Modern Worldviews and the Deity of Christ
Part 4: The Finite Theism of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Uncreated Deity of Christ
By Robert M. Bowman Jr.
[The first three installments of this series are available at Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]
Unlike the other worldviews considered in this series so far, Jehovah’s Witnesses profess to base their beliefs entirely on the Bible, which they affirm is the only written word of God and fully true in all its teachings. Yet their actual beliefs are quite different from those of traditional Christianity.
The founder of the religion, Charles Taze Russell, had become skeptical of the Bible as a teenager until he encountered groups of people (which included Adventists not part of the Seventh-day Adventist Church) who professed belief in the Bible while rejecting doctrines they considered unreasonable. These doctrines included eternal punishment for the wicked (also rejected by the Seventh-day Adventists), the Trinity, and the incarnation. Thus from its beginning the religion, known originally as the Bible Students, reinterpreted the Bible to accord with what they considered reasonable.
In 1879 Russell launched a magazine called Zion’s Watch Tower and Herald of Christ’s Presence, and in 1881 he organized Zion’s Watch Tower Society in Pittsburgh, the precursor to the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the corporation that publishes the religion’s literature. In 1931 Russell’s successor Joseph F. Rutherford changed the name of the religion from Bible Students (a name being used by some groups that rejected his leadership) to Jehovah’s Witnesses.
As the name suggests, Jehovah’s Witnesses place great emphasis on the name Jehovah, an Anglicized form of the Hebrew name for God, YHWH (usually understood by scholars to be pronounced Yahweh). They claim that the New Testament originally used this name and that apostate Christian scribes replaced it, usually with the Greek word kyrios (“Lord”), during the second century. In support of this position, the Watchtower published its own English version of the Bible called the New World Translation (NWT), which “restores” the name in the New Testament by replacing “Lord” (and in a few places “God”) 237 times with the name “Jehovah.”
In Watchtower theology, Jehovah God is a singular individual, the Father alone. He has a “spirit body,” albeit not one that literally looks human, and he is located along with the angels (who also have spirit bodies) in the “spiritual heavens,” an actual place outside or beyond the physical heavens. Thus, Jehovah is not omnipresent. Nor is Jehovah omniscient in the sense of knowing all things. He has exhaustive knowledge of the past and the present, but he does not know everything about the future but only what he chooses to foresee.
Jehovah’s Witnesses consider the doctrine of the Trinity to be an apostate doctrine of pagan origin. They believe that Jehovah the Father created a great angelic spirit, Michael the archangel, as “a god” and empowered him to make the rest of creation. When the time came, God transferred the “life-force” of Michael into the womb of Mary to create the man Jesus. During his earthly years, Jesus was just a human being, not a god or an angel in the flesh. After Jesus died, Jehovah “raised” him from the dead, not by bringing his human life back from the dead, but by recreating him as an angelic spirit again. (They speculate that his dead body was dissolved into gases.) In this third phase, he is known both as Michael and as Jesus Christ. The “holy spirit” (not capitalized) is not a divine person but is God’s invisible active force by which he exerts his influence throughout the world while remaining located in the spiritual heavens (much like in Mormon theology, although Mormons believe God has a physical body).[1]
From this overview of Watchtower doctrine, we can see that the Jehovah’s Witness worldview is not like the Christian worldview minus the Trinity. The Watchtower teaches a kind of theism but one in which God is by nature an embodied being located in some sort of space, even though it is a space beyond the physical cosmos. He is neither omnipresent nor omniscient as understood in classic Christian theism. While Jehovah’s Witnesses affirm that Jehovah is infinite, this term is applied to God in their theology only in some respects (e.g., that Jehovah has always existed and that his energy is unlimited). Moreover, Jehovah’s Witnesses do not view God as the sole Creator of all things. Rather, he created one creature directly, Michael, and then Michael made everything else with God’s power and instructions. From an orthodox perspective we might call this worldview a form of finite theism or finite Godism. What makes their version of this worldview unusual is that they believe in one Almighty God (Jehovah) who is finite in some respects and in a subordinate god (Jesus) who is definitely finite.[2]
Jehovah’s Witnesses argue that all of the elements of this worldview are based on the teachings of the Bible. However, the Watchtower’s finite theism is incompatible with Scripture. For example, when Solomon stated in prayer to God, “The heavens, yes, the heaven of the heavens, cannot contain you” (1 Kings 8:27 NWT), the expression “the heaven of the heavens” must refer to the absolute highest heaven. That means that God is not an embodied being contained in “spiritual heavens” located somewhere beyond our physical heavens.
Of particular interest to us here are the efforts of Jehovah’s Witnesses to reconcile their denial of the full deity of Christ with biblical proof texts often used by Christians in defense of the doctrine. Much of the work has already been done by the Watchtower Society in its New World Translation, which gives different renderings of key texts on the subject. For example, their view that the preexistent Christ was “a god” is enshrined in the NWT rendering of the last part of John 1:1, “and the Word was a god.” Although much could be said about this translation, I will make two simple comments. First, it is inconsistent with New Testament usage of the noun theos, which when used as a positive title of honor always means “God.” Second, in other places in the New Testament—and even in John—Christ is called theos in a way that even the Watchtower cannot translate as “a god.”
One such verse is John 20:28, where Thomas said to the risen Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” (NWT). Jehovah’s Witnesses have offered a couple of (conflicting) explanations of Thomas’s statement, neither of them plausible. They have suggested that Thomas was referring both to Jesus (“my Lord”) and to the Father (“my God”), but John tells us explicitly that Thomas was addressing “him,” that is, Jesus, not “them.” They have also suggested that Thomas may have been expressing surprise, as when modern people say “O my God” when they are shocked by something. Such an interpretation doesn’t fit ancient Jewish culture, doesn’t fit the context in John 20, and doesn’t explain the two titles “Lord” and “God” used together.
The fundamental error of Watchtower Christology is that it places the preexistent Son on the created side of the line between Creator and creation. The New Testament disagrees: It teaches that all created things came into existence through the Son (or Word), the preincarnate Jesus Christ (John 1:3, 10; 1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2, 10–12). The Watchtower attempts to overturn this teaching by adding the word other four times in Colossians 1:16–17, notoriously making it read as follows:
. . . by means of him all other things were created in the heavens and on the earth, the things visible and the things invisible, whether they are thrones or lordships or governments or authorities. All other things have been created through him and for him. Also, he is before all other things, and by means of him all other things were made to exist (Col. 1:16–17 NWT, emphasis mine).
Remove these occurrences of other from the passage and the text reads smoothly as saying that “all things” were created in, through, and for the Son, who existed before “all things.” “All things” was a standard Jewish expression (found, for example, in Genesis 1:31) to refer to the totality of the created world that the Lord God alone had made. Thus, read in its Jewish religious and theological context, Colossians 1 is clearly placing the Son on the uncreated side of the Creator-creation distinction.
Notes
[1] Watchtower theology is set forth in detail especially in their proselytizing handbook Reasoning from the Scriptures (Brooklyn: Watchtower, 1985, 1989) and their Bible encyclopedia Insight on the Scriptures, 2 vols. (Brooklyn: Watchtower, 1988).
[2] On other forms of finite theism, see Norman L. Geisler and William D. Watkins, Worlds Apart: A Handbook on World Views, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 185–215.
— Robert M. Bowman Jr. is the president of the Institute for Religious Research (IRR.org). He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in biblical studies from Fuller Theological Seminary and South Africa Theological Seminary. Dr. Bowman has lectured extensively at Biola University and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary on apologetics, biblical studies, religion, and theology. Rob is the author or co-author of 18 books, including (with J. Ed Komoszewski) The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense (Kregel, 2024), which discusses the subject of this series in comprehensive detail.
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Wonderful article! Dr. Bowman explains the primary problems with JW theology concisely and clearly. Most helpful. Thank you for sharing!