by Honesty 7 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
The WTS does not believe the soul is anything other than a person's whole being but they teach that the 144,000 are resurrected to Heaven as immortal beings. Can anyone explain what they really are trying to say?
P.S. I hope this makes a little bit of sense. I am still confused on the biblical basis and logic behind some of their beliefs. Maybe that's why I left.... I didn't wait on Joe Hoba.
The WTS does not believe the soul is anything other than a person's whole being
Breath + Body = Soul
Insight Book Volume 2 p. 1006 Soul ***The Genesis account shows that a living soul results from the combination of the earthly body with the breath of life.
but they teach that the 144,000 are resurrected to Heaven as immortal beings.
No Breath + Spiritual Body = 144,000 = immortal
Can anyone explain what they really are trying to say?
Are you saying that the 144,000 once in heaven are not souls?
I'm not sure what the question is?
Blondie
I get ya, of there is no soul, in that regard, what goes to heaven in the case of the 144,000. Can't say I ever thought of it like that.I would imagine they think the body gets reinvented in spirit form.
The WTS does not believe the soul is anything other than a person's whole being but they teach that the 144,000 are resurrected to Heaven as immortal beings. Can anyone explain what they really are trying to say?
As a JW, I always thought the reason for this was that as soon as they died, their very being would change from a tangible creature-body to a spirit-body as per 1 Cor. 15: 50-52 " However, this I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit God's kingdom, neither does corruption inherit incoruption. Look! I tell you a sacred secret: We shall not fall asleep (in death), but we shall be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, during the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised up incorruptible, and we shall be changed". NWT
Sure seems like a "soul" to me!
HappyDad
The teaching is that those who die exist only in God?s memory (hopefully) until they are resurrected. Once resurrected, whether to heavenly life as spirit creatures or earthly life as humans they again are living souls. It?s hard to comprehend how a resurrected YOU is really YOU and not a clone but it really will be YOU and all without the existence of an immortal soul. With God, all things are possible whether we understand them or not.
FairMind
they get this from where it speaks in the bible about the gloified bodies, at least I would think cause of what it says about christ had when he defeated death. Jw dont teach about the gloified body of christ but that he was a spirit I must contradict that will how christ was able to eat and drink with the diciples.
just some thoughts from conversations and reading on the JWs
mnb77
I am working on a massive thread on the subject of immortality and resurrection in the Bible (prolly the longest post I've ever written). For now, I'll say that the Watchtower idea of resurrection is very different from that in the Bible or in second-Temple Judaism. It is actually not resurrection at all, but recreation. The promise of resurrection is of a renewed embodied life after death. In the interval between death and resurrection, the person waiting to be resurrected is not non-existent but rather in an intermediate state, variously in Sheol/Hades, "under the altar", heaven, and so forth (cf. Isaiah 14:9-18; Wisdom 3:1-4; 1 Enoch 22:1-14, 103:3-8; Testament of Abraham 20:14; 4 Maccabees 13:13-17; 4 Ezra 7:28-32; 2 Baruch 30:1-3; Josephus, Jewish War, 3.163, 374; Pseudo-Philo, Biblical Antiquities 23:13; Luke 16:19-31; Revelation 6:9-11; 1 Clement 50:3-5); the expectation of immediate post-mortem existence is also evident in Acts 12:14-16, 2 Corinthians 5, and other texts. Resurrection restores embodiment (as a gift from God) to the dead and thus delivers them from Sheol/Hades and brings them back to life. There might be physical continuity (cf. Ezekiel 37, as interpreted in Pharisaic Judaism; 2 Maccabees 14:3-6), or the bodies God might bestow to the dead are superior to the original bodies they had. But there is always continuity of some sort. Those "sleeping in death" referred to in Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:18, 20; 1 Thessalonians 4:14-15) are those awaiting a resurrection, they are not non-existent; the metaphor of "sleep" implies the existence of the one who is "sleeping". Interestingly, the Jews who explicitly denied the existence of an afterlife ? specifically the Sadducees (who were influenced by Epicureanism) ? also denied the resurrection (cf. Acts 23:8, Josephus, Jewish War 2.165; b Sanhedrin 90b). The Society has basically adopted a view similar to the Sadduceans that nothing personal can survive death (the proto-Sadducean manifesto Ecclesiastes constituting the main proof-text, which itself denies the possibility of a return from death), but since the NT overwhelmingly endorses the Pharisaic belief in the resurrection, the Society has invented a doctrine of recreation that masquarades as resurrection but which absolutely is not the Judeo-Christian belief in resurrection because it denies any continuity between the original and the future copy either in terms of (1) body or (2) soul or spirit. The Society claims that the resurrected person will be an exact (tho improved) replica of the original because God has remembered every detail of the original person and has kept that information stored in his "memory". Nowhere in the Bible is such a notion found at all. In fact, their favorite proof-text against the existence of an afterlife is devastating to such a view:
"The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 9:5-9).
The belief in the resurrection, btw, was not a monolithic entity but a dynamic varying system of beliefs ? so that some described the resurrection in terms of Plato's immortality of the soul doctrine (cf. Wisdom and Josephus), some believed that resurrection would restore their original bodies (cf. 2 Maccabees, the "Empty Tomb" stories in the gospels which assumed that Jesus' body had been resurrected), others believed that the resurrection would transform or bestow them with new angelic bodies (cf. 2 Baruch, 1 Corinthians 15), some believed that the intermediate state was mere sleep while others believed that there would be rewards and punishments during the interval before resurrection. The belief in the resurrection was also tied to varying cosmic eschatologies that posited the resurrection as an event occuring during Judgment Day and which results in embodied state of eternal bliss or eternal punishment (cf. Matthew, on the "body" going to Gehenna). Despite this variety in belief, the resurrection was never conceptualized as a disembodied existence (as the Society claims was the case in Jesus' resurrection), or as the creation of new individuals lacking any essential continuity with the original individuals. That's not what resurrection was about. It was about bringing the original people who once lived "back to life".
The WTS does not believe the soul is anything other than a person's whole being but they teach that the 144,000 are resurrected to Heaven as immortal beings. Can anyone explain what they really are trying to say?
You're absolutely right. It is a contradiction and pure hypocracy. I just completed an in-depth paper on the subject.
http://www.soul.host-ed.me/index.html
While traditional Christians teach that man has a soul - the non-material essence and ego of man which survives death and can go to heaven as an invisible spirit creature - the Jehovah's Witnesses believe, and teach, that no such soul exists; that upon death all of man, every vestige of the human being, including his soul, is annihilated and becomes extinct. They believe that Christendom's notion of a soul, particularly an immortal soul, is the work of the devil and a myth devised by Satan to mislead mankind. However, on examining the Jehovah's Witnesses' own theories in this regard, the Watchtower Society's double standard becomes self-evident because they also teach that their resurrected 144,000 Jehovah's Witnesses (who alone go to heaven) began to be resurrected to heaven as invisible spirit creatures in 1918, and today are being resurrected as invisible spirit creatures bound for heaven, writing, “He [Christ] went to prepare a heavenly place for his associate heirs, ‘Christ’s body,’ for they too will be invisible spirit creatures” (Let God Be True, p.138).
In other words, in the traditional Christian world a redeemed man dies and his invisible soul (spirit) goes to an intermediate state where it waits. In the Watchtower World a man dies (one of the so-called 144,000) and his invisible spirit goes to a heavenly afterlife also. Regardless of the labels the Jehovah's Witnesses place on this process, such as calling theirs a “resurrection,” the point is that the process is exactly the same: man dies, invisible spirit goes to the afterlife.
With the exception of a few irrelevant labels placed on the process by the Jehovah's Witnesses, there is absolutely no difference in the core concept of a soul (spirit) surviving the body, except the Jehovah's Witnesses claim that with respect to mainstream Christians it doesn't happen at all, and can't happen, and is a lie perpetuated by Satan, but with respect to their 144,000 Jehovah's Witnesses it is happening as we speak, and is sanctioned and performed by God Almighty. It is the extent of such blatant hypocrisy which prompted me to explore in detail the Jehovah's Witnesses' false teaching that man does not have a soul (spirit) that survives death.
