la­tion. Ulti­mately, this trans­la­tion raises lots of red flags for me because of it’s secre­tive nature in who trans­lated it, and how it was trans­lated. Most other stan­dard Bible ver­sions doc­u­ment quite well who was involved, and what meth­ods are used. Hav­ing trans­parency in trans­la­tion allows peo­ple to see and ques­tion the meth­ods. Keep­ing every­thing secret does not allow for the same level of crit­i­cism, and can bring the reli­a­bil­ity of the trans­la­tion into question.

Click here to read further.

Inter­pre­ta­tion Flaws: Core Beliefs

One of the fun­da­men­tal beliefs of the Jehovah’s Wit­nesses is that Jesus has already returned and has estab­lished His King­dom here on earth. They even claim the date when this event hap­pened. One of the biggest prob­lems with this is that not only has the “date” moved sev­eral times, it is also based on flawed inter­pre­ta­tion for dat­ing spe­cific events in the Scrip­tures. The time-frame was also deter­mined by break­ing one of the fun­da­men­tal rules of exe­ge­sis. Basi­cally, it seems that spe­cific prophecy two dif­fer­ent places regard­ing two very dif­fer­ent events have been com­bined to help explain each other. One could eas­ily shat­ter this whole idea sim­ply by apply­ing some basic inter­pre­ta­tion standards.

Click here to read further.

Inter­pre­ta­tion Flaws: Reli­gious Practices

One of the prac­tices I saw that I wanted to study was the sep­a­ra­tion from any gov­ern­ment author­ity. Because the Jehovah’s Wit­nesses believe that Jesus has already returned and taken His place on the throne, estab­lish­ing a new King­dom here on earth, they do not rec­og­nize the author­ity of any other gov­ern­ment sys­tem. Not only is the lack of sub­mis­sion to gov­ern­ment author­i­ties (there is no author­ity that God has not put into place, good or bad) not Bib­li­cal, it is also founded on flawed core beliefs (men­tioned above). There also seems to be hypocrisy when they expect the pro­tec­tion of the gov­ern­ment, but refuse to par­tic­i­pate in it. They will even use the government’s jus­tice sys­tem to fight for their right to not rec­og­nize the gov­ern­ment … but don’t you have to rec­og­nize the author­ity of that jus­tice sys­tem in order to use it to fight your case?

Click here to read further.

Inter­pre­ta­tion Flaws: Diety of Jesus

While the Jehovah’s Wit­nesses accept Jesus as the proph­e­sied Mes­siah, they deny His deity. The idea here is that they look at Him as a “cre­ated being” which means that, as a cre­ation of God, He could not be God. As God’s first cre­ated being, He has been ordained as the com­ing king tasked with rul­ing over God’s King­dom. While the the­ol­ogy of the Trin­ity is one of the most dif­fi­cult things in Chris­tian­ity to truly grasp, the Scrip­tures are very clear that Jesus, while sep­a­rate from God the Father (and the Holy Spirit), is still fully God Himself.

Click here to read further.

The Role of Chris­tians in Deal­ing with Jehovah’s Witnesses

While I believe that the entire fun­da­men­tal belief sys­tem prac­ticed by the Jehovah’s Wit­nesses is wrong, I am still quite con­victed as a Chris­t­ian to present an appro­pri­ate response. Jesus never called me to debate peo­ple into sub­mis­sion or fight some­one until they say “uncle.” He did, how­ever, call me to love peo­ple. It is impor­tant to under­stand the dif­fer­ences between our belief sys­tems, but this is not a license to go pick a fight. I think that the next time my vis­i­tors come to my house, I want to do some­thing nice for them with­out debat­ing a sin­gle word. I will let my love for them as God’s cre­ated beings and my actions speak the­o­log­i­cal truths and points of doc­trine that I could ever speak to them. The rest is up to the Holy Spirit.

Click here to read further.

Amen.

Invi­ta­tion to Serve as a Guest Blogger

I invite you to con­tribute to an ongo­ing dis­cus­sion On the Hori­zon about the var­i­ous belief sys­tems and, more par­tic­u­larly, what the many dif­fer­ent churches believe and teach. The invi­ta­tion extends to those who, like me, are spir­i­tu­ally walk­ing beyond the walls of orga­nized reli­gion and per­sons of all dif­fer­ent faiths, not just Chris­tians, in order to fur­ther our knowl­edge and tol­er­ance of each other’s under­stand­ing of and approach to spir­i­tu­al­ity and belief.

Send your con­tri­bu­tion to admin at hope­ful­spirit dot com!

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• What My Neighbor Believes: Wicca (Part Two)
• What My Neighbor Believes: Wicca (Part One)
• What My Neighbor Believes: Lutheranism (Part Two)
• What My Neighbor Believes: Lutheranism (Part One)