WHY THE WATCHTOWER NEEDS CHRISTENDOM
John Sefton
When a visit by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society's agents, or "publishers", occurs they leave behind a definite impression that traditional Christianity, or "Christendom", is a corrupt and apostate religion, existing to subvert the true religion of God, or "Jehovah". There is no doubt that the WBTS sees Christendom as its mortal enemy and the agent of Satan bent on destroying it. Hundreds of pages full of invective and venom directed at Christendom and its "clergy" are published by the WBTS every year. It ranges from the publication of relatively innocuous facts (for example, see AWAKE!, March 22, 1996, Watching The World, More Churches for Sale) suggesting that Christendom has had its day (if so, why does Jehovah need to destroy it at Armageddon?) to full blown denunciation of Christendom and its practices (see The WATCHTOWER, April 15, 1996, Why Worldly Religion Will End).
The paradox of their anti-Christian stance lies in their total dependence upon and inability to withdraw from Christendom. The first part of their dependence upon Christendom comes about because our churches provide the main hunting ground from which they poach their converts. This is because they have no doctrine of regeneration, and therefore they are realistic in appreciating that they would be wasting time in the public bars and ghettoes seeking the lost. However the churches of Christendom have a ready-made pool of basically moral people who don't need a lot of retraining in the area of conduct, and always have a supply of frustrated individuals who don't really understand Christian doctrine or who have no real relationship with Christ to speak of. So the WBTS relies upon Christendom to do the hard work of producing a well-behaved flock from which to steal sheep.
The second part of their reliance upon the Christian church relates to the first. In order to steal our sheep, they need to use our terminology in order to appear to have the food with which to feed the flock. Gone are the days when you could nail the JWs on "being born again", "the blood of the lamb", "salvation by grace" and other important Christian doctrines. All these and many more terms have been adapted in one form or another by the WBTS in the last decade or so, as their awareness of who their target audience really is has increased. No degenerate drunk would care about the use of the term "the blood of Christ" (although he may well care about the benefits to him!), but a church-goer is much more likely to care. Recent Watchtower and AWAKE! articles have addressed issues important to mainstream Christianity such as prayer, bible study and preaching (all with a unique watchtower "spin"), in an attempt to make the stolen sheep of Christendom feel at home in their new pasture (the grass looks real, but so does Astroturf from the right angle!)
The third way in which the WBTS absolutely depends upon Christendom is the way in which they pilfer our scholarship. In any of their heavier books regarding their erroneous doctrines (for example, Should You Believe In The Trinity?, 1989), how many JW "scholars" are quoted? If you guessed "Zero", you were correct! The Watchtower, while having a huge library which most scholars would kill for, has few, if any, scholars to make use of it. However, just as Christendom provides a ready-made pool of well-trained church-goers, it also provides many centuries of bible scholarship. Why waste several years researching Plato's works and their impact on Greek thought in the first century yourself when you can quote (out of context, of course!) one line from a weighty tome by one of Christendom's "intelligentsia" (see for example the way Adolf Harnack is cited on page 11 of Should You Believe In The Trinity?). However, this is not to say that there is no special technique involved in stealing and perverting the intellectual legwork of our scholars. Just as real estate agents' most important creed is summed up in three words "Position! Position! Position!", so is that of the WBTS. The Watchtower's use of the principle is vastly different from that of real estate agents, however, in that the more obscure and inaccessible the position of the quote, the better! The 1969 Kingdom Interlinear in defending its John 1:1 stance made use of a large number of quotes from well known scholars, such as A.T. Robertson, Dana and Mantey and others. The problem with these sources is that they are readily available to any serious student of the Bible, and therefore the out-of-context nature of the quotes is easily exposed by someone possessing, or at least having access to these works. The Watchtower learned its lesson (probably expedited by Julius Mantey's threat to take legal action!) and the most recent Kingdom Interlinear (1985) only (mis)quotes the 1973 article by Phillip B. Harner in the Journal of Biblical Literature. Most Christians would have no idea how to lay hands upon this article (a trip to a good seminary library should suffice), and therefore they have no way to refute the contextualness of the quotes attributed to Harner. The principle is also borne out in the "Trinity" booklet in the way in which the early Church fathers are quoted (again out of context) to appear to lend credence to their assertion that the early Christians did not believe in the Trinity. Once again, the average Protestant would not have the slightest idea what the Fathers said on ANY subject, let alone the Trinity, and so the WBTS has again seemingly shown that the Watchtower grass is palatable to Christendom's sheep.
In conclusion, it is reasonably clear, even from the small amount of evidence cited above that the Watchtower is not an independent religion disseminating new revelation to a needy world, but merely a parasite, depending upon the body of Christ for its nourishment, and if Christendom were to ever die, as the WBTS so gleefully predicts, then they too will die as does any parasite after its host's death. So when the Watchtower's people come to your door next, don't treat them as enemy agents trying to subvert the true faith, but rather as Christendom's lost sheep who were lured from the fold with promises of greener pastures, only to be set upon by ravening wolves. If by our gentle teaching and prayer we can bring only one of them back to the fold, there will be much rejoicing in Heaven (cf. Luke 15:1-7).
