Chapter VIII. The Lure of Certainty

 

Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and mean that this is something one can have in common? . . . Is it possible to believe that one can have a god without using him?-Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (New York: W. W. Norton, pp.29-30)

 

THE W0RLD perceives them as different; and they feel  themselves to be different. And that is the magic of a religion that fears magic,  mystery, poetry-a religion that treats ecstasy as an aberration and flees  from passion with a passion that is thoroughly small and dry.

 

I felt bad for sinning that day and asked the Lord to punish me with a pain. Also desiring to know the pains of labor. He gave me  the pain right away, a period-pain, but different - spasms, like  contractions! It was beautiful, and I was praising the Lord. Until the Devil said, "But you should take a pill, the pain is bad." I shunned his words, but then the pain became worse, and I took a pill; and the  pain got even worse. At 3 A.M. it stopped. I slept and slept.

 

How wonderful it is to live a pure and simple life! It's really  good to sit around a table and share thoughts with simple folk. . .

 

I'm nervous and frenzied. I think of going to Russia to do  missionary work with Andre'. (I don't love him! And he loves Jehovah so much! Why don't I love him?) And I can't help smoking another  cigarette. Bad. If I were a man people would leave me alone so much more. And when will I ever be able to relax?

 

A strange day. Started off by doing a lot of sewing, learned about ~d;1rmn~ and the hex stitch. Then Frau S. walked in and decided  to transport me to her house to learn cooking and the Bible. For some reason I suddenly became sad, dissatisfied, self-pitying,  couldn't stop crying. She started reading me some Witness article about the  necessity of morality and Christian behavior being reflected by  clothing. I've heard so much about clothing (mine in particular) from that  family, and I got fed up and left, very upset. After a while, I went  back to the tranquility of darning with Frau Mehringer. And then was given some very nice baked rice pudding. . .

 

I know that this is right because I feel cleaner and everything around me is purer than it has ever been.

 

Today in the late afternoon, after a nap, I went to Klaus's house, the tailor, the Witness of Jehovah. I was feeling tired and a  little bit shy and nauseated because this morning I bought a dirndl, a  pocket- book, and a bakery bun, and as always when I deal with worldly things, it drained me. . . .

 

I will write to my brother and tell him I have found The Truth.

 

 What a wonderful thing it is to be able to really trust people be- cause you know they're seeking after the truth. How can I describe the atmosphere around these good, honest people? Brother 0. spoke so wisely while we were sitting there drinking a bit of schnapps  and eating a bit of garlic, bacon, cheese, and bread. He also spoke  of his six years in prison under Hitler. Oh, how brave! How I admire that happiness of his, and I know it's good.

 - from the diary of Vera Retsoff I

 

Vera was 17 when she wrote this, having been converted by  Jehovah's Witnesses in a small village in Germany. Multilingual, from an  affluent, achieving family, Vera ran away from college and was a Jesus  Freak for two years before she became a Witness. She remained a Witness for  three years, until her marriage to her childhood sweetheart; and her growing  doubts together with her growing conviction that it was not "selfish" to  use her talents effectively divorced her from the Society.

Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to be a Jehovah's Witness. It's hard . . .  like the Witnesses can't . . . you don't supposed to like . . .  you gotta be good, you can't party, you gotta go to all the meetings, field  service and stuff. And like people on the street are saying, like lots of  people think we're crazy, so it's hard to cope with the people. But what  else is there? You be out on the streets, man, you be missin' a good  thing. 'Cause there's nothin' out there. I mean, the majority of  teen-agers is bad. I'm gonna keep on tryin'. But it's hard. I mean, it's bad on  the street, but we gotta be out on the street. Now, me, I been  president of the Black Knights - there was thousands of us. I'm not talkin' about killin' nobody, you understand; but I wanted to feel big, dig it?  I'm tryin' now, though, you know. To be good. 'Cause the Witnesses are right: There's nobody out there gonna do nothin' about all the  poverty and shit and war and stuff. Nobody.

 - Booker Smith, a 17-year-old black from Harlem who is an unbaptized Witness

 

You get used to the South Bronx; you don't see the suffering any- more. To the people who live there, it's not suffering, it's  their life. They are casualties of the Devil's system. And so are you. From Adam all have sinned and all are victimized. You too. Jehovah's  Witnesses are not hanging out on street corners or into immorality or dope. We're not violent like the rest of the people. Our people  in the South Bronx are physically and spiritually clean. . . . As far as  all those programs to feed people and help people with dope problems, and day-care centers and social work. . . some people think  that's doing good, but if they're not following the Bible, they're not  doing good.

 

We're treated differently, given respect by fellow workers and  employers. Worldly people know we are honest and faithful workers. They know we're not subversive. They know we're discreet, and  they know we don't overindulge. Young ladies treat us with honor  because they know we wouldn't engage in premarital sex. That would be  like jumping off a building. Fornication can kill you. We keep clean.

 - Thomas Bart, 21 -year-old black Witness elder

 

I'm not like the rest of the kids in high school . . . the way how they dress and the way how they act and fool around and not listening to the teacher and talking like what they're not supposed to talk about, like obscene words and things that corrode your mind like sex.

-14-year-old black Witness (male)

 

All of a sudden there are so many questions and they're so heavy. Jehovah knows I want to serve him. But how can I do so out of a clean heart with no reservations or disagreements? How come there are so many questions when I really know all the answers? What about all the wickedness and suffering God has permitted on the earth? Why, if he has the power . . . why, if he loves? Why? I  know the answer from the book: The issue is political-God's rule  against Satan 5. For the last 6,000 years, man has had the opportunity to  rule, and he has proved incapable of doing so. And the suffering of the innocent is the result of man's choosing worldly governments instead of God's heavenly kingdom. The suffering is a result of man's  choice, not God's doing. Also, because he hasn't ended the world yet,  Jehovah is really merciful: He's giving more people the opportunity to serve him. . . . But way down deep, I don't really believe it. .  . . The waiting seems so long. I wish the end would come now. This  instant. Now. I'm tired of waiting. . . . But maybe God's taking his spirit away from me because I have sexual feelings toward S. . . . I  never realized how important the words of the brothers are: how  treacherous the heart is, how unclean. . . . I want everything, I really do. . . I want the end to come now.

 - from the diary of a 23-year-old Witness who left the Society soon after she wrote this

 

I was so desperately needy when I became a Witness, just barely functioning, just surviving. I didn't like anything about the  present, I hated my past, and the Witnesses gave me a future, and I gave  myself to it. I loved the idea of a New World . . . someday I'd be tall  and beautiful, and everything evil and unfair would go away, and  there'd be justice. It's odd; I really didn't like anything about being a  Witness, but I gave myself to them fully and completely. I held  nothing in reserve. I was looking to them for honesty and decency. I  couldn't find it. But I couldn't allow myself to be critical. Then I had a  nervous breakdown. Maybe that was my way of getting out? The Witnesses felt betrayed by my breakdown. Their faces were so hard. No help. After the breakdown, I couldn't go from door to door  anymore. I wanted God to tell me directly what to do. I couldn't get Him  off my back. . . . I was so conscientious. Wouldn't you think that the more conscientious I was, the more rewards I should have gotten?  But the more I lent myself to the Witnesses, the more I suffered.  Which proves that sacrifice is awful. So now I follow Ayn Rand.

 - a former Witness

 

 

They shrink from the intolerable fear that God does not care  about men. Perhaps the original impulse was one of love: can a God-hungry  soul contemplate the thought of souls damned in hell? Charles Taze  Russell gazed into the fires of hell, averted his eyes from that vision of  eternal suffering and damnation, and substituted for the God of the Passion - the  suffering Christ of the gospel - a pragmatic, tribal God.

 

For some men, the stubborn, painful certainty that God does not  exist has (though suffused with nausea and dread) been gorgeously  energizing:

 

Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murders, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most  powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under  our knives. . . . Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?  Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There  has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us - for  the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all  history hitherto.

 -Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

 

For other men, the absence of the sure knowledge of God has been a thrilling and lucid invitation to act absolutely as if He did not exist, to be fully human, to substitute duty and struggle and human love for the impulse to devotion and praise, to adore a flawed and wonderful world.

 

For Russell and his followers, who had a sense of premonition and  fore boding, it was necessary to invent a personal, concrete, and  immediate solution to the injustices of life. "The mean and the vulgar  flourish, the righteous suffer," said the Psalmist, praising God in radiant  despair. The mean and the vulgar flourish, the righteous suffer, said Russell . . .  and he made charts and juggled dates and numbers in a frenzied attempt to  reduce the beauty and the terror of the world to manageable proportions. In  the process - in his fear of the absurd, the unexplained, the  incomprehensible, in his flight from mystery, from the desert of God's uncertain  grace - he was obliged to renounce both the world and the divinity of Christ.

 

The Witnesses have modified their ideology through the years,  but what has never changed is that in order to accommodate a wholesome  hatred for injustice, the Witnesses have had to embrace an unhealthy  hatred of the physical, material world. The world is evil, loathsome and  abhorrent; man’s nature is evil, loathsome, and abhorrent. They have never been  able to reconcile love of God with love of the world.

 

Their religion is neither one of austere penance nor one of  sublime contemplation. They move in our midst like disdainful strangers,  waiting for Jehovah - a hard and irritable judge, not a living flame - to enter  into wrath. They neither tremble at the abyss nor swoon at the altar  of a magnificent God. They spit out the world as if it tasted of ashes;  they reject the large idea of a mystical union with God, a communion of brothers  and saints. Their God is querulous and small; their religion  nourishes damaged deserters from the world, offering them a brittle certainty.

 

Because God will accomplish all things without the collaboration of man, they do not strive to accomplish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

 

Because they believe the world exists only to be despised, because they believe it is rotten, they are content to leave it to rot.

 

 

It is alien to their thinking that God and man can work together  to perfect and transform the world - and just as alien to their thinking  that man, unsupported by God, is made beautiful by struggle and human love.  They do not rejoice in the salvation of man by God-made-man, or in the  redemption of man by man. They are outside the tradition of the other  Christian churches: they do not believe in the Trinity, the Incarnation,  the Eucharist, the immortality of the soul. Their linear, eschatological  religion is literalist. The consequences of not acting are, of course, as weighty as the  consequences of acting. Absenting themselves from the conflicts of the  world, they surrender the organization of the world to others.

 

It would be easy to conclude that they love neither God (if by  God we mean the God of the gospel who died for men’s sins), nor man; to  judge them so lacking in idealism and compassion as to be monstrous in  their indifference. Still, their religion allows them to believe that  the world is terrible, but that life is not hopeless. Because it rigidly  controls all aspects of their behavior, it gives them the illusion of moral  superiority, and of safety. It delivers people who have no tolerance for ambiguity  from having to make ethical choices. It allows self-loathers to project their  hatred onto the world. It translates the allure of the world into Satanic  temptation, so that those who fear its enticements are armed against seduction.  It provides ego balm for the lowly, an identification with The Chosen.  Because Jehovah's Witnesses believe as little in psychology as they do in  philosophy, it tames or numbs the wilderness of the heart by closing the valves  of inquiry. It exalts mediocrity, at the same time conferring status on and  granting acceptance to the exploited and the oppressed. Moralistic rather  than moral, it rescues its adherents from vice (drug addiction, criminality,  dirty dishes) and from the demands of art. Obsession, which characterizes  geniuses, children, madmen, saints, and artists, is seen as idolatrous.

 

Yet in the heart of every Witness is the felt knowledge that  should he leave his spiritual home, he will die a social death at the hands  of his brothers now, a spiritual death at the hands of his God later. And the  messages received by the Witnesses from their leaders remind them always  of the first Fall, the dangerous tightrope they walk between omnipotence  and disinheritance. Repressing human needs, individual desires, they may  seem smug - but never entirely, never joyously, sure.

 

To understand them, it is necessary to understand their doctrine, and particularly their views on evil and salvation, from which all their hopes and fears and their social attitudes (and their appeal - which seems to outsiders bloodless and legalistic) stem:

 

Evil; The Fall; Immortality

 

By revealing an original fall, Christianity provides our  intelligence with a reason for the disconcerting excess of sin and suffering. Next, in order to win our love and secure our faith, it unveils  to our eyes and hearts the moving and unfathomable reality of the  historical Christ in whom the exemplary life of an individual man conceals  this mysterious drama: The master of the world, leading, like an  element of the world, not only an elemental life, but (in addition to  this and because of it) leading the total life of the universe, which he  has shouldered and assimilated by experiencing it himself. And finally by  the crucifixion and death of this adored being, Christianity  signifies to our thirst for happiness that the term of creation is not to be  sought in the temporal zones of our visible world, but that the effort required  of our fidelity must be consummated beyond a total transformation of ourselves and everything surrounding us.

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (pp. 102-103)

 

The existence of evil is the central problem for all religions. Jehovah's Witnesses explain it by legalisms:

 

God, though able to bring an end to bad things, restrains himself for mankind's own benefit. - TW, June 1, 1974

 

[God's] vindication is more important than the salvation of men. - LGBT (See pp.29-36.)

 

The fundamental issue between God and Satan . . . involves man’s integrity to Jehovah as his Sovereign. - AII Scrip (See pp.7-8.)

 

They base their case on Job's great cry of despair, tidying his heart's pain into logic:

 

Why does God permit evil? . . . From the book of Job we can see that Jehovah has permitted such because of a boast that his  adversary, Satan the Devil, made, namely, that he could turn all men away  from God. Yes, Satan claimed that Jehovah God does not deserve to be feared and worshipped and that the only reason why men do obey him is to make selfish gain for themselves. Satan boasted that if  God would let him get at Job, a very righteous man, Satan could cause  Job to curse God. God accepted the challenge and let Satan bring all  manner of hardship and suffering on Job. . . . But Satan failed to  turn Job against God. Job thereby upheld Jehovah as the rightful Sovereign and the One deserving to be feared and worshipped. - TW, April 15, 1976

 

It began, of course, in Eden 6,000 years ago: perfect Adam and Eve were created "free moral agents"; but Satan, in the form of the Serpent, caused the first human pair to eat of the forbidden fruit (a real tree, a real fruit, in the Witnesses' literal version):

 

The Devil was originally a spirit son of God and, as such, he was perfect; but he allowed pride and greed for power to be like God  to develop in his heart, and this led him to rebel and to get Adam  and Eve to join him in his rebellion. He wanted to be a god and have creatures worship and serve him. [This Good]

 

Lucifer was "perfect," the Witnesses say, "till iniquity was found in him, when he conceived a rebellion against God."

 

Adam and Eve, "although they were perfect in body and mind, . . . were as yet untried, and God gave them the opportunity of proving their obedience to him under the test." [Ibid.]

 

God's prohibition is seen as an act of love, an opportunity for Adam and Eve. How perfect man might entertain imperfect desires is not, for the Witnesses, an interesting question, nor is why or how "selfish ambition" entered Lucifer's perfect breast. This is as close as the Witnesses come to a metaphysical explanation of the entrance of evil into the world:

 

God gave to his human son and daughter the freedom of choice, free moral agency . . . because God cared about them and had  feeling for them. He had shown love by bringing them to life and by his preparations for their earthly happiness. If God had created them  so that they were automatically obedient and incapable of doing  otherwise, then they could never show genuine love in return to their  Creator. Their obedience would be mechanical. Real love requires a  want ing to do things that please another or that are in his  interests. . We get our greatest joy out of doing things for others when we  sincerely want to do them because we care about them . . . spontaneously, freely. [Awake!, Oct. 8, 1974, p.12]

 

Had Adam and Eve not been seduced by the Serpent's invitation to "become like Gods," they would have lived forever on a perfect earth. Instead, they were cast out of the Edenic paradise garden to the "unfinished" part of the earth, there to live out their days in toil and pain.

 

Thus, Adam and Eve sinned through disobedience to God, and their sin involved all men in death, depriving man of infinite bliss in Eden and of free access to the tree of life. But Christ, in obedience to Jehovah, sacrificed himself as the "lamb of God," and thereby caused the "river of life" to rush forth again for the benefit of the obedient among men.

 

God has permitted Satan (evil) to exist in order to "raise up his witnesses to declare and publish his fame or name throughout all the earth before all his enemies are destroyed." [LGBT]

 

Satan has, during the course of human history, set up an "organization" to rival God's. This organization-composed of religious, political, and commercial elements - perpetuates the Serpent's original lie to Adam and Eve: "Ye shall not surely die."

 

The immortality of the soul is a devilish lie:

 

Satan . . . brought forth the religious idea that when man dies he just appears to die, that it is just the body that dies, but some- thing inside him, a soul or spirit, lives on, either being born  again to some other human or into an animal, or going off into some spirit realm.

 

[But, in fact] when a person dies his soul does not go straight to heaven, nor does his soul go to a place of torment called "hell,"  nor would that soul be able to come back as a spirit or ''ghost'' to  haunt the dead person's relatives. All such teachings are based on  Satan's religious lie that the soul of man does not die, and he has  caused many to believe such teachings in order to hold them in fear and turn  them from the true understanding of God's purposes. . .

 

The simple truth about the matter is that, when a person dies, he  is dead, unconscious, and knows nothing. . . . Jehovah's most wonderful and merciful provision for the human race . . . is the  Ransom. . . . Sin and death entered into the world when Adam rebelled against God. Adam lost for himself and for his offspring perfect  human life in a paradise on earth. By means of the ransom Jesus  Christ bought back for mankind this that was lost, namely, perfect human life with its rights and earthly prospects. . . . God . . . did  this by transferring the life of his only-begotten son, who was with him in heaven, to the womb of Mary, a Jewish virgin. . . . Jesus was  miraculously born as a perfect human. . . .

The provision of the ransom . . . opened up a hope of everlasting life. Some believers would be granted life in the heavens, others  on the earth. [This Good; see pp. 7-2 6]

 

After [Armageddon] mankind . . . will be told to make preparations for the restoration of their beloved dead. What a happy thing it  will be to prepare a room for Mother and Dad! Some day while working -about your lovely garden park home you will hear the familiar  voice - of father or mother calling from the room you prepared for them.  You will run to their room and tell them about the new world and its  joys and all the things that happened on earth while they were asleep  in death. How happy they will be to have no more pain, for they will come back without the sickness that caused their death, and they  will have before them the glorious hope of living forever on the  perfected earth! This process will go on until all in the memorial tombs are brought forth. [Faith, p.225]

 

The absorbing problem of whether God calls men to Him or if, on  the other hand, men choose God, the question of where grace and will  join to provide redemption and union is not directly addressed by the  Witnesses. The closest approach to the problem of grace and will or whether  salvation depends on faith or works, is the distinction between "the  heart" and "the mind":

 

The mind must of necessity take in and digest information. It is  the seat of intellect, the knowledge-processing center. It  assembles information and by process of reason and logic it reaches certain  conclusions. And the Scriptures indicate that it is, in some amazing  way, directly related to the heart. The heart has a vital role, for  with it are associated the affections and motivation. The heart's direction  of one's whole course in life becomes evident to onlookers. They find out eventually what the person really is on the inside. But Jehovah  at all times knows the "secret person of the heart." . . . At times the  heart may overrule the conclusions of the mind, giving motivation that  favors and elevates emotions or desires over logical reasoning. Not  only does a person have to know with his mind what is right in  Jehovah's eyes, but he has to have the desire in his heart to follow that  course. [TMSG, Study 15: "Reaching the Heart of Your Listeners," p.75]

 

This evades the question of how God's grace operates to save men.  It does allow the Witnesses to explain why men who are held in  general to be good or wise reject their message: Their "hearts" are "bad" . . .  "It is much more to Satan's liking to hold sway in a subtle way over  intelligent, capable persons who are highly respected." [All Scrip; see pp.207-08]

 

 

The Divinity Of Christ; The Trinity; The Ransom

 

But truly, Lord, if I wanted to cherish only a man, then I would surely turn to those whom you have given me in the allurement of their present flowering. Are there not, with our mothers,  brothers, friends and sisters, enough irresistibly lovable people around  us? Why should we turn to Judaea two thousand years ago? No, what I cry  out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly  passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.-Teilhard, p.127

 

I want no pallid humanitaranism - If Christ be not God, I want none of him; I will hack my way through existence alone. - Romano Guardini

 

If God gave his life for a man, would that be a corresponding ransom? Could a lion redeem a mouse? - Watchtower Society

 

In addition to denying the immortality of the soul, the Witnesses deny the Incarnation.

 

Dorothy Sayers called the Incarnation and the crucifixion the  terrifying drama of which God is the victim and the hero. It is that  ecstatic version of God - the version that says that God bore the anguish of being  human (by virtue of which, as Teilhard says, "nothing is profane") that  permits of the idea that we may be sacramentally joined to Him. We are led back  to God through the humanity of Christ:

 

[God] plunged [himself] into matter in order to redeem it. . . .  The immense enchantment of the divine milieu owes all its value in the long run to the human - divine contact which was revealed at the Epiphany of Jesus. . . . As our humanity assimilates the material world, and as the Host assimilates our humanity, the eucharistic transformation goes beyond and completes the transubstantiation of the bread on the altar. Step by step it irresistibly invades the  universe. (Teilhard, pp. 107, 117, 125]

 

Traditional Christianity teaches 'is that God became man to die  for our sins; and that the godhead is composed of God the Father, God the  Son, and God the Holy Spirit; that the Incarnation may be realized,  for each individual, through the Eucharist.

 

The Witnesses, perhaps out of aversion to mystery and a  determination to root everything in the concrete, deny the personality and the  deity of the Holy Spirit, which they define, instead, as "the active force of  God" which moves His servants to do His will. They argue that the Trinity is  a pagan doctrine that originated with the Egyptians, Hindus, and  Babylonians.

 

The Witnesses say that Jesus was a perfect human creature, no  more, no less; and that God his father required the sacrifice of a perfect  human life to "buy back," or ransom, what the perfect Adam had forfeited - life  forever (for the faithful) on a perfect earth. Jesus is described as a  "perfect parent" who took the place of sinful Adam. Jesus was, they say, before he  became "a tiny bundle of live energy" who was "transferred from heaven  to the egg-cell in the womb of the unmarried girl Mary" [FPL, p. 127], a  perfect spirit creature, the archangel Michael. He divested himself of his  spiritual nature when he came to earth; and, when he died (on a stake - the cross is  presumed to be "pagan" too), he was resurrected to spiritual life (a  cut above the spiritual life he had enjoyed before, it would seem, since he  was raised to rule over "all other parts of God's organization"):

 

He was a spirit person, just as "God is a Spirit"; he was a mighty one, although not almighty as Jehovah God is; also he was before  all others of God's creatures, for he was the first son that Jehovah  God brought forth. . . . He was the first of Jehovah God's creations. After God had created him as his firstborn Son, then God used him  as his working Partner in the creating of all the rest of creation.  . . . The life of the Son of God was transferred from his glorious position  with God his father in heaven to the embryo of a human. On the third  day of his being dead in the grave his immortal Father Jehovah God  raised him from the dead, not as a human Son, but as a mighty immortal spirit Son, with all power in heaven and earth under the Most High God. . . . After he had sacrificed his perfect manhood, God raised him to deathless life as a glorious spirit creature. He exalted  him above all angels and other parts of God's universal organization,  to be next-highest to himself, the Most High God. [LGBT, see pp.3 1-36, 115-16. See also Aid, pp.917-32.]

 

So, in the Witness version of Christ, there would. seem to be  three Christs (none is God); and each is independent of the other.  There is the spiritual archangel Michael (called also "the Word," or "Logos");  then there is the perfect human Jesus - born, according to the Witnesses,  innocent of ("ignorant of") his prehuman life, who sacrificed his human  nature on the stake; and finally there is the resurrected Christ, who enters a  higher spiritual lane than the one he enjoyed in his prehuman existence.

 

The Witnesses say it was not Jesus' earthly body, but a kind of  "suit of flesh" that manifested itself to his disciples upon his  resurrection on the third day. (Rutherford, ever inventive, suggested that God might  have preserved Jesus' human body somewhere to exhibit it during the  Millennium. [The Harp of God (New York: WB&TS, 1928)]

 

The churches have consistently argued that to deny the divinity of Christ, the agony of God in the garden, is heresy: "For if, being  a creature, He had become man, man had remained just what he was, not joined  to God, for how had a work been joined to the Creator by a work?"  [Athanasius: Discourses Against the Arians]

 

To deny the divinity of Christ is also to deny oneself the  Eucharistic sacrament: When Jehovah's Witnesses "celebrate" the "Memorial" of Christ's death, a small number - those who expect a heavenly,  rather than an earthly, reward - share unleavened bread and wine. The bread is  merely symbolic of [Christ's] own fleshly body, head and all"; the wine  is "symbolic of his own blood"; and to partake of these emblems is a  token that one   “imitates Jesus," and "appreciate[s] the sanctification of his  blood." (Compare this with Teilhard: "There are certain noble and cherished  moments of the day - those when we pray or receive the sacraments. Were it not  for these moments of more efficient or explicit commerce with God,  the tide of divine omnipresence, and our perception of it, would weaken until  all that was best in our human endeavor . . . would be for us emptied of  God." [Teilhard, pp. 65-66] The Witnesses believe that human endeavor  is, by its nature, devoid of God, and that God is not present in the evil  world.) Nor is one baptized into the Church as an infant. Adult baptism is a  "symbol of one's dedication to do God's will." [LGBT, pp. 29 - 98]

 

Charles Taze Russell's waspish attitudes toward the Mass, the  sacraments, the Eucharist (those doctrines of union of God and man  which thrill mystics and exert a magical pull even among unbelievers, for  those especially whom Eliot called the "children at the Gate") set the tone  for future Watchtower writings: "Papacy denies and sets aside the true  Continual Sacrifice, and substitutes the 'abomination,' the Mass, in its stead  . . . the very foundation of all the various schemes of the Church of Rome for  wringing money from the people, for all her extravagancies and luxuries."  [SS, Vol. III, Thy Kingdom Come, p.102]

 

How splendid it must be, how exalting, to feel, to know:

 

Ah, you know it yourself, Lord, through having borne the anguish of it as man: On certain days the world seems a terrifying thing:  huge, blind, and brutal. . . . The things in our life which terrify us,  the things that threw you yourself into agony in the garden, are,  ultimately, only the species or appearance, the matter of one and the same sacrament. We have only to believe.

 

"We have only to believe." [Teilhard, pp. 136-37] Irresistible words; there is a tension amounting to glory even in resisting them.

 

But for Russell, everything not rooted in numbers and dates and legal analyses was anathema. The low churches did not escape the raspings of his sharp tongue, either:

 

"[The] year 1846 witnessed the organization of Protestant sects into one great system called the Evangelical Alliance . . . many of those . . . cleansed . . . thus became entangled with the yoke of bondage." [SS, Vol. III, pp. 119-20) The Papacy and the Protestants were both wiped out by Russell's heavy, whipping, sex-stained hand.

 

And how do the churches feel about what they are obliged to regard as apostasy?

 

Father Robert Kennedy (of the Brooklyn diocese) says, most charitably:

 

Catholics are indeed dissatisfied with the institutional aspects  of the Church, with its wealth and clericalism. They turn to Jehovah's  Witnesses as an alternative. . . . In Latin America, for example,  where the Witnesses make great gains, Catholic belief tends to be  authoritarian. We have, in the past, represented forces of oppression, and  worship revolves around the saints and the Virgin. The Church's  Christology - the Christ of the Trinity - is remote. Jehovah's Witnesses offer an immediate, vivid, living Christ - a man, even as other men - who, they think, has relevance to their lives. A carpenter. Not  God. He is more real to them than the Christ of the Catechism. And just  as the early church succeeded in slave cultures, like Corinth, the  immediacy of the Second Coming appeals to the underprivileged. . . .  And the simplicity and uniformity of belief among Jehovah's  Witnesses, for people who feel that the Church is baroque and disengaged from  daily life, is attractive. . . . Intellectual Catholics ask refined  questions. Jehovah's Witnesses ask no questions.

 

The evangelical churches regard Jehovah's Witnesses as "people of  the cults . . . unreached by the church." The Witnesses are equated  with Reverend Ike, the Mormons, Christian Science, and Sun Myung Moon:  "All of them turn away from the central doctrine of the Christian faith."  And they are considered as pernicious as the occult - as "witches, Satanism,  astrology, and tarot cards." Dr. Walter Martin, of the Christian  Research Institute of Melodyland, California, says:

 

Satan manipulates the church. The Christians have been afraid of the cults. A JW comes to the door . . . a million times a day all  over the world this happens. The Christian says, "Well, I belong to  such- and-such a church; I'm a Christian." Then the JW zaps him with the Trinity: "Can you prove to me that it's in the Bible?" he asks.  The Christian can't prove it; he's frustrated when he can't answer  questions. So the scenario is that the Christian's blood pressure  goes up to about 5000; he gives his testimony; he talks about how he's been  filled with the Holy Spirit; the JW is entirely unmoved by it and says,  "But you didn't answer my question from the Bible." The Christian says, "You're going to hell." Bang. And that ends it. . .

 

What we should recognize is that JWs are lost souls for whom Christ has died. The Watchtower is a cult; it's a group gathered around somebody's interpretation of the Bible, and it ends up  denying that Jesus Christ is literally God in human flesh. . . . The  church has failed them for a hundred years: "Let the Lord convert them, we've said; "Don't have them in your homes, whatever you do; just be  positive, preach Jesus and everything will work out fine."

 

Well, it hasn't. The ostrich approach has made things worse. What we have to do is evangelize by presenting them with answers. We need to go to them. We've got to go to their Kingdom Halls - their meeting places - to hand out tracts. We have organized a whole movement in Southern California which we call Operation Recovery. We have hundreds of young people volunteering to pass out tracts (designed to look like Watchtower literature) at their conventions.  We have teams of people all over Southern California being trained  to go to JW meeting places and pass out tracts to lead these people  back to Christ. . .

 

The Witnesses appear to be impenetrable, brainwashed. But it's an illusion. Their minds are blinded by Satan. The only way to communicate with them is by God the Holy Spirit. The Charismatic movement is the spearhead of the Holy Spirit to open their eyes. . .  . The Witnesses don't dialogue - they have prerecorded answers, like  eight-track tapes. . . . They love to talk about the Trinity,  Armageddon.

 

We send out one tract - 100 Years of Divine Direction - and quote from The  Watchtower. We show how they predicted Armageddon seventeen times, and were wrong each time. They missed 1874, 1914, 1918, 1925, 1941 - and most recently, October, 1975 . . . We have to wake up to the fact that this is a mission field. [Christian Broadcasting Network 700 Club broadcast, June 11, 1976]

 

To grasp the Witnesses' theology, it must be asked, For whom was Christ's ransom sacrifice made? For whose sins did he atone? Not,  according to the Witnesses, for all men: Departing again from Christian  tradition, the Witnesses say there are two "classes" of people who will  benefit from his sacrifice: "a heavenly class," and "an earthly class." For a  "great multitude" of "other sheep" the reward for faithful service to God  will be everlasting life on an earth soon to be reclaimed from the wicked at  Armageddon. A much smaller number, "the anointed," 144,000 spiritual  brothers of Christ, will be "co-rulers" and "associate kings" with Christ in  heaven. Since 1918, when "Christ came to his temple," these "anointed  ones" have been "resurrected" - or raised, "in the twinkling of an eye." (They  were joined by the apostles and the early church members.) The  heavenly class has been being gathered since the First Coming of Christ; its  ranks, according to the Witnesses, are rapidly closing. The invitation the  Witnesses now extend by means of their proselytizing is to the "great  multitude":

 

With the rebellion of Satan the Devil wicked heavenly rule gained control of mankind, and God purposed to set up later a new  heavenly rulership over the earth. It would be called "the kingdom of the  heavens." The heavenly kingdom would be made up of tried and tested creatures who would maintain their integrity on earth down till  death in following faithfully the footsteps of Jesus Christ. . . . The  number of these is limited to 144,000,... associated with him in this heavenly kingdom. . . . Today, after nineteen centuries of selecting,  there is yet on earth a small remnant of the 144,000.

 

When the last members of the kingdom class finish their earthly course faithful to death, then the heavenly kingdom of the 144,000 under Jesus Christ the king will be completed by their  resurrection from the dead to life in heaven. It will rule over all other  creatures in the heavens and those who gain life on earth. . . . It will  destroy Satan and all his agents. . . . The call for heavenly inheritance  is now closing. [FPL]

 

Charles Taze Russell distinguished between two classes of  "spiritual-begotten" people - a higher class, which (with his passion for  numbers and dates and concrete emblems which extended even to the alphabet)  he called Class n, who would sit with the resurrected Lord in heavenly  glory; and Class m, mortals who "shrank from the death of the human will"  and as a consequence would not reign with Christ in glory, but would  become spirit beings of' a lower order within the divine nature. [SS, Vol. I,  The Divine Plan of the Ages] As the Witnesses had to accommodate more and  more converts, however, a new scenario was invented. M and n are no  longer operative.

 

The Scenario:

 

At Har-Magedon, . . . the kings and their armies and those having the marks of the "wild beast" will all be "killed off' in  execution of the death sentence that proceeds out of the mouth of the victorious  King of kings like a "long sword." Their corpses will not be buried  with religious, military, or civil honors. All the scavenger birds  will feast upon their dead bodies, and the eyes of God's protected remnant  and their "great crowd" of godly companions will also feast. These  will be satisfied at seeing this glorious vindication of the universal  sovereignty of the Most High God, Jehovah. . . . They will be glad afterward  to bury any bones remaining of the wicked ones and so cleanse the  earth. . . . This will also serve as a health measure, to rid the earth of the foul smell of putrefying human corpses and to prevent water and  air pollution and the spreading of diseases to the survivors of this  war at "Har-Magedon." [Babylon; see p.630]

 

Before Armageddon, this is what the Witnesses say will happen: "A scarlet-colored wild beast with seven heads and ten horns" will turn  against "the international religious harlot, Babylon the Great" [TW, Jan.  15, 19761; who has been "riding the beast," and will destroy the "symbolical  woman that, figuratively speaking, has had immoral sexual relations  with the world."

 

Less vividly, all worldly rulers, acting through the United Nations, will turn against organized religion and destroy all religions:

 

They will make her appear shameful like a naked woman in public. [Like the] dogs that ate up . . . Jezebel . . . they will devour  her body with which they once had liked to unite. They will destroy all her beauty of form and her religious capacity to give soothing  pleasure to ungodly, worldly men. . . . They will feed on her, as long as  there is anything to her. What is left of her frame they will burn with  fire, as if she were, not a Babylonian temple prostitute, but the unchaste daughter of a priest in ancient Israel." [Ibid.; see pp.599-604.]

 

The seven-headed scarlet-colored dragon spoken of in the 17th  chapter of Revelation is the eighth (and final) world power of Satan's  organization set up to rival God's: it is the United Nations, which God bends to His Will to destroy "false religion." In the Old Testament book of Daniel,  seven wild beasts are spoken of; for reasons impervious to logic, these  beasts represent, to the Witnesses, seven successive world powers. The first six  are Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, all of whom  have ranged themselves against God. The seventh beast represents "the  dual world power of Great Britain and the United States." (Other great  civilizations, such as the Mayans and the Indus Valley, to say nothing of  the Axis powers and China and the Communist countries, have no place in  this collage.) Now, it follows that the eighth world power is necessarily  the United Nations - because it springs from the previous seven world powers.

 

“Since these religious organizations claim to represent the true God, the desolator [the beast, or the UN] will act also in hatred against the One whom they pretend to serve. This vicious, beastly attitude against God [is] blaspheming his name." [TW, Dec. 15, 1975, p 7441 God is obliged to destroy the U.N.

 

Meanwhile, what about the Witnesses? One can hardly expect them not to assign themselves a leading role in this theater of the absurd:

 

Should the [Watchtower] Society survive that violent destruction  of Babylon . . . the Society will absolutely refuse to unite itself  [with the UN]. Such a refusal would certainly move the [UN] to take drastic action against the Society and the Christian witnesses of Jehovah whom the Society represents and serves. . . . International action against these announcers of Jehovah's Kingdom . . . would be the way in which the UN "wild beast" fights against the "lamb," the  Lord of Lords and King of kings. . . . Anti-religious political  authorities of the earth will be able to dissolve religious corporations . . .  but never will they be able to dissolve the worldwide brotherhood of  Jehovah's Christian witnesses. [TW, Jan. 15, 1976]

Jehovah's witnesses, sheltered within his Theocratic organization, will be under siege and will seem threatened with destruction by  the overwhelming hosts of . . . Satan. . . . Yet be not anxious . . .  Jehovah will fight the battle for his remnant and their companions.  He will perform his "strange act at Armageddon. [TW, April 1, 1945, pp. 108-09]

 

There will then follow, so the scenario goes, a period of  anarchy. As Charles Taze Russell wrote, "The closing in of this night will  evidently put a stop to any further labor to disseminate the truth, which,  misunderstood by the public generally, will probably be accused of being the  cause of much of the anarchy and confusion then prevailing." (The  Watchtower Society is, and always has been, obsessed with anarchy - to the  extent of imagining that it will be regarded as the cause of anarchy, as  the source of all power failures.)

 

 After all the survivors of Armageddon pile up dead bones and  watch birds feast on the eyes of dead enemies, they will begin, under  the direction of God, to prepare the earth for Paradise. The 1,000-year reign  of Christ will have begun.

 

The Witnesses anticipate the charge that their zest for gore is unbecoming; as if to excuse their God's bloody excesses, they compare  His war to the wars of men:

 

"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." Frightful? Gruesome? Sadistic? Ghoulish? Fiendish? Bible readers in Christendom may express shock at that inspired battle account! . . . How can  they sincerely be shocked, when the so-called "Christian" nations that  they so patriotically support now stand prepared to fight the final  war with . . . flaming napalm bombs . . . with liquid fire belched forth from guns, with corrosive chemical gases, with explosives that will  blast away a person's face so that the surviving victim needs to wear a  mask and be fed intravenously, with nuclear bombs of such enormous power as to make tens of thousands of human creatures disappear  into thin air? How can the supporters of such wartime viciousness find fault with Jehovah of armies? [Paradise Restored to Mankind by Theocracy! (New York: WB & TS, 1972), pp. 389-90]

 

Satan, for the duration of the reign of Christ and his "144,000  royal associates," is "abyssed" before his ultimate annihilation. For a  thousand years, a series of "resurrections" will take place: Brought forth  to "a resurrection of life" will be "the other sheep" who died before  Armageddon and "the faithful men of old" - pre-Christian "Witnesses." Brought  forth to "a resurrection of judgment" will be people "whose hearts may have  been wanting to do right, but who died without ever having had an  opportunity to hear of God's purposes or to learn what he expects of men."  [FPL, p.229]

 

Not to be resurrected - but to sleep forever in uneventful  death - are "those who deliberately and willfully did wrong," those who  "died wicked beyond reform or correction," [Aid, pp. 1399-1400] such star  sinners as Judas, Adam and Eve, those who perished in the Flood and at  Armageddon, and the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah.

 

Those who are "raised," or resurrected, will arrive in fallen, imperfect bodies, but not in the identical bodies they took with them to the grave. God will not collect their scattered atoms; He will "reactivate the life pattern of the creature" which He has stored in His  memory.

 

The logistics of all these resurrections - which will be spaced over a period of 1,000 years - might give population experts a very large headache. Other, less literal, religions might simply trust in God and hope for the good. But the Witnesses have worked it all out in advance, down to the closest half-acre:

 

A very liberal estimate of the number of persons that have ever lived on earth is twenty billion. . . . Not all of these . . .  will receive a resurrection, but even assuming that they did, there would be no problem as to living space and food for them. The land surface of  the earth at present is about 57,000,000 square miles . . . or more  than 36,000,000,000 acres. . . . Even allowing half of that to be set  aside for other uses, there would be more than half an acre . . . for  each person. . . . One-half acre . . . will actually provide much more  than enough food for one person. . .

 

Let us assume that those who compose the "great crowd" of righteous persons who "come out of the great tribulation" on this  system of things alive . . . number one million (about . . . one  thirty-five hundredth of earth's present population). Then if, after allowing,  say, one hundred years spent in their training and "subduing" a  portion of the earth . . . God purposes to bring back three percent of this  number, this would mean that each newly arrived person would be  looked after by thirty-three trained ones. Since a yearly increase of  three percent, compounded, doubles the number about every twenty-four years, the entire twenty billion could be resurrected before five hundred years of Christ's thousand-year reign had elapsed.  [Ibid.]

 

Not all, after these resurrections, is yet perfect: After the  Millennium (during which man will have achieved physical and mental  perfection), God will schedule another test of man's integrity. Satan is "let  loose out of his prison," and he and "his demons come again into the vicinity of  the earth, where they can exert an invisible control over those of mankind  who succumb to them." For reasons that are unclear, "Satan the Devil  will be confident of himself, in spite of the mental, moral, spiritual,  physical perfection of mankind." He will again "challenge God's sovereignty"; the  issue will at last be settled in God's favor. [God's Kingdom of 1000 Years Has Approached (New York: WB&TS, 1973), p.149] Anyone seduced by the Devil  will be consigned to "the second death." (All of this, for anyone who's  interested, is an odd reading of Ezekiel and Revelation.) With God's name  "sanctified forever," Christ will be able to hand over to his Father a  forever-perfect kingdom; and all shall be well, world without end.

 

He hath made everything beautiful in his time. - Ecclesiastes 3:11, KJV

 

Everything he has made pretty in its time. - Ecclesiastes 3:11, NWT

 

The Witnesses' translation of the Old and New Testaments (which  they prefer to call the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures) both diminishes  emotions and - by clever manipulation of words and punctuation unsupported  by unbiased scholars - furthers their own doctrine. (For example,  "Cross" is translated "torture stake"; by a replacement of a comma, the  meaning of Luke 23:43 is changed to destroy the idea that Jesus was offering  the malefactor who died with him immortality: "Verily I say unto thee,  Today shalt thou be with me in paradise." - KJV. "Truly I tell you today, You  will be with me in Paradise. " - NWT.)

 

The Watchtower Society published its translation of the New  Testament (the "Greek Scriptures") in l950 - to something short of critical  acclaim. The Old Testament (the "Hebrew Scriptures") was published in five  volumes from 1953 to 1960, and the entire New World Translation of  the Bible was published in 1961. Prior to 1961 the Society had relied  chiefly on the American Standard Version (1901), primarily because this  translation used the name Jehovah over 6,000 times in the Old Testament.  In 1944, the Society purchased the use of the plates of the American  Standard Version in order to print it on its own presses.

 

But the Society, while acknowledging its indebtedness to other versions of the Bible, found fault with them all - for their "inconsistencies or unsatisfactory renderings, infected with sectarian traditions or worldly philosophies." [All Scrip, p.323]

 

Thus, a decision was made by the Society to bring out its own  translation from the original languages. This New World Translation was  intended to bring the Bible as close to present-day readers as were the original Scriptures to their audience. An announcement was made on  September 3,  1949, at the Society's Brooklyn headquarters that a committee had  completed such a translation and was presenting it to the Society  for publication. The gift also gave the Society complete possession and control of the property, in recognition of its work in spreading knowledge of  the Scriptures. The translation was accepted by the directors of the  Society, who then proceeded to have it published.

 

This bland account implies that Knorr had stumbled upon a work by disinterested (anonymous) translators. The New World Translation  of the Bible was, of course, an in-house version. The "Committee" labored with Knorr peering over their shoulders. All of us who worked at Watcht