A reader writes….
“Revealed Truth” or “Present Truth” what does this mean. That at a particular time a “truth” has been revealed? Yes but does the “truth” change once it has been revealed? That “truth”never changes in itself. It will always be a “truth”. It may be clarified or made clearer at some future time but it itself never changes per se or it is not “truth”. Example the Bible teaches that Jesus gave his life as a ransom. This is a revealed Truth. It has never changed in itself. The Bible clearly teaches it. There may be information that may help us to understand it better but it itself, the doctrine never changes. In contrast C.T. Russell believed and taught that the “Higher Powers” or “Superior Authoritites” of Romans 13 were the governments of the earth a revealed “truth”. Then J.F.Rutherford came along and said no. The “Higher Powers” (KJV) were Jehovah and Jesus. A revealed “truth”. Then in 1962 the Watchtower taught that the “Superior Authorities” were the Governments of the earth a revealed “truth”. Who was telling the “truth”. Russell or Rutherford or the Watchtower? Jehovah’s Witnesses such in that previous article parrot the twisted semantics of the word “truth” with such words as “present” truth. No such thing! Truth is Truth and it always be Truth. “Your Word is Truth? John 17:17. God who CANNOT lie Titus 1:2
Self Deceiving Behavior. (Cognitive Dissonance)
Topic: Jehovah`s Witness
Expert: Brenda Martin
Date: 8/4/2005
Subject: Viewpoints of C.T. Russell and J.F. Rutherford
Question
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Followup To
Question -
Hi Brenda. I found your response concerning the deity of Christ interesting. My question is in two parts.
I was wondering if you had done much research into the beliefs of the founder of The Jehovah’s Witnesses, Charles T. Russell and his successor, J.F. Rutherford.
According to what I have read, Russell was a prolific writer and wrote many books. In several instances he quotes scripture, without comment or correction, stating that Christ should be worshipped. (A view I undertand that is no longer supported by Jehova’s Witnesses.)
In The Harp of God he quotes Matthew 28:1-10. Verse 9 reads “And they came and held him by the feet, and worshiped him.”
In Deliverance he states, “Crucifeixes were erected, and the worship of the people turned to these rather than to let them intelligently worship the Lord Jehovah and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
and
In the August 15th 1941 issue of the Watchtower it was explained with reference to Jesus’ obedience unto death, “For this reason God has highly exalted him and given him a name above every name, and commands that all creature in heaven and earth shall worhip the Son as he worships the Father. Phil. 2:5-11″
1. Does it seem that there has been a change in the teachings of the Watchtower concerning the worship of Jesus since Russell’s time?
and
2. What/who do you believe Jesus to be?
Thanks.
Answer -
Hi Beth, you said there has been a–”CHANGE IN THE TEACHINGS OF THE WATCHTOWER”
Absolutely correct,the Bible shows that Jehovah enables his servants to understand his purpose in a progressive manner. (Prov. 4:18; John 16:12) Thus, the prophets who were divinely inspired to write portions of the Bible did not understand the meaning of everything that they wrote. (Dan. 12:8, 9; 1 Pet. 1:10-12) The apostles of Jesus Christ realized that there was much they did not understand in their time. (Acts 1:6, 7; 1 Cor. 13:9-12) The Bible shows that there would be a great increase in knowledge of the truth during “the time of the end.” (Dan. 12:4) Increased knowledge often requires adjustments in one’s thinking. Jehovah’s Witnesses are willing humbly to make such adjustments.
“WHAT/WHO DO YOU BELIEVE JESUS TO BE?”
J.W’s believe, not that Jesus Christ is part of a Trinity, but that, as the Bible says, he is the Son of God, the first of God’s creations; that he had a prehuman existence and that his life was transferred from heaven to the womb of a virgin, Mary; that his perfect human life laid down in sacrifice makes possible salvation to eternal life for those who exercise faith; that Christ is actively ruling as King, with God-given authority over all the earth since 1914.
The modern-day history of Jehovah’s Witnesses began with the forming of a group for Bible study in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., in the early 1870’s. However, their beliefs and practices are not new, but are a restoration of first-century Christianity.
Brenda
Brenda,
Your answers lead me to ask, If “Jehovah enables his servants to understand his purpose in a progressive manner. (Prov. 4:18; John 16:12)” then how do we know that the “truths” that current Jehovah’s Witnesses and prophets are espousing are the truth? Could these beliefs/truths change over time as well?
and
What do you call/refer to Jesus as? You said he was King but where does he rank? How did Jesus live a perfect life if he isn’t Jehovah God? (Is anyone other than Jehovah able to live a perfect life?)
Thanks.
Beth
Answer
HI Beth, you asked–”HOW DO WE KNOW THAT THE “TRUTHS” THAT CURRENT JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES ARE ESPOUSING ARE THE TRUTH?”
Jehovah reveals his confidential matters at the time he deems advisable. For that purpose God has authorized a “faithful and discreet slave” to provide his people with “their [spiritual] food at the proper time.” (Matthew 24:45) There is, therefore, no reason for us to become overly concerned, or even agitated, that certain matters are not fully explained. Rather, we can be confident that if we patiently wait on Jehovah, he will provide, through the faithful slave, what is needed “at the proper time.”
We can be assured that, what JW’s are preaching at any particular time, is the “truth” as far as it has been revealed at that time. We do not preach lies (unlike the churches) they know what the bible says on many subjects and yet they insist on preaching lies to their flocks, we do not, we preach the revealed truth at all times.
Through all the years, the Bible has not changed and neither has the divine will changed for the Christian.
“COULD THESE BELIEFS/TRUTHS CHANGE OVER TIME AS WELL?”
A case in point; when I became a Witness 30 years ago, the scripture in Matthew regarding the “generation would not pass away” was seen as a literal generation of 70-80 years, this has, in recent times, changed and we now view that scripture differently. So yes they can change and do.
but God’s purpose for mankind remain the same.
“WHAT DO YOU CALL/REFER TO JESUS AS?”
Jesus, Christ, Messiah, Saviour, Son of God, etc. etc.
“KING BUT WHERE DOES HE RANK?”
Jesus is the second greatest personage in the universe.
Although it occurred invisibly to our human eyes in the heavens, the “son of man” gained access to the Ancient of Days, Jehovah God, and there were given to the “son of man” all that “rulership and dignity and kingdom.” So it was then, at the end of the Gentile Times in 1914, that the Lord Jesus as the Son of man came accompanied by all the angels and sat down “on his glorious throne.” Thus the Messianic kingdom of God was born in the heavens.
“HOW DID JESUS LIVE A PERFECT LIFE IF HE ISN’T JEHOVAH GOD?”
Simple, he was created perfect by God, just as the angels, including Satan, not to mention, Adam and Eve, were created perfect, all were perfect and yet none are Jehovah God.
“IS ANYONE OTHER THAN JEHOVAH ABLE TO LIVE A PERFECT LIFE?”
Yes of course they are, when Adam and Eve were created they were given exactly that, a “Perfect life” they failed to appreciate what they had been given and sinned, but nevertheless, they were originally perfect.
Jesus came to earth, born of Mary as a perfect man, the same as Adam had been, and he proved by his faithfulness till death, that it is possible to “live a perfect life”
Perfection is what Jehovah wants for mankind, nothing less. We today however cannot possibly “live a perfect life” because we are not perfect, we are imperfect, but in the future mankind will be brought back to a state of perfection and enjoy everlasting life.
Brenda
In the Watchtower ‘Questions from Readers the question is asked, “Is Jesus the ‘mediator’ only for anointed Christians?
Their answer
‘ … At a time when God was selecting those to be taken into that new covenant, the apostle Paul wrote that Christ was the “One mediator between God and men.’ (1 Tim. 2:5) Reasonably Paul was here using the word ‘mediator” in the same way he did the other five times, which occurred before the writing of 1 Timothy 2:5, referring to those then being taken into the new covenant for which Christ is “mediator.’ So in this strict Biblical sense Jesus is the “mediator” only for anointed Christians. The new covenant will terminate with the glorification of the remnant who are today in that covenant mediated by Christ. “This great crowd” of “other sheep” that is forming today is not in the new covenant. However by their associating with the little flock of those yet in that covenant they come under benefits that flow from that new covenant.’ (Watchtower, 4/1/79, p. 31).
The Truth vs. the truth
Virtual Experiment
The Truth vs. the truth
by Stephen Cox
Can the Truth survive the Internet?
This is a story about American values, Bulgaria’s policy on human rights, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, and the strange and unforeseen persistence of truth in our allegedly postmodern age.
Stephen Cox is professor of literature at the University of California in San Diego, and the author of “The Titanic Story.”
In this age (so it is said), there is room for data and opinion and diverse points of view, but none at all for simple “truth” - a term that must never be invoked unless it is surrounded by a guard of scare-quotes and qualifying phrases. Among the advanced thinkers of the late 20th century, fear of truth rose to the level of hysteria. The dean of postmodern theorists, Jean-François Lyotard, habitually associated “truth” with the threat of “terror.” Similar language was adopted by practitioners of deconstruction, critical theory, and the militantly relativist species of religious studies, cultural studies, and identity politics. Today, the term of choice may not be “terror”; it may be “oppression,” “domination,” or the more stylish “hegemony.” But whatever words are used, Truth is clearly on the defensive within the American intelligentsia.
And there are good reasons for the suspicion of truth.
The 20th century was an era of lies - enormous, ridiculous lies, the lies of fascism, communism, and “scientific” racism - lies that were retailed as objective truths by intellectual and political authorities who used them to maintain their power and make it appear legitimate. It is possible to argue that if we are ever to escape from Authority, we must first escape from Truth; and that is precisely what postmodern thinkers argue.
According to the most optimistic of these thinkers, however, a means of escape has now been discovered, a way of making the lies and pretenses of established authority yield to the reality of diverse points of view and heterogeneous “language games.” This means of escape is the Internet, the most efficient device ever invented for confronting “truth” with kaleidoscopic opinions and perspectives. The net can connect anyone to anyone, anyone’s game to anyone else’s. It is incredibly cheap, incredibly easy to use, incredibly powerful.
In postmodern circles there are, indeed, suspicions of the Internet, as there are of truth, suspicions centering on its service to “globalization” and “consumer capitalism.” But to theorists who have moved beyond leftist clichŽs, the Internet seems, in the words of one of the host of webpages devoted to the topic, a “direct embodiment” of postmodernism.
A generation ago, in the Neoplastic Era of electronic technology, Ralph Ellison compared modern American culture to a phonograph record. Both of them operated on the principle of “random accessibility”: everyone has access to anything - just drop the needle. It was an apt metaphor, but the Internet is much greater than a metaphor. It provides the maximum degree of accessibility, and it provides something more. You don’t sit passively in front of the Internet; you use it to make things: business deals, political movements, marriages, communities of shared eccentricities.
The 20th century was an era of lies - enormous, ridiculous lies, the lies of fascism, communism, and “scientific” racism.
You can also use it to make trouble. The day has come when every large institution in the world depends on the Internet to do its business. That is another way of saying that every large institution is continually exposed to electronic penetration and attack by competitors, dissidents, rebels, and spies. There could not be a better environment for the subversion of institutions and ideas. The Internet is hospitable to opinion and information; it is not hospitable to authority and authority’s best friend, the “truth.”
Or so it might appear. It’s at least a plausible hypothesis. But we need a test case, an example of some crucial conflict between the Internet and a formidable, institutionally embodied “truth.” I have found such a case.
There is a large American institution whose very name for itself is “the Truth.” With about 2 million adherents in the United States and about 15 million in the world (6.3 million of them active adherents), it is the second-largest of America’s native-born religions. The Mormons are ahead in numbers, but even they are less impressively authoritarian than the organization to which I refer: the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, whose followers are known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Now, however, the Witnesses are locked in mortal combat with the forces of dissent, and the field of battle is the Internet. The outcome of the struggle is undecided, but its shape is definite, and it has a lot to teach us about postmodern ideas of truth and authority.
Who Are They?
Who are Jehovah’s Witnesses? That is a difficult question for most people to answer. The Witnesses are the least known of America’s large minority groups. They do not vote, they do not congregate in Utah, they do not operate colleges, hospitals, or newspapers. They have no dealings with any other religious sect, tradition, or tendency, refraining even from celebrating the “pagan” holidays of Christmas and Easter. Their only visible folkway is a habit of materializing on people’s doorsteps to “place” a copy of the Watchtower magazine.
But there is a heavy irony about their isolation and invisibility. At every stage of their history, they have assimilated leading features of the surrounding society, features that self-isolation has preserved and replicated in exaggerated, ultimately self-subverting forms, like the quaint, helpless fauna that inhabit remote islands. Another irony is that the Witnesses’ system of authority began with the attempt of a solitary dissident to escape from the confines of “Christendom.”
The inventor of the Watchtower Society, Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916), owned a small chain of men’s clothing stores in Pittsburgh. In his spare time, he studied the Bible. A lover of progress and enlightenment, he found himself unable to accept the intellectual discipline of historic Christianity. He rejected the doctrines of the trinity and the immortal soul; in his book The New Creation (1904), he even compromised with the theory of evolution. So far, he was a typical 19th-century rationalist. Yet he could not agree with the newly fashionable “higher criticism” and its rationalist attack on the Bible’s coherence, inspiration, and authority. He proposed to fight rationalism with rationalism. He would defend the Bible on scientific grounds.
Unfortunately, science, for him, was largely a matter of calculations and measurements. The crucial thing was the Bible’s use of numbers. He became convinced that he had discovered the number system of Bible prophecy, and that the numbers tallied perfectly not only with the known events of history but also (oddly but happily) with the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, God’s “stone witness” in the land of Egypt. He outlined God’s plans in an elaborate and beautiful diagram, studded with symbolic pyramids, called the “Chart of the Ages.” His mathematics demonstrated that history would soon culminate in God’s restoration of the earthly paradise. And he started calling his movement the Truth. It was “Science . . . springing from the Word of God.”
Russell wasn’t the only prophet of the millennium. Most of his ideas about history originated in America’s vast, amorphous Second Advent movement. His followers and the Seventh-Day Adventists are the major living descendants of the remarkable people who in the mid-19th century roused America by proclaiming that the second coming or “advent” of Christ would soon occur. But Russell’s own group, once started, developed in complete independence from any other. Russell was a good writer and public speaker and an energetic self-advertiser. Hundreds of newspapers reprinted his sermons; millions of people bought his books. His journal, “Zion’s Watch Tower and Herald of Christ’s Presence,” began in 1879 with a circulation of 6,000; its current circulation is well over 20,000,000.
His great mistake, a mistake that would be repeated several times in Watchtower history, was the prediction of a specific date for the end of the world. He thought it would all be over by the end of 1914. Something did happen in 1914, but it wasn’t quite the end of the world. After Russell died, his disciples reassessed his arithmetic. They affirmed its truth, while altering its specifics. The Watchtower Society eventually decided that 1914 was right, but it was right because it marked Christ’s (invisible) second coming, which Russell thought had happened in 1874. The end of the world would happen later. Other predictions located it in 1918, 1925, 1942, and 1975. The failure of these forecasts led to defections, sometimes to massive ones; but the people who stayed (and they are the only people who really matter to any organization) were those who still believed that, in principle, such events were subject to rational calculation. And who better to do the calculations than the experts at the Watchtower Society?
The Internet is hospitable to opinion and information; it is not hospitable to authority and authority’s best friend, the “truth.”
Russell’s era was the Witnesses’ Age of Reason. The next Watchtower president, Joseph Franklin Rutherford (1869-1942), presided over the Age of Politics. Rutherford, universally known as Judge Rutherford, was a lawyer who had served as a temporary judge in Boonville, Missouri. He had, in addition, campaigned for William Jennings Bryan, apostle of Free Silver and other Progressive causes. Like Bryan, he cast himself in the prophetic mode and crusaded against the power of big capital. Like Bryan, he also opposed America’s entry into World War I. His opposition to the war and military service led to his imprisonment for nine months on (palpably false) charges of sedition. He became, with some reason, a vigorous enemy of secular authority.
Russell had regarded history as a process of reconciliation between God and man. Rutherford saw it as a battle between God’s government, the Theocracy, and Satan’s government, the tyrannical nation-states, greedy capitalists, and power-mad churches, a battle that would end in the slaughter of everyone who was not on the side of Theocracy. This essentially political conception guided his reorganization of Russellism. In the “holy nation,” as Rutherford called the Watchtower movement, congregational church government was replaced by “theocratic” mandates. He decreed that all local officials would henceforth be appointed by Watchtower headquarters, and congregations would be called “companies,” as in “military companies.” He changed the name of the movement itself from Bible Students (too generic) to Jehovah’s Witnesses (a legalistic term of his own coinage).
Rutherford’s slogan was “Advertise, Advertise, Advertise the King and His Kingdom!” His advertising style was crude but marvelously theatrical. He wrote a book called “Millions Now Living Will Never Die.” He sent his followers into the streets wearing sandwich boards that said, “Religion Is a Snare and a Racket” (the Watchtower movement was not a mere “religion”). He published cartoons depicting porcine priests and Satanic politicians. He took to the radio, rivaling Father Coughlin in blistering attacks on the government. His sound-trucks (some of them armored) toured North America, blaring his speeches to unwilling ears. He staged huge conventions that, like the legislatures of totalitarian states, unanimously approved the bombastic “resolutions” the leader wrote on their behalf. To distinguish the practices of the Theocracy from those of Satan’s Organization, he outlawed the celebration of birthdays, Christmas, and Easter, and the use of the cross in worship. He decided that flag-salutes, voting, and enlisting in the army were treason to Theocracy, and he outlawed them, too. Everyone in the Watchtower movement was required to participate in “service,” selling Rutherford’s books and ideas to the general public. Dissenters were purged and publicly denounced. There was one Truth, and Judge Rutherford was its prophet.
Rutherford’s career was a parody (if it is possible to parody such things) of the extremist political tendencies of the era. When he died in 1942 at his San Diego residence - an estate intended as the capital of the resurrected patriarchs’ millennial regime, but equipped, for the present, with secret shelters against enemy attack - it was obvious that he had outlived his time. In ensuing years, the Watchtower Society learned to behave less like a political cult and more like a modern corporation - while retaining most of Rutherford’s doctrines and all of his authority.
Every stereotype has its archetype. Sloan Wilson supplied the stereotype of America’s corporate culture in the title of his novel “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1955). The archetype had appeared some years before. N. H. Knorr (1905-1977), Rutherford’s successor as president of the Watchtower Society, literally was the man in the gray flannel suit. Like Rutherford, he exerted complete corporate control; but whereas Rutherford put his personal stamp on everything, Knorr wouldn’t even sign his own name. All Watchtower literature was now produced anonymously, by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Inc. All directives were communicated, in a vague but decisive way, by “the Society.” Maximum standardization was achieved: all effort was concentrated on house-to-house distribution of literature, the kind of thing that almost anyone can do. The rebarbative doctrines of Rutherford’s time were massaged into truth-bites bland enough to be marketed everyplace in the world where people were attracted to American goods.
The Watchtower assumed the shape of a multinational firm, with scores of branches and tens of thousands of local outlets, all as much alike, wherever they were, as so many McDonald’s restaurants. The Watchtower’s factories and offices towered over Brooklyn Heights; Wall Street traders practiced divination on the daily messages of the Watchtower’s neon signs. And the Watchtower moved with the times. In the 1970s, it followed the precedent of other large American corporations: it cultivated a blander style of management and a spiffier public image. It replaced its imperial presidency with a web of committees, and it replaced the stodgy look of its books and magazines, a style formed in reaction to the excesses of the Rutherford period, with pastel graphics and a friendly, though insistent, use of multicultural images and rhetoric, capitalizing especially on the Society’s success in wooing African Americans.
Russell proposed to fight rationalism with rationalism. He would defend the Bible on scientific grounds.
Its statistical self-confidence blinded it to its limitations. The movement was severely burdened by its past. While it struggled to make itself inviting to everyone, it was cursed with ordinances against participation in virtually all civic customs and virtually all religious practices except selling Watchtower literature and hearing it expounded. The Witnesses’ niggling, estranging regulations made them appear absurd, especially to their own young people.
Still more embarrassing - deadly, in fact - was the Society’s notorious “blood ban,” its belief that blood transfusions constitute a violation of God’s law against eating blood (Genesis 9:4). The belief was inspired by the Society’s Rutherford-era war on “so-called medical science” (a branch of Satan’s empire) and became one of the most prominent fixations of the Watchtower movement. Receiving a transfusion, or permitting one’s child to do so, was a D.O. (disfellowshipping offence); and to be disfellowshipped was to be thrown out of the Truth and shunned by one’s friends and relatives. For five decades, the “blood ban” took a steady toll of believers’ lives. It is still doing so.
Another embarrassing feature of the Truth, and its mathematics, resurfaced dangerously in the 1960s, when the Society added up some more numbers and predicted that the current order of things would end in 1975. This time, the calculations were simpler, clearer, and even more compelling than Russell’s. They led to a tremendous revival of devotion within the Witness community. Many people who had drifted away raced back; many Witnesses sacrificed promising careers to work full time spreading the good news of the world’s forthcoming end.
The world obstinately endured, and the Witnesses’ effort to recover from the resulting public relations disaster brought yet another old characteristic to the fore - the Society’s custom, dating back to Russell’s use of the term “present truth,” of treating every falsification of its prophecies as a sign that the Truth itself is advancing. Not everyone accepted this paradoxical (or, to borrow Lyotard’s word, “paralogical”) idea of truth as something that simultaneously moves and maintains its fixed location at Watchtower headquarters. Several hundred thousand Witnesses dropped out; others were expelled after a failed attempt at doctrinal reform by Raymond Franz, a member of the Society’s august Governing Body.
The organization survived, in large part because of its ability to restrict communications. Anyone who made “apostate” remarks or carried “apostate” news was immediately disfellowshipped and shunned. Of course, if you wanted to attack the Truth, you could go write a book about it (Franz wrote two of them), but the market was small. It was pretty much restricted to Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Witnesses were under orders never to read apostate books. In any event, that kind of reading material had to be sought, usually with difficulty; it did not just turn up on your doorstep, like the Watchtower. Dissidents came to the Witnesses’ conventions and tried to pass out their own literature, most of which was thrown away. They conducted direct-mail campaigns, with little more effect than the appearance of cartoons in Watchtower publications showing pieces of apostate mail whizzing into the trash can.
Then the Internet was born.
Appearance of the Antichrist
Suppose you were a devout Jehovah’s Witness and you had just hooked up to the Internet. What would be the first thing you’d do? You’d sit down in front of the computer and type in “Watchtower” or “Jehovah’s Witnesses.” And what you’d see on your screen would be: “Questions for Jehovah’s Witnesses,” “Answering the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” “False Prophecies of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” “Beyond Jehovah’s Witnesses,” “Watchtower Observer,” “Free Minds, Inc.” - row upon row of opposition pages and sites. If you clicked onto one of those sites, you would be amazed and disgusted, but also, perhaps, enticed, especially if you had ever harbored any nagging doubts about the Truth or any secret resentments against authority in general.
A state-of-the-art opposition website is a supermarket of information and opinion, offering Watchtower news, personal experiences of former Witnesses, humor, facts about the Watchtower’s colorful history (the subject of systematic suppression and distortion by the Society), analysis of the Society’s unique methods of biblical interpretation, psychological and procedural advice for people who want to leave the Watchtower, and, of course, links to other opposition sites.
Opposition sites have achieved a virtual monopoly on the sale of back-dated Watchtower publications, literature that the Society considers too full of embarrassing Old Truths to be marketed to anyone, even for reasons of nostalgia. And if print technology is too low-tech for you, CD-ROMs are also for sale. One thin disk will give you a treasury of the Society’s outdated speculations about the fast-approaching showdown between labor and capital (Russell, “The Battle of Armageddon,” 1912) , the prophetic significance of the Lackawanna Railroad (Clayton J. Woodworth, et al., “The Finished Mystery,” 1917), the inadvisability of marriage, now that Armageddon is so close (Rutherford, Children, 1941), and hundreds of other topics.
Rutherford saw history as a battle between God’s government, the Theocracy, and Satan’s government, the tyrannical nation-states, greedy capitalists, and power-mad churches.
A number of apostate sites target the blood ban, the most vulnerable spot in the Watchtower’s defenses. The most influential of these sites has been “New Light on Blood,” the propaganda machine of a secret society of Witnesses whose aim is a radical reform of the Watchtower organization. The Associated Jehovah’s Witnesses for Reform on Blood is composed of people from many countries, and it appears to have high-level contacts within the official organization. Its power stems from the fact that its existence is largely electronic and “virtual.” It can gather facts, it can infiltrate the official organization, it can alert the mass media, it can warn wavering Witnesses that they are in danger of “bloodguilt” (the most terrible thing you can say to a Witness) if they fail to oppose the ban on blood; it can do all this and still evade the identification and punishment of its members. Never has insurrection been so easy: “If you want to remain anonymous, use an anonymous remailer like this one.”
But are there no loyal forces in cyberspace? When the Internet first became widely accessible, loyal websites proliferated. Individual Witnesses saw the new technology as an opportunity to communicate with fellow believers in an unofficial way. The Watchtower had always quashed independent Witness publications. Truth had to flow in one direction only - out from the Society’s editorial offices and down to the local congregations. Even loyalists welcomed a break from that routine. But while print technology could be easily policed, the Internet could not; so the Society issued warnings about the “spiritual pornography” to be found in cyberspace and rumbled sadly about the ease with which people become addicted to the Internet and start neglecting kingdom service. Some loyal websites took the cue and vanished.
Yet even the Society was no match for the Internet. It found that the public press considered the net a principal source of information, and it didn’t want anybody turning to apostate websites for information about the Watchtower itself. So it made the momentous decision to create its own website. While acknowledging the existence of “other sites” that “express favorable or unfavorable opinions about us,” watchtower.org proclaimed itself the only “authoritative source about the beliefs, teachings, and activities of Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
The official site offers a variety of best-foot-forward articles (”Five Ways to Improve the Quality of Your Life,” “When No One Will Be Poor,” “The Marvelous New World of God’s Making”). But it’s not all sunshine. The apostate sites have always been a very present absence at the official one, much of which is continuously devoted to a defense of the blood ban. Publicly attacked for maintaining a harmful and illiberal policy, the Society responds with articles about health and freedom: “Blood - Vital for Life,” “Quality Alternatives to Transfusion,” “Blood: Whose Choice and Whose Conscience?” and “You Have the Right to Choose.”
The Society was learning the law of the Internet: the net is an agent of mainstream American values - freedom, competition, adequate public debate. To state that law in another way: there isn’t much point in creating a website to announce that you know everything and that if other people don’t agree, they can just get lost. When you enter the Web, you get stuck to the rules of dialogue. And that is what happened to the Watchtower Society. Not only did it have to speak of rights instead of “theocratic” orders, but its involvement with the Web authorized its followers to exercise their own right to electronic dialogue.
During the late 1990s, hundreds of loyal websites blossomed, mostly innocuous and controversy-free: personal sites that discussed the happiness of selling Witness literature, offered snapshots of family trips, and made sure to include a link to watchtower.org. Other loyal sites featured chatrooms and bulletin boards, carefully monitored to exclude comments that were not “upbuilding.” Some offered anti-apostate material. One delightful chat-oriented site presented a page called the “Paradise Earth Ban List,” a lake of digital fire reserved for people “who have broken the rules and are banned from #paradise_earth.” Few of the loyal sites seemed to be much encumbered by visitors.
A site that became very active indeed was H2O (Hourglass2 Outpost). Created in late 1996, its International Open Forum served, during the next five years or so - a long time on the Internet - as the primary meeting place for Internet-friendly Witnesses, and a model of the Internet’s negotiations with Truth and Authority. Clicking onto the Forum’s message board, Witnesses were greeted by a babel of electronic voices loud enough to make any postmodern thinker believe that the millennium had indeed arrived. Occasionally, monitors announced that they had removed somebody’s post because it was abusive or non-”upbuilding,” but their anxiety seemed to result principally from a desire to keep both dissenters and loyalists coming to the site. There was no institutional truth in sight, even the truth about who owned the forum. Just as the Watchtower Society replicated the anonymity of the corporation, so H2O replicated the anonymity of the Society.
Whereas Rutherford put his personal stamp on everything, Knorr wouldn’t even sign his own name. All Watchtower literature was now produced anonymously.
That symmetry, or irony, was not much appreciated by loyalists who clicked onto this “Witness” site, only to find their most cherished beliefs under attack by correspondents called “Dred Scott,” “Sceptic’s Soapbox,” “Liberal Elder,” and “Crunchy Frog.” The board was regularly swept by urgent demands to know “who runs this site?” And there was always someone who volunteered to rescue unsuspecting loyalists by letting them know that:
“HOURGLASS 2 IS AN APOSTATE WEBSITE. IF YOU READ BETWEEN THE LINES, VERY CAREFULLY, YOU WILL SEE THAT THE INDIVIDUALS WHO RUN THIS WEBSITE ARE APOSTATE.”
Those warnings were posted just as anonymously as anything else. Few loyalists wanted the Society to know that they frequented a site that was also frequented by apostates.
H2O’s packaging betrayed no apostasy. Its sponsors sometimes posted “Dear brothers & sisters” messages to warn, perhaps with ironic intention, that “H2O is no more inspired or able to protect you from apostates, than is the Watchtower Society.” That did not allay loyalist suspicions that H2O was a front for the Blood Reform group. On the board itself, loyalists accused apostates of setting up websites in order to trace the electronic addresses of loyal correspondents and get them in trouble with the Society. Apostates, in turn, accused the Society of setting up pseudo-apostate sites in order to get the addresses of pseudo-loyalists and disfellowship them. Meanwhile, loyalists accused other loyalists of disloyalty, and a loyalist intellectual attempted to convince everyone that God himself is “the Master of Deception,” cunningly testing his servants with truths that look like lies. Adding to the mix were people who kept coming up with “news” from “inside the org,” news intended either to inspirit Watchtower subversives with prophecies of reform, to dispirit them with false prophecies, or simply to spread the terror of being uncovered: the Society knows who you are! You will soon be disfellowshipped!
Birth of the Social Contract
The Witnesses’ Internet wars might, at first glance, seem like nothing but battles of spy vs. spy, of polarized and mutually parodic ideologues - the “atheists” vs. the “Society men.” Closer inspection showed “a continuous spectrum of opinion” (as one H2O participant put it), the kind of spectrum that appears in any large community of talkers and listeners. H2O and its sibling sites presented Jehovah’s Witnesses with their first opportunity to become that kind of community, and the experiment was well worth watching - not just as a test of the Witnesses’ reactions but also as a test of postmodern ideas.
Contrary to the assumptions and hopes of postmodernists who looked to cyberspace for the long-promised transvaluation of all values, the revolution of the Internet turned out to be the revolution of a type of normalcy. It continually reinstituted the “spontaneous order” that Friedrich Hayek considered the significant achievement of a free society. Even H2O was not just so many anonymous people presenting diverse points of view. It was a social order characterized by a division of labor.
On any board as popular as H2O, the “lurkers” or observers outnumber the active posters. On H2O, the posters were further divided by ideology. But that’s not the only important thing. Regular posters developed specialized roles. Some were demagogues, provocateurs, advocates for the intellectually handicapped, or professional cynics and victims. Others took on the practical job of telling other people how to handle their software and maintain their websites. Still others became historians canvassing the records of the Witness movement for absurd or instructive facts, sociologists analyzing the behavior of Witness subgroups, lawyers providing advice about the complicated procedures of the Watchtower “judicial” system, psychologists picking up the pieces that the lawyers left behind, salesmen promoting some great new notion or some great new link, dramatists, story-tellers, satirists, and comedians turning the Witness experience into works of literary art. Every social role represented someone’s attempt to earn the currency of the Internet - the attention and respect of other people. Together, these roles approximated the patterning of a real community.
The virtual community was almost entirely anonymous, but it’s clear that some of its members were a lot better known to one another than they were to their Witness families and friends. The obsessive privacy of modern communities is often regarded as the enemy of public life. At H2O, however, one could see that privacy creates the margin of safety that individuals need if they are to discover any life at all. The plastic computer case signified both privacy and power.
“[I]n 1995 when I bought my first computer (Mac 8100) I realized what I had been associated with [in the Watchtower]. . . . It was then that a big part of myself was freed. The Internet did indeed save my ’soul.’
It was more than a question of discovering the facts about the Watchtower movement. People on the net discovered talents that they never knew they had, and they got a chance to cultivate them. Many began their involvement as naive lurkers and loyalists, only to be drawn into dialogue and develop a role as thinkers and writers - often, I would add, acute and forceful thinkers, and writers of charm and wit.
The failure of the world to end in 1975 brought back the Society’s custom of treating every falsification of its prophecies as a sign that the Truth itself is advancing.
These charming, intelligent, irritating, not infrequently hostile strangers also discovered a conception of the social contract that is older than Hayekian or even Lockean ideas of the free society. Its locus classicus is the passage in Sophocles’ “Antigone” where Haemon suddenly realizes what is wrong with his authoritarian father: “You want to talk but never to hear and listen.
Tell that to the Watchtower Society. But you can also tell it to patrons of the Internet who threaten other patrons, call them morons and fools, distract them with irrelevant issues, or simply lie about the facts. On H2O, as on any other website, people who kept doing these things suffered the worst civil penalty that an individualist society can inflict: they stopped being taken seriously.
The Internet’s version of the social contract was based on the perceived interests of the participants, not on institutional hegemony or agreement about substantive issues. Was this a vindication of postmodernist ideas about the abandonment of truth and authority?
Resurgence of Truth
Not at all. The sudden, spontaneous evolution of Witness websites was entirely the product of private individuals’ concern with the authority of old-fashioned truth. The dissidents spent their time and energy trying, as they frequently said, “to tell the truth about the Truth.” The loyalists who appeared on disloyal sites had the same idea. They were sufficiently motivated by the pursuit of truth to risk a bad conscience and discipline by their own religious organization for engaging in dialogue with its opponents. People on both sides were trying to live up to the demands of a simple but practical theory, one of the oldest theories in the world: the correspondence theory of truth.
Nearly everyone involved in the Watchtower wars agreed on the simple idea that truth corresponds to ascertainable fact, and falsehood doesn’t. Set aside, for the moment, all the symmetries and ironies, debates and paranoias among the pro-Watchtower and anti-Watchtower forces. The question that drew thousands of people into the arena of electronic debate was not a matter of unrelated perspectives and relativistic principles. It was much more straightforward: Did the Watchtower Society’s ideas about the world, and about itself, correspond to facts?
“Rick,” one of the anonymous people responsible for the H2O board, conceded that issues are usually not “black and white”; still, he suggested, “truth will reveal itself to those who never stop seeking it.” Everyone else seemed to agree. If someone could have convinced the Internet debaters that the search for truth was just an amusing language game or a search for diverse opinions, none of them would have stayed on the board. What drew the virtual community together was the conviction that ideas can be found that make a recognizable match with fact.
This conviction easily transcended all boundaries of class, gender, ethnicity, national culture, and current religious convictions. Prominent among the participants in the great Internet debate were African Americans, Norwegians, Venezuelans, Finns, Australians, militant atheists, born-again Christians, wealthy businessmen, impoverished single moms, physicians, janitors, and the blandest of general Americans. They all took the universal Internet community so much for granted that no one even mentioned multiculturalism or reflected, in the style of the Disney Corporation, that “it’s a small world, after all.” Again, if you’re looking for a vindication of the free society as Americans have traditionally understood it, this is a good place to start. But it’s important to repeat that the net is not just a way of saying things; it’s also a way of doing things. All sides in the Watchtower controversy now seem to accept the fact that the virtual community has a serious impact on the real community. Dramatic evidence began appearing in 1998, with the Bulgarian Blood Battle.
The Watchtower Society had been scuffling with the government of Bulgaria since 1994. The issues were blood transfusions and military service. The government believed that the Witnesses’ blood ban was a threat to public health. The Witnesses believed that the government’s reluctance to exempt them from military service was an infringement of liberty. One thing led to another, and the Watchtower Society haled Bulgaria before the European Commission of Human Rights. Negotiations followed, and in early March, 1998, the legal dispute was amicably settled. Bulgaria agreed to give the Witnesses conscientious objector status, and the Watchtower Society agreed not to impose “any control or sanction” on Witnesses who received blood transfusions. Anyone who read the agreement would conclude that the blood ban was lifted, at least for Bulgarians.
In times past, such a portentous change would never have caused a ripple in the Society’s international organization, because it would never have received any publicity. In the 1960s and 1970s, Witnesses in Mexico were allowed to exempt themselves from military service by purchasing a little card indicating that they had “served,” while Witnesses in Malawi, who knew nothing about events in Mexico, suffered horrible persecution for refusing to buy a little card indicating that they were “members” of the ruling political party.
The Internet broke the Witnesses’ isolation from truth. On April 20, 1998, the obscure Bulgarian agreement was discovered lurking on the website of the European Commission and was reported by a poster on H2O. This seems to have been the first news that the Watchtower world (including almost everyone at Watchtower headquarters) had received of it. The news aroused both hope and suspicion. Was this apostate trickery, or a symptom of Watchtower reform? Electronic research confirmed that the news was authentic: the Society had compromised its stance on blood. In the Witness community, this was one of the biggest events imaginable. “As a witness of 40 years standing,” one H2O poster observed, “I never thought I would see it.”
People on both sides were trying to live up to the demands of a simple but practical theory, one of the oldest theories in the world: the correspondence theory of truth.
But what did it mean? Was the Society hesitantly adapting itself to a new, more open world? Had it conveniently discovered some new truth about blood? Would it admit that its old idea of truth was false? Would it have to admit this, now that everybody who had a computer could see what was happening? Intelligence from Europe and America suggested that the Society was dithering, unprepared to react to the challenge of quick and uncontrolled publicity. But with the Internet watching, even the slowest, heaviest authority can’t take long to dither.
When the Society acted, its objective was not to speak the truth but to quell disorder on the net. On April 27, 1998, it dispatched a press release to a friendly site, NoBlood.com. Its announcement was a masterpiece of obscurantism. It said nothing about the Society’s moral compromise; it merely applauded a victory for “religious freedom.”
This was a desperate gamble. The Society had decided to engage with the Internet’s demand for public dialogue, but only by playing its own private game with words. The strategy was boldly postmodern. It was meant to free the Society from any binding relationship between language and reality, any expectation that it would satisfy the correspondence theory of truth. Of course, that kind of freedom could be achieved only by identifying truth with institutional authority. But this is an ironic reflection on postmodern theories about authority and truth, not on the Society, which has always simply identified the two.
Understanding that principle, operators of loyal websites quickly purged people who came up with annoying questions about the Society’s announcement. Loyalists posting on enemy sites went so far as to argue that the blood ban had never existed in the first place, that individual consciences had always been invited to decide things for themselves - even though, admittedly, a wrong decision might have certain unpleasant institutional consequences. This, indeed, was the Society’s new line: having a blood transfusion is completely up to you - just don’t do it, if you know what’s good for you.
The immediate effect was to inspirit the Watchtower’s opponents. Dissenters, especially the people at H2O, spoke of final judgments and miraculous conversions:
“This has to be the beginning of the end for the WBTS [Watchtower Bible and Tract Society] as we know it. No way in hell will this slip quietly into obscurity.”
“They compromised their faith in Jehovah and failed the test.”
“I’m so [expletive deleted] at myself for being a SUCKER! for so many years. Thanks to the Internet I was able to wake up from my STUPIDITY!!!”
By fall, 1999, the Society realized that it was in serious trouble. It began taking action to soften its image, while hardening its authority. It yielded to one of the most vociferous demands of its Internet opponents: it made four appointments of relatively young men to the Governing Body, one of them the GB’s first African American member. At the same time, it aimed a harsh blow at its Internet intelligentsia. An extraordinarily long and emphatic article in Our Kingdom Ministry, the Watchtower house organ, denounced the Internet, coming down hard on even such seemingly “innocent” phenomena as the electronic sharing of edifying news and chat. Kingdom Ministry made a special target of loyalist sites that had been dispensing increasingly sophisticated defenses of the Society’s doctrines. It insisted on the Society’s exclusive right to market its own teachings, using its own books and its own website.
Websites all over the world went blank - but only temporarily. Even the Watchtower Society could not tell private individuals to unplug their machines. The lasting effect was simply to make the loyalists who remained in action, or who returned to the Web, endure the ridicule of Internet opponents who wondered how they could keep defending the Society’s authority after the Society had authoritatively decreed that they must not take it upon themselves to do so.
While the blood battle continued on the Internet, another problem cropped up - less important, but with its own nasty squint toward the problem of truth: Y2K. The Society had never associated any of its millennial prophecies with the advent of the actual millennium. Nevertheless, a long time had passed since 1914, which was supposed to mark the beginning of this world’s end. Apocalyptic hopes were endemic in local congregations; they attached themselves to the year 2000; they were encouraged and spread by the Internet; and they were frustrated, as all preceding hopes had been.
The Witnesses are stuck in the door-to-door-salesman routines of a pre-electronic world, with no electronic outreach except watchtower.org, which no one will ever find unless he goes to look for it.
The millennium dawned very dismally over the Watchtower Society. Since 1999 it had been spending much of its time (in some issues of its publications, all of its time) exhorting Witnesses to patience and endurance over the long haul. The exhortations were a concession to reality, the new reality that the Internet helped to create. In most countries of the industrialized world, as well as many countries of the third world, membership was slumping badly. Despite gargantuan efforts at proselytization, the number of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 17 heavily Internetted countries, including the United States, actually shrank in 1999. Growth in the world as a whole was a very suboptimal 2%. The pattern continued in 2000, with zero growth or losses in 74 out of 235 countries or territories reporting statistics, declining placements of literature, and an 11% decrease in baptisms. Growth in the United States reached only about one half of one percent.
2002 saw a modest turnaround: the worldwide number of active Witnesses increased by 2.84%. Witness watchers attributed the change, which was especially evident in certain Western nations (e.g., the United States, where the increase was 3%), to anxieties prompted by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The number of baptisms, however, still floated near a 14-year low, while the number of hours that Witnesses spent preaching remained steady. In 1988, almost 3,300 hours of witnessing were required to produce one convert. That was a lot of hours. But by 2002, over 4,500 hours were required (up from about 3,500 in 1999 and about 4,000 in 2000). That means that the average Witness, who logs about 200 hours of preaching a year, will work more than two decades before achieving any quantifiable result.
The problem looks even worse when you consider that many baptisms are those of family members, who are a great deal easier to convert than randomly contacted “householders.” For generations, Watchtower publications have excoriated “Christendom” for its laziness and smugness, but now it appears that the Witnesses’ own zeal is much less effective than that of many evangelical and mainline Christians. No wonder: the Witnesses are stuck in the door-to-door-salesman routines of a pre-electronic world, with no electronic outreach except watchtower.org, which no one will ever find unless he goes to look for it.
Where Are They Going?
In the last year or so, the Watchtower Society has encountered additional threats, and it has tried some new responses, most of them feckless. One of the biggest threats was an infection from the Witnesses’ ancient enemy, the Roman Catholic Church. Russell, like most Protestants of his time, was fervently anti-Catholic, and Rutherford insisted that the Catholic Church was the real leader of the Axis powers. As late as 1960, the Society was inspired by the Kennedy presidential campaign to publish a special issue of its magazine Awake attacking “The Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century”. The Society had always rejoiced in the Church’s embarrassments. Yet the Church’s current sex scandals showed how easy it is to pursue a scandal in any religious group, given the ability of the Internet to organize the forces of disaffection. Watchtower dissidents learned the lesson, organized, and began attracting significant media coverage to their stories of sex abuse and cover-ups among Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Fearful of legal interference in any form, the Society tried various means of appearing to decentralize itself, protectively isolating religious functions in certain corporate bodies and business functions in others. When former Watchtower President Milton Henschel died in March 2003, the Society’s news release said only that he had “filled various administrative capacities.” It was a far cry from the leader-worship of Rutherford’s day, or the corporation-worship of Knorr’s. It was as if the presidency had never existed, or as if Henschel had been an interchangeable part of some electronic device. Once again, the Society was acquiring the characteristics of its surroundings. It was succumbing, at least in style, to the age of the Internet - not, to be sure, to the Internet’s wild, demotic individualism, but to its other characteristic, its capacity for remoteness and anonymity. The digitized world was now inhabited by a digitized Society, with the Governing Body its shadowy webmaster. Dodging attempts at refutation, Witness literature grew grayer and blander, as if its content were computer-generated from some remote source.
The Internet broke the Witnesses’ isolation from truth.
Meanwhile, the Society’s foes continued building their own institutions. H2O remains, and it has been joined by other well-mounted message boards, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses Discussion Forum (jehovahs-witness.com). The conflict between the Internet and the Society is decidedly unequal. The Society’s task is, first, to convince people that it has a comprehensive and fully consistent explanation of reality; then, to organize these people into a force that can support a vast profusion of things: printing plants, assembly halls, local churches, mortgages, investments, legal offices. The task of the Internet dissidents is simply to show that the Society’s ideas aren’t true, and to organize such inexpensive virtual institutions as may be useful in spreading that message. The dissidents have a considerable economic advantage.
Can the Society, or anything like it, have a future in an Internetted world?
Perhaps. There are several options available to it. The most obvious is to do what Raymond Franz tried to get it to do, a quarter-century ago: admit it was wrong. But this, of course, is the least likely option to be taken. Only one modern American institution has ever admitted that it was fundamentally in error - the Worldwide Church of God, an Adventist church that, influenced by the Witnesses, once referred to its members as “in the Truth,” and to everyone else as out of it. During the 1990s, the WCG leadership surveyed its distinctive teachings and announced that they could not be squared with the Bible. The reward for its courage was the loss of 50-60% of its membership. This is an example that the Watchtower Society will be very reluctant to follow.
It is much more likely to choose one of two other options, roughly the same two that confront all other truth-challenged institutions in the modern world.
The first option is for the Society to keep trying to isolate its own version of truth from the checkable truth of the Internet. If it does that, the Watchtower movement will become a living fossil, a fellowship confined to people who, like the Amish, are content to remain in a world that predates the net.
The second option is for the Society to adapt its version of truth, bit by bit, to the fact-gathering capability of the Internet and the free society that the Internet exemplifies.
This second option is almost certainly the one that will be taken. Like other earthly authorities, the Society has a will to live at almost any cost. It will try to live even if the cost is a quiet coming to terms with its own mistakes. The real question is whether the speed of the Internet will give it time for an orderly evolution. We have seen, in Eastern Europe, how quickly glasnost can be followed by oblivion. The crucial factor may be the morale of the leadership, its ability to live with the same truth that normal people live with, while simultaneously acting as if it were still in possession of its higher truth.
Raymond Franz told me the following episode from the life of his uncle, Frederick Franz, the fourth president of the Watchtower Society. In old age, Frederick Franz was taken to an eye doctor, who found that he couldn’t read even the first line on the eye chart. The doctor pronounced him almost totally blind, with no possibility of improvement. “Well,” Franz said, slapping his knees, “as long as I’m here, I might as well get my eyeglass prescription brought up to date!”
That’s morale for you. Does the Society still have enough of it, at a time when morale has so few ways of evading the embarrassments of truth? We’ll find out - because the Internet will tell us.
© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation
http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2003_10/cox-truth.html
So now we know
WHAT THE NEAR FUTURE HOLDS
January 27, 2008 ( Hawaii zone visit) Gerrit Losch
Although we cannot know our individual future, we do know mankind’s immediate future (2 Peter 3:17) (”You, therefore, beloved ones, having this advanced knowledge”).
God keeps us informed and He cannot lie (Titus 1:2). What will occur in the near future?
–There will be an international statement or situation where people will cry out “Peace and Security” (1/15/03 Watchtower). This has not yet occurred. We don’t know if it will be a desire for peace or a belief that peace has been achieved.
–Matthew 24:14 has been fulfilled (every day 3,000,000 hours are spent in the ministry).
–The Great Tribulation has 3 stages:1) Destruction of Babylon the Great, 2) Period of time in between Babylon ’s destruction and Armageddon, and 3) Armageddon.
1) Disgusting thing standing in the holy place (Matthew 24:15, Luke 21:20)
–This occurred in 66 CE under Cestius Gallus when Jerusalem ’s wall was almost undermined. The Roman armies were disgusting because of their idolatrous ensigns. In 70 CE General Titus came to destroy the city.
–Unfaithful Jerusalem pictures unfaithful Christendom. Political nations within the UN will devastate Christendom, but it has not yet begun taking its threatening position against false religion (5/1/99 Watchtower, page 16).
–Terrorists, such as Al-Qaeda, are targeting political nations, not religious organizations.
–Governments will confiscate all religious bank accounts and property. They will probably imprison clergymen and possibly kill them.
–Unless those days were cut short (Matthew 24:22), no flesh will be saved. This referred to the days in 66 CE (not 70 CE). Therefore, the modern application is at the beginning of the Great Tribulation the destruction of Babylon the Great (not Armageddon). Unless those days were shortened, no flesh (true Christians) would be saved.
2) Between 66-70 CE the Jews were divided into factions within Jerusalem . Food ran out and people were prohibited from leaving the city. This occurred “immediately after the tribulation of those days” (Matthew 24:29), referring to the destruction of Babylon the Great.
–The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven. The 2/15/94 Watchtower, page 20, indicates that this will likely be frightening phenomena in the sky more impressive than what was observed in Jerusalem .
–Josephus recorded that a comet appeared in Jerusalem in the first century and remained for 1 year (very unusual)..
–Matthew 24:30 and Luke 21: 25, 26 indicates that men will beat themselves in lamentation and become faint out of fear. This happens during the Great Tribulation. Don’t apply Luke 21:26 about men being “faint out of fear” to today.
–Luke 21:25 mentions “the anguish of nations, not knowing the way out because of the roaring of the sea and its agitation”. Brother Loesch said this could also have a literal fulfillment (e.g. tsunamis).
–Luke 21: 27 describes mankind as seeing “the Son of man coming in a cloud”. This sign is in heaven (not on the earth). Therefore it is not the sign of Jesus’ presence, which has many facets here on earth today. Rather, everyone will recognize that what they are seeing is supernatural.
–Matthew 24:34 “this generation will be no means pass away until all these things occur”. The anointed Christians still living will see the fulfillment of all the things foretold regarding the Great Tribulation, including Jesus’ execution. However we do not know if they will survive Armageddon and enter the New World .
–There will be a final attack on God’s people by the King of the North before Armageddon. We still cannot identify the King of the North and should not speculate (Daniel book page 281). We may not know until the attack on true Christians actually begins. This attack will probably parallel Gog’s attack described at Ezekiel 38.
3) At Armageddon, everyone will recognize that it is divine judgment (Revelation 1:7″every eye will see him”).
–Zechariah 14:12 “There will be a rotting away of one’s flesh, while one is standing upon one’s feet; and one’s very eyes will rot away in their sockets, and one’s very tongue will rot away in one’s mouth”. Jehovah may use radiation to destroy the wicked. (Yes, Brother Losch actually said “radiation”).
–The final separation of the sheep and goats will take place at this time.
We must be prepared. At an hour thatwe do not think it to be, the Son of man is coming (Matthew 24:44).
Matthew 24:17 “Let the man on the housetop not come down to take the goods out of his house”. How could he flee without coming down from the roof? He would take the outside stairs or ladder, not bothering to go down through the house.
–We must be willing to leave everything behind! The first century Christians had to run it meant the loss of absolutely everything. But their flesh or lives were saved.
–We will lose our homes, businesses, etc. We may be tested by how we view material things.
–The Christians in the first century fled to the mountains. Jehovah’s mountain-like organization will offer protection (God’s Kingdom could also be the mountain that we flee to).
Some doubt the nearness of the end because there are still so many to reach:
There are 1.3 billion people in China (although we are preaching there)
1.0 billion in India where 80% have never been witnessed to
1.0 billion Muslims (although we are legal in the largest Muslim country, Indonesia , which has a population of 50 million more people than Russia )
But Jesus said that we would by no means complete the circuit of cities (Matthew 10:23).He said this after explaining what they should do when people persecute them. We don’t know if Jehovah will open up other territories. He could do so in a way we never imagined. Regardless, we know that each life is precious to Him and we should work hard to preach to everyone.
The end is near. Revelation 17:11 described the UN as the eighth and final king. It has already lasted 3 times longer than it did before going into the abyss (as the League of Nations ).
After Armageddon there will be a lot of work to do. Anyone who thinks the Thousand Years will be a long vacation is mistaken. We will have to cleanse the earth (Bible describes people traveling the earth to bury the dead) and prepare for the resurrection.
New estimate is a resurrection of 30 billion people. Can you imagine 30 billion people reappearing on one day? No, it’s not reasonable. We can assume that there will be a gradual resurrection (Insight book estimates 200-300 years), one generation at a time. This will make it possible to communicate with the previous generation.
We will need to provide food and lodging for the newly resurrected ones. There may be special houses where the resurrections occur (those who died at sea won’t be swimming to shore). We don’t know if the dead will return with clothing or not, but we do know that they will be completely restored physically (no missing limbs, etc.). We can look forward to growing back hair, teeth, etc. Some animals already manifest such abilities (giant squid can grow back new arms and Amazonian fish grow new teeth over and over).
Do we really believe the end is near? Our decisions show what we truly believe. Don’t seek great things for yourself (Jeremiah 45: 4, 5). This system is passing away. Rather seek first the kingdom. Jehovah has promised to preserve our souls as spoil and has offered us the opportunity to live as long as He does. What a privilege!
(There were 7,204 that attended this special talk at a rented convention center in Honolulu and 3,262 that were tied in at 21 other locations on the Hawaiian islands.)
Private Aircraft?
ANC95LA077
On June 12, 1995, at 1530 Alaska daylight time, a wheel equipped Cessna 402B airplane, N710WS, registered to and operated by the Watchtower Bible Organization and Tract Society, collapsed its nose gear while taxiing back after landing. The business flight, operating under 14 CFR Part 91, departed Good News, Alaska, and the destination was Tuntutuliak, Alaska. No flight plan was filed and visual meteorological conditions prevailed. The airline transport certificated pilot and the three passengers were not injured and the airplane was substantially damaged.
According to the Director of the Watchtower Bible Organization, who was also a passenger on the airplane, they were taxiing back to the ramp after landing. The runway had just been graded and a small depression in the runway’s surface was filled with soft material. The airplane’s nose gear rolled into the depression and the nose gear collapsed.
The Director of the Watchtower Bible Organization stated that the soft area on the runway had been marked with yellow cones. He stated that the runway maintenance person told them the cones were removed so the runway surface could be graded. The cones had not been replaced.
There were no NOTAMS (Notice to Airmen) issued. The Alaska Supplement, however, states that runway conditions are not monitored and that a visual inspection is recommended. The supplement states that there are dips and ruts to 4 inches deep.
NTSB Identification: ANC95LA077 .
The docket is stored in the Docket Management System (DMS). Please contact Records Management Division
14 CFR Part 91: General Aviation
Accident occurred Monday, June 12, 1995 in TUNTUTULIAK, AK
Probable Cause Approval Date: 1/29/1996
Aircraft: CESSNA 402B, registration: N710WS
Injuries: 4 Uninjured.THE RUNWAY SURFACE HAD BEEN GRADED, AND SOFT GRADED MATERIAL HAD BEEN PUSHED INTO A SMALL DEPRESSION ADJACENT TO THE RUNWAY. THE AIRPLANE WAS TAXIING BACK TO THE RAMP, WHEN THE NOSE WHEEL ROLLED INTO THE DEPRESSION AND THE NOSE GEAR COLLAPSED. THE SOFT AREA/DEPRESSION HAD BEEN PREVIOUSLY MARKED WITH YELLOW CONES. THE CONES HAD BEEN REMOVED WHILE THE RUNWAY WAS BEING GRADED AND HAD NOT BEEN REPLACED. NO NOTAMS HAD BEEN ISSUED. THE ALASKA SUPPLEMENT STATED THAT THE RUNWAY WAS SOFT AND RUNWAY CONDITIONS WERE NOT MONITORED.
The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows:
THE AIRPORT MAINTENANCE PERSONNEL’S INADEQUATE MAINTENANCE OF THE RUNWAY BY NOT REPLACING THE YELLOW CONES THAT MARKED THE SOFT AREA. THE SOFT AREA ON THE RUNWAY WAS A RELATED FACTOR.
Excerpted from Crisis of Conscience, Chapter 1, published by Commentary Press.
Whether we like it or not, moral challenge affects each of us. It is one of life’s bittersweet ingredients from which there is no successful escape. It has the power to enrich us or impoverish us, to determine the true quality of our relationships with those who know us. It all depends on our response to that challenge. The choice is ours-it is seldom an easy one.
We have the option, of course, of surrounding our conscience with a sort of cocoon of complacency, passively “going along,” shielding our inner feelings from whatever might disturb them. When issues arise, rather than take a stand we can in effect say, “I’ll just sit this one out; others may be affected-even hurt-but I am not.” Some spend their whole life in a morally ‘sitting’ posture. But, when all is said and done, and when life finally draws near its close, it would seem that the one who can say, “At least I stood for something,” must feel greater satisfaction than the one who rarely stood for anything.
Sometimes we may wonder if people of deep conviction have become a vanishing race, something we read about in the past but see little of in the present. Most of us find it fairly easy to act in good conscience so long as the things at stake are minor. The more that is involved, the higher the cost, the harder it becomes to resolve questions of conscience, to make a moral judgment and accept its consequences. When the cost is very great we find ourselves at a moral crossroads situation, facing a genuine crisis in our lives.
This book is about that kind of crisis, the way people are facing up to it and the effect on their lives.
Admittedly, the story of the persons involved may have little of the high drama found in the heresy trial of a John Wycliffe, the intrigue of the international hunt for an elusive William Tyndale, or the horror of the burning at the stake of a Michael Servetus. But their struggle and suffering are, in their own way, no less intense. Few of them could say it as eloquently as Luther, yet they take very much the same stand he took when he said to the seventy men judging him:
Unless I am convinced by the testimonies of the Scriptures or by evident reason (for I believe neither pope nor councils alone, since it is manifest they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is held captive by the word of God; and as it is neither safe nor right to act against conscience, I cannot and will not retract anything. Here I stand; I cannot otherwise; God help me. Amen.1
Long before any of these men, the apostles Peter and John of nineteen centuries ago confronted essentially the same issue when they stood before a judicial council of the most respected members of their lifelong religion and frankly told them:
Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.2
The people I write of are from among those I know most intimately, persons who have been members of the religious group known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. I am sure, and there is evidence to show, that their experience is by no means unique, that there is a similar stirring of conscience among people of various faiths. They face the same issue that Peter and John and men and women of later centuries confronted: the struggle to hold true to personal conscience in the face of pressure from religious authority.
For many it is an emotional tug-of-war. On the one hand, they feel impelled to reject the interposing of human authority between themselves and their Creator; to reject religious dogmatism, legalism and authoritarianism, to hold true to the teaching that Christ Jesus, not any human religious body, is “the head of every man.”3 On the other hand, they face the risk of losing lifelong friends, seeing family relationships traumatically affected, sacrificing a religious heritage that may reach back for generations. At that kind of crossroads, decisions do not come easy.
What is here described, then, is not merely a “tempest in a teapot,” a major quarrel in a minor religion. I believe there is much of vital benefit that any person can gain from considering this account. For if the numbers presently involved are small, the issues are not. They are far-reaching questions that have brought men and women into similar crises of conscience again and again throughout history.
At stake is the freedom to pursue spiritual truth untrammeled by arbitrary restrictions and the right to enjoy a personal relationship with God and his Son free from the subtle interposition of a priestly nature on the part of some human agency. While much of what is written may on the surface appear to be distinctive of the organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in reality the underlying, fundamental issues affect the life of persons of any faith that takes the name Christian.
The price of firmly believing that it is “neither safe nor right to act against conscience” has not been small for the men and women I know. Some find themselves suddenly severed from family relationships as a result of official religious action-cut off from parents, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, even from grandparents or grandchildren. They can no longer enjoy free association with longtime friends for whom they feel deep affection; such association would place those friends in jeopardy of the same official action. They witness the blackening of their own good name-one that it has taken them a lifetime to earn-and all that such name has stood for in the minds and hearts of those who knew them. They are thereby deprived of whatever good and rightful influence they might exercise on behalf of the very people they have known best in their community, in their country, in all the world. Material losses, even physical mistreatment and abuse, can be easier to face than this.
What could move a person to risk such a loss? How many persons today would? There are, of course (as there have always been), people who would risk any or all of these things because of stubborn pride, or to satisfy the desire for material gain, for power, prestige, prominence, or simply for fleshly pleasure. But when the evidence reveals nothing indicating such aims, when in fact it shows that the men and women involved recognized that just the opposite of those goals was what they could expect-what then?
What has happened among Jehovah’s Witnesses provides an unusual and thought-provoking study in human nature. Besides those who were willing to face excommunication for the sake of conscience, what of the larger number, those who felt obliged to share in or support such excommunications, to allow the family circle to be broken, to terminate long-standing friendships? There is no question about the sincerity of many of these persons, or that they felt and still feel distress from carrying out what they deemed a necessary religious duty. What convictions and reasonings motivated them?
Notably, as regards the cases here dealt with, many if not most of those involved are persons who have been associated with Jehovah’s Witnesses for twenty, thirty, forty or more years. Rather than a “fringe element” they have more frequently been among the more active, productive members of the organization.
They include persons who were prominent members of the Witnesses’ international headquarters staff at Brooklyn, New York; men who were traveling superintendents and elders; women who spent long years in missionary and evangelistic work. When they first became Witnesses, they had often cut off all previous friendships with persons of other faiths, since such “outside” associations are discouraged among Jehovah’s Witnesses. For the rest of their life their only friends have been among those of their religious community. Some had built their whole life plans around the goals set before them by the organization, letting these control the amount of education they sought, the type of work they did, their decisions as to marriage, and whether they had children or remained childless. Their “investment” was a large one, involving some of life’s most precious assets. And now they have seen all this disappear, wiped out in a matter of a few hours.
This is, I believe, one of the strange features of our time, that some of the most stringent measures to restrain expressions of personal conscience have come from religious groups once noted for the defense of freedom of conscience.
The examples of three men-each a religious instructor of note in his particular religion, with each situation coming to a culmination in the same year-illustrate this:
One, for more than a decade, wrote books and regularly gave lectures presenting views that struck at the very heart of the authority structure of his religion.
Another gave a talk before an audience of more than a thousand persons in which he took issue with his religious organization’s teachings about a key date and its significance in fulfillment of Bible prophecy.
The third made no such public pronouncements. His only expressions of difference of viewpoint were confined to personal conversations with close friends.
Yet the strictness of the official action taken toward each of these men by their respective religious organizations was in inverse proportion to the seriousness of their actions. And the source of the greatest severity was the opposite of what one might expect.
The first person described is Roman Catholic priest Hans Küng, professor at Tübingen University in West Germany. After ten years, his outspoken criticism, including his rejection of the doctrinal infallibility of the Pope and councils of bishops, was finally dealt with by the Vatican itself and, as of 1980, the Vatican removed his official status as a Catholic theologian. Yet he remains a priest and a leading figure in the university’s ecumenical research institute. Even students for the priesthood attending his lectures are not subject to church discipline.4
The second is Australian-born Seventh Day Adventist professor Desmond Ford. His speech to a layman’s group of a thousand persons at a California college, in which he took issue with the Adventist teaching about the date 1844, led to a church hearing. Ford was granted six months leave of absence to prepare his defense and, in 1980, was then met with by a hundred church representatives who spent some fifty hours hearing his testimony. Church officials then decided to remove him from his teaching post and strip him of his ministerial status. But he was not disfellowshiped (excommunicated) though he has published his views and continues to speak about them in Adventist circles.5
The third man is Edward Dunlap, who was for many years the Registrar of the sole missionary school of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead, also a major contributor to the organization’s Bible dictionary (Aid to Bible Understanding [now titled Insight on the Scriptures]) and the writer of its only Bible commentary (Commentary on the Letter of James). He expressed his difference of viewpoint on certain teachings only in private conversation with friends of long standing. In the spring of 1980, a committee of five men, none of them members of the organization’s Governing Body, met with him in secret session for a few hours, interrogating him on his views. After over forty years of association, Dunlap was dismissed from his work and his home at the international headquarters and disfellowshiped from the organization.
Thus, the religious organization that, for many, has long been a symbol of extreme authoritarianism showed the greatest degree of tolerance toward its dissident instructor; the organization that has taken particular pride in its fight for freedom of conscience showed the least.
Herein lies a paradox. Despite their intense activity in door-to-door witnessing, most people actually know little about Jehovah’s Witnesses aside from their position on certain issues of conscience. They have heard of their uncompromising stand in refusing to accept blood transfusions, their refusal to salute any flag or similar emblem, their firm objection to performance of military service, their opposition to participation in any political activity or function. Those familiar with legal cases know that they have taken some fifty cases to the Supreme Court of the United States in defense of their freedom of conscience, including their right to carry their message to people of other beliefs even in the face of considerable opposition and objections. In lands where constitutional liberties protect them, they are free to exercise such rights without hindrance. In other countries they have experienced severe persecution, arrests, jailing, mobbings, beatings, and official bans prohibiting their literature and preaching.
How, then, is it the case that today any person among their members who voices a personal difference of viewpoint as to the teachings of the organization is almost certain to face judicial proceedings and, unless willing to retract, is liable for disfellowshipment? How do those carrying out those proceedings rationalize the apparent contradiction in position? Paralleling this is the question of whether endurance of severe persecution and physical mistreatment at the hand of opposers is, of itself, necessarily evidence of belief in the vital importance of staying true to conscience, or whether it can simply be the result of concern to adhere to an organization’s teachings and standards, violation of which is known to bring severe disciplinary action.
Some may say that the issue is really not as simple as it is here presented, that there are other crucial matters involved. What of the need for religious unity and order? What of the need for protection against those who spread false, divisive and pernicious teachings? What of the need for proper respect for authority?
To ignore those factors would admittedly show an extreme, blindly unbalanced, attitude. Who can challenge the fact that freedom, misused, can lead to irresponsibility, disorder, and can end in confusion, even anarchy? Patience and tolerance likewise can become nothing more than an excuse for indecision, nonaction, a lowering of all standards. Even love can become mere sentimentality, misguided emotion that neglects to do what is really needed, with cruel consequences. All this is true and is what those focus on who would impose restraints on personal conscience through religious authority.
What, however, is the effect when spiritual “guidance” becomes mental domination, even spiritual tyranny? What happens when the desirable qualities of unity and order are substituted for by demands for institutionalized conformity and by legalistic regimentation? What results when proper respect for authority is converted into servility, unquestioning submission, an abandonment of personal responsibility before God to make decisions based on individual conscience?
Those questions must be considered if the issue is not to be distorted and misrepresented. What follows in this book illustrates in a very graphic way the effect these things have on human relationships, the unusual positions and actions persons will take who see only one side of the issue, the extremes to which they will go to uphold that side. The organizational character and spirit manifest in the 1980s, continued essentially unchanged in the 1990s, and remains the same in this year 2002.
Perhaps the greatest value in seeing this is, I feel, that it can help us discern more clearly what the fundamental issues were in the days of Jesus Christ and his apostles, and understand why and how a tragic deviation from their teachings and example came, so subtly, with such relative ease, in so brief a span of time. Those who are of other religious affiliations and who may be quick to judge Jehovah’s Witnesses would do well to ask first about themselves and about their own religious affiliation in the light of the issues involved, the basic attitudes that underlie the positions described and the actions taken.
To search out the answers to the questions raised requires going beyond the individuals affected into the inner structure of a distinctive religious organization, into its system of teaching and control, discovering how the men who direct it arrive at their decisions and policies, and to some extent investigating its past history and origins. Hopefully the lessons learned can aid in uncovering the root causes of religious turmoil and point to what is needed if persons trying to be genuine followers of God’s Son are to enjoy peace and brotherly unity.
What if….
What if most of what you have been taught about the Bible is wrong? Could it be true that in many cases you have been taught to believe exactly the opposite of what the Bible really teaches? Asked another way, how do you know that what you have been taught is the truth? Could you pick up a Bible and defend your beliefs? How do you know that you have not been deceived?
These are serious questions that every Christian should ask themselves, but unfortunately ones that most need to seem afraid to. Those who are members of evangelical churches have been taught to accept that their beliefs represent the final word in what is ‘orthodox’, and many it seems are afraid to step outside that realm for fear of be branded as a ‘cultist’ or a ‘heretic’. This is indeed troubling when you consider that the average Christian today could not begin to explain the Biblical or historical origins of the doctrines which they affirm as true. We have been taught to accept the truth of certain doctrines based only the fact that they are widely accepted, or have always been preached as ‘the faith once delivered to the saints’.
Does evangelical theology really represent ‘the faith once delivered to the saints’? Do the doctrines which are so prominently set forth today really stand on a firm Biblical foundation?
ONCE DELIVERED WHEN
There is woeful lack of Bible study among those today who profess to be Christians. Much of what many call ‘Bible Study’ is nothing more than ‘devotionals’ which contain little or no doctrinal depth, or study of what others have written about the Bible instead of Bible study itself. Even in such cases, most of what is written today by evangelical Christian authors is simply a rehash of what others have written in the past.
For example, the recent popularity of the ‘Left Behind’ series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins is little more than the works of John Nelson Darby, C. I. Scofield, and Clarence Larkin rehashed and taken to the point of sensationalism in order to appeal to and attract a 21st century audience. In their time (the late 19th century) these men were serious students of the Bible, and even though I may not ultimately agree with their conclusions, I do not at all doubt their sincerity, love for God’s Word, and earnest desire to find the truth. However, what many fail to realize is that the doctrines these men propounded (the secret rapture of the Church followed by a seven year period of tribulation in which a personal antichrist will reign over the earth) were revolutionary at their time. In fact, the teaching of the secret rapture was almost unknown up until their time and was met with the utmost skepticism to say the least. To assert that a doctrine such as the ’secret rapture ‘ of the church has always been held by true believers is simply untrue.
Up until the late 19th century, it was also generally accepted among Protestants that the Papacy as a system fulfilled the role of the antichrist. While the works of Darby, Scofield, and Larkin ultimately served to make the concept of the Antichrist as a single future individual popular among evangelicals, many today remain ignorant of the fact that this concept was at first met with loud protest. In fact those who had taken the time to study the subject realized that this ‘new’ teaching was not new at all but had first been set forth in 1558 by a Catholic Jesuit Priest named Ribera as part of the Roman Catholic ‘counter reformation’ in an attempt to ‘take the heat off’ the Papacy.
The issue here is not whether Darby, Scofield and Larkin were correct in their conclusions. The issue is that most Christians today accept these evangelical teachings as divinely sanctioned doctrinal fact without even the most cursory investigation. However this example serves only to indicate a much greater problem, namely that most if not all present-day evangelical teaching is accepted by the overwhelming majority of Christians without even rudimentary study.
As my own personal study of the Bible continued, and as my personal investigation led me further and further away from those doctrines which I had been taught to accept, it did occur to me that others would surely accuse me of having apostatized or abandoned the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’. Even today this seems to concern others with whom I have shared my beliefs. However, the more I studied, the more I could not help but be struck by the fact that the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’ when applied to modern-day evangelicalism is nothing more than a tragic fallacy.
The large wealthy denominations of today may hold positions of esteem; they may be popular and exert great influence, but they clearly do NOT represent the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’. This prideful smug, arrogant attitude that consigns anyone who dares question the teaching of modern evangelical theology to the category of ‘apostate’ completely ignores the fact that this world endured 1000 years where Christian thought and freedom were suppressed to near non-existence by the most cruel methods imaginable. The ‘faith once delivered to the saints’ was forced underground during these ‘dark ages’ and the records of those minute groups who did dare question the Roman Catholic authority during that time, as well as what they believed, are scant to say the least.
Almost all major denominations today have their roots in the protestant reformation that began in approximately 1500 AD. This of course is 1450 years too late to have anything to do with the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’. With the invention of the printing press in 1456 Bibles steadily began to become more available to the common man. As a result of the proliferation of Bibles and a renewed zeal for study, the reformation was born.
But consider for a moment that the very fact and necessity of the reformation necessarily implies that something had gone very wrong in ‘Christendom’. The reformation was supposed to be an attempt to recover the truth that had been lost and buried by centuries of tradition, greed and church abuses. The ‘faith once delivered to the saints’, if it was to be located at all, would only be found through careful and lengthy study of God’s Word, and by the prayers of those who yearned to know the truth at any cost. Clearly though, the truth was in need of a recovery as it did not come through the dark ages completely intact.
However, the greatest problem with the reformation was that it became just that; a reformation of an apostate system that had absolutely nothing to do with the true church and teaching of Jesus Christ to begin with. What was needed was not a re-formation of an apostate system, what was needed was a recovery of the truth! The fact that these same protestant groups which evolved from this ‘re-formation’ today claim to be the true Church of Jesus Christ means nothing whatsoever. Did they at one time represent sincere efforts to recover what had been lost during the dark ages? Yes. Does that mean that they today hold the truth and that anyone who disagrees with them is ‘apostate’? Absolutely NOT! Modern evangelicals may like to pretend that they represent the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’; they may spew their venom and pronounce anathemas on those who dare to disagree with them, but none of that makes what they teach the truth anymore than any other group or individual which has sought to recover the truth following the dark ages.
There are those today who will assert that their particular denomination has a clear unbroken chain of believers all the way back to the times of the apostles. While I certainly believe that there has always been a scattered remnant of true believers on this earth, even during the dark ages, it is rather naive to assume that these small groups of believers believed exactly as the large evangelical denominations today. Baptists in particular like to point out that they were not part of the reformation, but always existed as Baptists even back to the time of the apostles, howbeit under different names; Bogomils, Paulecians, Nazerenes, Waldensens, etc. While I do not doubt that these groups represented many of the true scattered believers down through the ages, I do not agree with the evangelical literature which tries to give the impression that these groups believed exactly those same doctrines which are so widely accepted today. Such reasoning is simply dishonest.
The period following the reformation, fed by the distribution of Bibles, spawned hundreds if not thousands of movements each searching to reclaim the truth. The powerful evangelical denominations of today stand among them, not above them. Nor do they stand above you or I.
We as believers must stand for truth. Many evangelical Christians today are afraid to think differently for fear that they will be branded a heretic. But you cannot abandon the truth unless you first know the truth. You cannot betray convictions unless you first have convictions, and you cannot forsake the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’ unless you have that faith to begin with. Faith in a belief system means nothing, and a belief system means nothing unless it is born of serious personal study, and a deep and sincere relationship with God.
DOCTRINAL HYPOCRISY
The battle cry among evangelicals is their supposed stand for the verbal inspiration of the scriptures and their conviction that all beliefs must be based solely on them and not man-made tradition. This of course is a premise in which I stand in perfect agreement. If the truth is to be known at all, it is to be known only by divine revelation, of which the scriptures are the only current source extant. But does evangelical theology really represent sound Biblical teaching?
Evangelical apologists couch their arguments in language that leads one to believe that their beliefs alone stand on a firm scriptural foundation, while all other groups, which they consign to the category of ‘cult’ or ‘sect’, supposedly arrive at their belief systems only through human ingenuity or a ‘twisting’ of the scriptures. While this type of language may impress those who are looking for security and for a voice of authority to tell them that what they believe is the truth, thoughtful unprejudiced investigation tells an altogether different story. When the evangelical doctrines of today are examined, it can be shown rather easily that in every way in which they accuse others of ‘twisting the scriptures’, they themselves are equally as guilty, and in many cases, more so.
Take for example the doctrine of the ‘trinity’, which is considered to be the central doctrine of the ‘Christian Faith’. This doctrine more than any is used as a spiritual litmus test in determining which groups can be considered ‘evangelical’ and which are ‘cults’. Not only is there no clear statement of this doctrine in scripture, but there was no formal affirmation of this doctrine until the council of Nicaea in 325 AD. Even then it was only accepted through much controversy and protest. Because the language of the Nicene creed has much more in common with Greek philosophy than anything in the New Testament, it is absolutely naïve to think that anyone who knew nothing of Christianity, if given only the New Testament to read and study, would formulate this doctrine by himself or herself. Yet to deny this doctrine in evangelical or fundamental circles means to brand one’s self a cultist!
The Encyclopedia Britannica states:
Neither the word Trinity nor the explicit doctrine appears in the New Testament, nor did Jesus and his followers intend to contradict the Shema in the Old Testament: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:4)…
The doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through many controversies. Initially, both the requirements of monotheism inherited from the Old Testament and the implications of the need to interpret the biblical teaching to Greco-Roman religions seemed to demand that the divine in Christ as the Word, or Logos, be interpreted as subordinate to the Supreme Being. An alternative solution was to interpret Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three modes of the self-disclosure of the one God but not as distinct within the being of God itself. The first tendency recognized the distinctness among the three, but at the cost of their equality and hence of their unity (subordinationism); the second came to terms with their unity, but at the cost of their distinctness as “persons” (modalism). It was not until the 4th century that the distinctness of the three and their unity were brought together in a single orthodox doctrine of one essence and three persons.
The Council of Nicaea in 325 stated the crucial formula for that doctrine in its confession that the Son is “of the same substance [homoousios] as the Father,” even though it said very little about the Holy Spirit. Over the next half century, Athanasius defended and refined the Nicene formula, and, by the end of the 4th century, under the leadership of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus (the Cappadocian Fathers), the doctrine of the Trinity took substantially the form it has maintained ever since.
It seems to me the height of absurdity to claim that this doctrine which only arose over many centuries and through much controversy should be used as the ultimate test of what is ‘orthodox’ and what is not. But this is precisely what is done in evangelical circles today. However, should any non-evangelical group advance a doctrine for which no explicit statement exists in scripture, they would be immediately denounced as a dangerous cult. Why most people in evangelical circles seem unconcerned about such blatant hypocrisy is a mystery indeed.
In many other cases, the clearest statements of scripture are explained away when they clash with an accepted evangelical doctrine. Many times these glaring contradictions are brushed off in ways that, to thinking people. border on the ridiculous. Take for example the following verse:
For David is not ascended into the heavens: but he saith himself, The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thy foes thy footstool. Acts 2:34-35
Our evangelical leaders assure us with the utmost confidence that this statement cannot be taken at face value, and that these words do not at all mean what they so clearly seem to teach. In fact, we are instructed to believe just the opposite; that David is in fact in heaven despite the most emphatic statement that he is not! Evangelicals must resort to their own ingenuity to explain away this clear Biblical statement, even though this is precisely what they accuse the ‘cults’ of doing. Quite often it seems that evangelicals are the ONLY ones who seem to buy some of these explanations.
The explanation given here is, of course, that David himself ascended into heaven, but that his body is not there yet. But who would ever deduce such a thing from the text itself unless you approached it first with the pre-conceived idea that David MUST be in heaven because nineteen centuries of ‘Christian theology’ say he is!
Yet another example of this same type of reasoning can be found in the following verses:
For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten Eccl 9:5
The dead praise not the LORD, neither any that go down into silence. Ps 115:17
Again, neither of the above verses is in any way ambiguous, yet we are informed that they do not mean what they explicitly say! Quite to the contrary we are told that the dead are really more alive than ever, and that the faithful dead now praise God day and night in heaven. Consequently these verses must be ‘explained away’. We are informed once again that these verses refer only to dead bodies, although such an explanation reduces these verses to obvious meaninglessness. But, should non-evangelicals resort to such tactics in order to ‘explain away’ such explicit passages of scripture they would immediately be accused of twisting the scriptures to suit their own interpretations.
Yet another example will serve to show that many times the evangelical criticisms of ‘cult teachings’ are simply not valid at all. Consider the following verse as it stands in the King James Bible:
And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss. And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise. Luke 23:39-43
Many students of the Bible have pointed out that they do not agree with the punctuation of the last verse and that it should instead be read as:
Verily I say unto thee this day, thou shalt be with me in paradise.
Evangelical leaders and apologists howl in protest that those who read this verse in such a way have ‘changed the Bible’ or ‘twisted the scriptures’ to teach what they do not say. But is this criticism even valid?
Anyone who is familiar with the Greek language in which the New Testament was originally written knows that punctuation did not exist in the original text. Therefore, those who would read this verse in a different way by changing the punctuation have certainly NOT ‘changed the Bible’ or twisted anything at all! In fact, because the punctuation was not part of the original inspired text, it would be just as easy to say that it is the evangelicals that are twisting the verse to suit their needs!
Evangelicals will sometimes point out that there is ‘not one eminent recognized scholar who believes that the punctuation of Luke 23:43, as it stands in the King James text, is in error’. But once again, this argument means absolutely nothing. Actually there is no shortage of scholars who believe that the comma in Luke 23:43 is in the wrong place (Rotherham, Bullinger, etc.). What the Evangelicals really mean, is that they do not accept any scholar who happens to disagree with them!
I remember listening to one popular syndicated radio broadcast where the speaker pointed out how a certain ‘cult’ had ‘changed the Bible’ by moving the comma at Luke 23:43. This man was of significant learning and reputation and almost certainly knew that he was not telling his listeners the whole truth. You cannot ‘change the Bible’ by moving punctuation, because there was no punctuation in the original text. This speaker was clearly counting on the ignorance of his audience in order to prove his point. Is this honest? Isn’t this exactly what this man was accusing the ‘cults’ of doing?
In still more instances Evangelicals will freely quote their own erroneous interpretations of the Bible as if they were actually quoting from the Bible itself. A few of examples of this are:
“Jesus talked about hell more than heaven”
“Jesus said that hell is a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth”
“Paul said ‘To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord’”
“The Bible says that hell is a lake of fire”
“The rapture precedes the seven year tribulation”
None of the above phrases is correct from a truly Biblical perspective although most evangelicals will swear that they are. All of these statements are derived from certain pre-conceived ideas and assumptions which evangelical theology brings to the Biblical text. But nowhere does the Bible explicitly teach any of these. This betrays a lack of serious Bible study, but once again, isn’t this precisely what they accuse the ‘cults’ of?
So we see from the examples above; the doctrine of the trinity which one must profess to be considered orthodox, clear verses concerning