HE INITALLY BELIEVED IN IT, BUT ABANDON THE DOCTRINE LATER.
WHY?
WHY DID RUSSELL ABANDON TRINITARIANISM?
by badboy 11 Replies latest jw friends
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BurnTheShips
Enquiring minds want to know.....
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deaconbluez
Because he believed whatever Nelson Barbour told him to believe.
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NeonMadman
I heard an interesting talk by Jim Bjornstad of the faculty of Cedarville University on this topic at the Witnesses Now for Jesus conference a few years ago. His argument was more detailed, but the bare bones of it was that much of JW doctrine, including denial of the Trinity, flows from Russell's adamant denial of eternal punishment.
The idea of no eternal punishment leads right into the idea of the dead being unconscious, since the punishment for the wicked must be annihilation. If the dead are unconscious, that implies that Jesus was also unconscious (and therefore, for practical purposes, ceased to exist) for 3 days in the tomb. But if Jesus ceased to exist, He could not be God, therefore the Trinity must be false.
It's roundabout reasoning, and Bjornstad went into a lot more detail as to why one belief flows from the other, but that was the gist of it.
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jaguarbass
I dont think anyone can come up with a religion and capsulize what the bible says because the bible is all over the place. It was written by a bunch of people who did not consult with each other and they were writing their views on the unknown and unkowable especially at the time.
The bible is used to support slavery and to support freedom.
It supports hell and it supports eternal sleep.
Pick and choose what you want to believe and the bible will support it.
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fjtoth
There is another thread devoted to this question at http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/12/149946/1.ashx.
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RR
HE INITALLY BELIEVED IN IT, BUT ABANDON THE DOCTRINE LATER.
WHY?
Hmmm ... what makes you think he believed it? Unless you are referring to his days as before the Watchtower. Nothing in his writings suggest that he believed the doctrine during his Watchtower years.
Although John Patton, a founding father of the Watchtower was a trinitarian. RR -
Narkissos
I have been reading a few things on the 19th-century history of French Protestantism lately (not one of the topics I am usually most interested in), and I came to realise that the Trinity debate was much more of a theological issue back then than I would have thought. Many "liberal" Protestant preachers attacked "orthodoxy" on the Trinity doctrine as the foremost example of the absurdity and contradictions of traditional dogma. Of course their main point was to present Jesus as a mere man (with many shades of nuances). And this was not limited to France (think of influential liberal "unitarians" like Emerson and Channing). I now come to think that under their influence, among other things, anti-trinitarianism may have become quite popular, and that some Protestant sectarians (who in many ways were at the opposite end of the spectrum from liberalism) may have been tempted to ride the tide as well, by offering a fundamentalistic brand of anti-trinitarianism.
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badboy
BTTTT
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proplog2
I would call myself a quaternitarian. Father = Love (the uniting ground of all existence) Son = Wisdom (the creative aspect of the universe) Spirit = Power (the flow of energy) Devil = Justice (Evil is done to assert the "self" and stop the world from impinging too deeply)