California Christian Apologetics Conference (IV)

For my first elective session I had the privilege of hearing from Pastor Harold C Felder. There were five different options to choose from at each session, but I opted for the Jehovah’s Witness (JW) seminar because I’d been meeting with one Witness in particular rather regularly. Harold is co-pastor of the Journey Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. Not a very famous guy (at least I’ve never heard of him before!), but certainly passionate about the Lord. His energy and enthusiasm were exhilarating, and he even “caught himself preaching” a couple times. His session was on a subject I’ve written about before here and here, Jehovah’s Witnesses: Origins, Beliefs, and Dangers. The full PowerPoint presentation can be found online here at his website. I especially appreciated this session for the documentation it provided of Jehovah’s Witness beliefs.

Quite a bit of hearsay was brought up throughout the 1 hour seminar, and I thought Harold dealt with it well: he didn’t comment on something he was not familiar with, as far as I remember. He did not pretend that every charge brought against the Watchtower was legitimate just because a Christian said it or just because the Watchtower obviously teaches false doctrines. Just because they lead a false religion does not mean that everything they teach is false; let me just get that on the table!

That said, he spared no expense in making abundantly clear that the Watchtower organization is not one in which any “seeker” will find the light of the Gospel or the gracious forgiveness of God. And for this reason he added a disclaimer to the beginning of his talk, to biblically justify the stance and the method he was approaching the subject with. Lest some might object to his “pickin’ on folk,” he quoted three verses from Titus and Timothy exhorting their respective recipients to pay close attention to doctrine and refute false teaching (Titus 1:9,2:1; 1 Tim 4:16). These are great verses that we should all have memorized. Why not do it this week?

He then moved on to make his point that the Watchtower is indeed a force to be reckoned with. He quoted some statistics concerning their membership. As of last year the Watchtower’s official membership is at 6,741,444 in 236 countries; they have a total of 99,770 kingdom halls; they conducted an average of 6,286,618 Bible studies last year (averaging to over 17000 bible studies per day); and they baptized 248,327 new members! This is not an insubstantial number of people! Clearly the Watchtower has significant influence on people’s minds. By comparison, the Southern Baptist denomination (the largest protestant denomination in this country) only baptized approximately 100,000 more people than the JW’s did last year, and even that number has been decreasing slowly over the last few years.

Then, before getting into any actual refutation, Harold spent time going over some of the particularly identifying marks of Jehovah’s Witnesses, practices and beliefs. Harold disappointed me with respect to his documentation in this section, unfortunately, but there is grace for him. I understand as one who writes (and makes bold claims!) myself that documentation can be possibly the most boring part of preparing some sort of refutation, but it is so comforting and refreshing the those reading that the stuff you’re feeding them is not just hearsay, but accurately represents the views of the ones being refuted. Anyways, without further ado.

The practices that set JW’s apart from the rest of Christianity are as follows (there may be more, but these are the most common, well known ones):

- door to door witnessing is necessary for salvation;

- they are governed by the “governing body” in Brooklyn, New York;

- members meet in Kingdom Halls (church) five times per week;

- they reject the celebration of cultural, national, and religious holidays as pagan and idolatrous;

o they also reject the celebration of birthdays along the same logic;

- members who disobey these rules can be disfellowshiped;

- they are not allowed to read any material other than the Watchtower’s;

- reading the Bible without the aid of Watchtower literature is forbidden.

I had known most of these before I came to this meeting, but the first one struck me as being incredibly works-righteous. Also, a lot of people think they are rather stupid (to put it bluntly) for rejecting holidays, but to think so is a bit hasty. The Watchtower mandates it because (they claim) they want to exalt only God and not share his glory with another. This is commendable and I even know about some Christians who have decided not to celebrate Christmas (not the gifts part anyways) so that they would train themselves to not be so focused on earthly treasure and such. This is commendable for those whose consciences are pricked in that area of their lives. However, in my chat with Jim and his wife (the JW’s that had been visiting me), I confronted them with the fact that the Bible says “freedom” while the Watchtower says “forbidden.” I pray this made them consider the Watchtower’s stance on other things as well. Perhaps it could simply be the pebble in their shoe, as Greg Koukl likes to say, that gets them running from the Watchtower. Please pray for them.

Harold then moved on from practices to beliefs. The sections we got through were God, the Holy Spirit, Christ, Salvation, and the Afterlife. Of course, they believe that Jehovah is the name of God and seem a bit overzealous about pronounced that name in order to be saved. After all, their translation of Romans 10:13 says that “all who call on the name of Jehovah will be saved.” Unfortunately, the word “Jehovah” is neither in there nor anywhere in any New Testament manuscript. In fact, no one even knows exactly how to pronounce the tetra gram YHWH. Jehovah is simply gotten by adding the vowels from Adonai in between the consonants. He reviewed this along with the standard refutation of the claims against the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity, and then moved on to the section that I personally found most helpful and extremely encouraging in my personal walk with God: the Holy Spirit.

Not much attention is paid to the Holy Spirit in Bible teaching these days, and unfortunately so, since he shares in the same glory as the Father and the Son. However, I learned and was reinforced as to the personality of the Holy Spirit as Harold gave his defense. Harold showed that the Holy Spirit has all the attributes of personhood: a mind (Rom 8:27), emotions (Eph 4:20), and a will (1 Cor 12:11), but the most striking to me was the verse brought up wherein the Holy Spirit talks about himself. This, I perceive to be glorious beyond comprehension. In Acts 13, “while they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” This absolutely blew my mind. Here is the Holy Spirit speaking and commanding on his own authority, his own divine authority. You don’t see it very often because the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son; but here He is, gloriously sanctifying Saul and Barnabas for the work He has called them to. Praise the Holy Spirit (don’t hear that every day, do you?).

After demonstrating the personhood and divinity of the Holy Spirit, Harold went after the person of Jesus, clarifying that He is not in fact, Michael the archangel, as the JW’s believe. He also persuasively demonstrated Jesus is Divine, God in flesh, 100% man 100% God, and was raised physically, even by simply using in a consistent manner several verses that JW’s use inconsistently. For example, in Colossians 1, the word “other” is added four times total in verses 16 and 17. But actually, the word “other” is not there and since it totally distorts the meaning, it certainly is not warranted to ‘clear up’ confusion in the verse. It makes perfect sense all by itself – unless you are a Jehovah’s Witness. Also, four aspects of Jesus resurrection prove that it was indeed physical and not spiritual (i.e. he wasn’t raised as a spirit or phantom or ghost of some sort): 1) The tomb was empty, so the body was definitely gone (Matt 28); 2) Jesus bore crucifixion scars (John 20:27); 3) He predicted He would raise HIS body in 3 days (John 2:19); 4) 1 Cor 15:44 was referring to a Spirit-controlled body, not a phantom. For added support of his interpretation of 1 Cor 15:44, he quoted Galatians 6:1 – “if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.” This is not talking about those who are ghost-like in appearance!

The last aspect of Jehovah’s Witness doctrine that we really dug into was their doctrine of Salvation. This is so key, because after the Watchtower is done with the doctrine of justification, grace is no more grace (Rom 11:6). Salvation in the Witness religion is based on works, pure and simple. Now, they’ll say it’s by grace, but their grace is God graciously giving humans the ability to earn their way to heaven! “To get one's name written in the book of life will depend on one's works” (Watchtower, Mar 15, 1962). Furthermore, one must acknowledge the Watchtower as from God in order to receive eternal life (Watchtower, Feb 15, 1983). Of course we know, and Pastor Harold proved to us, that salvation is solely by the grace of God and not by works (Eph 2:8-9), and that salvation comes by faith in Christ, not an earthly organization, or even in His church (Jn 5:24).

And at this point I am going to cut! We went over the afterlife for a bit, but you’ll have to check out the website for yourself if you want to read about it!

On a personal note, I was extremely convicted during this session of my intense arrogance. At one point when we were going over the admittedly strange doctrines of the Watchtower organization, one of the attendees gagged “This is so stupid…” in quite a haughty manner. After noticing how repulsive this sort of response was, realizing that it drips with pride and is dry of compassion, I remembered all the times my mother confronted me ever so graciously on my own attitude in this area. Praise God for opening my eyes to this sinful attitude, for “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). That was a stinger, but I am confident that realizing this face will benefit anyone’s evangelism efforts greatly.