I’m always surprised by the ignorance of most Christians when it comes to Jehovah’s Witnesses. For instance, my wife, who is a cradle Catholic, thought they were Protestants like any others, but ones that just happened to go door-to-door in their evangelization work. She was shocked to find out that they don’t believe in the Trinity or the immortality of the soul. And many people I speak to have no idea that Jehovah’s Witnesses practice a form of shunning against former members (called disfellowshipping). “Like the Amish?” they’ll say.
But the ignorance can go both ways. As a teenage Jehovah’s Witness, I’ll never forget the time in high school when I learned from a Baptist girl that she (and her church) believed in the Trinity. “You believe in that three-headed god?” I asked. “I thought only Catholics believed that!”
As a former Witness, I’d like to present a few of the more salient points you should be aware of when encountering a Witness. This will be a sort of “insider’s perspective” on Witness practice and belief, where I highlight some of the things people unfamiliar with the Witnesses miss when dialoguing with them. It’s not exhaustive, but it is a place to start.
First of all, “the organization,” as it was colloquially referred to by the membership, is a bureaucratic entity that is constantly changing. For decades, the mainstay of JW life was the reporting of “time,” or the hours spent going door-to-door that every Witness in good standing was expected to complete—typically a minimum of eight hours per month. That requirement was done away with recently—an astonishing development, because it was formerly understood to be a directive from Christ Himself (203), with the Watchtower’s detailed instructions on how to properly do it being deeply embedded in Witness praxis.
The shunning practice has undergone a pretty significant modification as well. Among other things, Witnesses are now permitted to say a greeting to the disfellowshipped person (the exception being those disfellowshipped for apostasy). Finally, one of their lingering failed prophecies has been further “adjusted”—namely, that “the generation” that witnessed the events of 1914 would not die prior to the start of the Great Tribulation. It’s now been necessary to posit the existence of “overlapping generations” as a suitable interpretation of “this generation” (Matt. 24:34) to avert systemic doctrinal collapse [i].
Nevertheless, there are a several constants when it comes to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Let’s discuss some common ground we have with Witnesses that you might not be aware of.
What do we have in common with the Witnesses, besides both being lumped into the general category of “Christians”? Witnesses are generally considered “conservative,” and so there is a good deal of overlap regarding traditional morals, with the notable exceptions of our stances on remarriage and contraception. But the major (and perhaps surprising) area of convergence is the similar insistence on membership in a visible, earthly organization as being necessary for salvation. For the Witnesses, the Watchtower organization is God’s dispenser of truth on earth. God leads it into all truth through a gradual process of increasing “light” (Prov. 4:18). “Current understandings” that are suspected by a Witness to be wrong are therefore opportunities to suspend judgment and “wait on Jehovah” to correct matters.
It might be necessary to carefully distinguish this from Catholic teaching. Some Witnesses are aware of certain changes in tone in the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council and will attempt to conflate the two phenomena. Catholics believe in one dogmatic gospel, delivered once and for all by Christ Jesus to his apostles. The understanding of this deposit can deepen, and we’re assured of the Holy Spirit’s guidance in this process, but it can never contradict what came before. And on certain prudential matters, the Church can change her stance as the needs of a particular age may require (on questions of social justice and relations with other faiths, for example). In contrast, Witness dogma can openly contradict what came before it, and Witnesses admit as much, based on their belief in progressive revelation. For example, at one time, Witnesses believed that all Christians would go to heaven upon their deaths. Later, in 1935, they received clarification from God that only 144,000 would do so, and that the rest would live forever on a paradise earth (16).
Despite these crucial differences in our understanding of how revelation works, Catholics can still praise the Witnesses for seeing the need for a concrete, visible faith community with a clear authority structure. Sadly, though, many ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses have not considered the possibility of entering the Catholic Church precisely because they feel so burned by their experience with religious authority in the Witnesses. Presenting a compelling vision of our historic hierarchical structure and how it corrects the deficiencies in the Witness model is therefore something to approach sensitively when talking with ex-Witnesses.
Remember that if a Witness is willing to talk to you at any length about matters of faith, you’ve already made some progress. Being exposed to something different is all it takes to trigger curiosity many times, so just giving him a glimpse of the beauty and depth of Catholicism can often be the best strategy.
[i] The entire modern prophetic chronology of Jehovah’s Witnesses is based on the year 1914 being the start of the Second Coming, or when Christ invisibly returned and chose the Witness organization as his people. The year 1914, in turn, is based on a nineteenth-century miscalculation of the End Times that hinges on ancient Babylon having been destroyed in 607 B.C., whereas virtually all authorities place that event in the year 587 B.C. instead. For a full treatment of the subject, I refer you to Carl Olof Jonsson’s The Gentile Times Reconsidered (Atlanta: Commentary Press, 2004).