Dontomas, your questionning what hes telling you, dosen't that ring alarm bells? Has this site not enlightened you to the plain facts that 99% of the people on this site have had a NEGATIVE experience with the JW's as people and as a religion. We don;t make this stuff up you know! It is a controlling dominating set of beliefs that have little to none at all basis on Scriptual Teachings. I suggest for your own sanity you cease now whilst your at least still in control of your thought processes. And sure the Elders studying with you are nice, theyre grooming you, like a new whore, once your baptised your on your own buddy, just wait for the criticism, the arrogance and finally the post traumatic stress disorder that plagues most of us. Sorry to be blunt amigo, but take it from an old company man, raised in the 'Dub Way, Its not a religion, its a Publishing Corporation, religion is the selling hook!
Should You Believe In The Trinity? - Maybe
by dontomas 33 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
-
-
Hellrider
DonTomas, for Gods sake, with the intelligence you obviously have, in light of your good questions, do not continue your study with that elder! Kid - A gave you some good answers. There has also been many threads concerning the Trinity. Personally I can`t decide about the Trinity. To sum it up: The JW-view on trinity could be right - but in that case, that`s the only thing they got right! - As they are so ... endlessly... wrong on everything else! ( - the cross vs stake, the ridicolous 607bc-claim, the "day for a year"-crap, 1914, the name of God, the name of God in the NT etc etc etc ad infinitum). Check out this thread: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/12/98558/1.ashx ..and read especially all posts (on the entire forum, actually) written by Leolaia, Narkissos and Joseph Malik.
Oh, and Defd:
Please kid a spare me. I can just see it now. He gonna get baptised even though he doesnt agree with everything stay in the truth for 10 yrs and then leave. Then come on here and complain how he was brainwashed and wasted all those yrs in a cult. If he dont agree, then STOP! that simple.
I take insult in that reply of yours, as there is an underlying statement in it: That all people on this board only have "themselves to blame". That`s just utter BS! I, along with many others on this board, was BORN into you ridicolous, satanic, life-defying DEATH-CULT! So take your crap somewhere else, you little retard!!!
-
dontomas
H-Rider - Thanks for leading me to the very thought-provoking thread that I hope to read completely sometime today. I am truly sorry that so many people have had miserable experiences with WT, et al. and I have really taken that into account. The comment on church viz. publishing company is something that had not occured to me before.
I am very fond of a lot of the things I read in WT publications and find the direct lessons from the word to be refreshing as opposed to the mealy politically motivated blabber I am hearing within Christendom these days. I love God's Word and wish to draw more upon it. Watchtower magazine has helped me do this to some extent.
That said, however, you dont' have to eat the whole apple to know that it is rotten. If one is dishonest in small things like the cross issue, it generally extends to "big" things like the nature of God and impending doom.
Like I said, I think I am done with this. Thanks for expanding my perspective.
God Bless All Here
Don Tomas
-
mrsjones5
Nice to meet you Dontomas.
Wow, defd is posting on a Saturday!
-
Narkissos
Welcome dontomas,
I am very fond of a lot of the things I read in WT publications and find the direct lessons from the word to be refreshing as opposed to the mealy politically motivated blabber I am hearing within Christendom these days. I love God's Word and wish to draw more upon it. Watchtower magazine has helped me do this to some extent.
The problem with WT literature is that it usually makes a partial and biased use of scattered Bible texts, taken out of their original context and arranged in thematic order. At first sight this may seem convenient, but it is utterly deceptive. This leads people to think that those texts were meant to answer the WT's questions the WT way. As a result, most JWs think they know the Bible whereas they only know a patchwork of "verses" backing up a particular catechism. Even if they eventually come to read the Bible in its entirety, they do so with this previously learnt catechism in mind -- which makes Bible reading exceedingly difficult and obscure. And so they have to come back to WT literature to "explain" (explain away, actually) the so-called "difficult texts" -- most of which only seem "difficult" because of that catechism. Actually they cannot get the thrust of most texts as getting it would ruin the catechism.
As to the Trinity issue, I would just emphasise that the trinitarian debate reflects 4th-century thinking. The NT, on the other hand, is made of a variety of texts and thinkings from the 1st and 2nd century. Asking the answer to a 4th-century question from 1st- or 2nd-century texts naturally leads to startling and contradictory results.
The WT approach is: 1) ask a doctrinal question in WT terms, then 2) quote verses which appear to back up the WT answer, then 3) explain away the texts which seem to conflict with the WT "Bible-based" answer.
The Bible approach I would recommend instead is: don't start with questions; read one complete Bible book after another in a reader-friendly translation (or, better, several translations) and let the questions come up from your reading; when something puzzles you (which will not happen so often as you might think), check the footnotes in a scientific study Bible to get some historical and literary background; if this is not enough, check scientific commentaries (there are tons of very valuable tools).
-
Leolaia
NT christology is a complex and difficult issue because different Christians had different ideas about Jesus' nature and identity (a diversity of opinion reflected in the story in Mark 8:27-30, Luke 9:18-21, Matthew 16:12-17, Gospel of Thomas 13:1-5). One could thus engage in one of two projects: (1) Try to understand how each author approached the issue individually, or (2) Develop a harmonizing christology that tries to combine these different perspectives into a single belief about who Jesus is and how he relates to God. The latter approach is what the Nicene-era church was engaged in (having defined a canon of accepted NT scripture that could be exploited as proof texts), and it is what most other churches have done....including the JWs. Each comes up with a different christology by privileging certain texts over others and making "problematic" texts fit into the overall picture by taking them out of context, coming up with a novel interpretation of certain key words or phrases, or finding an ingenious way to translate them based on either the textual tradition or certain technical grammatical rules. The Nicene-era church, as well as the Arians and the JWs today, interpreted NT texts in ways likely divergent from how they were originally understood. I am personally more interested in getting at the christological diversity of the early church and recognize that divergences in christological thought do exist, but if I had to choose on a "harmony" I would probably lean more towards binitarianism at the very least, if not trinitarianism. The bulk of the NT (Paul and the Johannine writings, at least) presents a higher christology than found, for instance, in Ebionite sources. Most of the major ingredients of second-century trinitarianism (and later Nicene trinitarianism) is found in the NT....however none of these are worked into any systematic theology as found in the later period. Instead there is a naive faith which is individually expressed in varying and often highly creative ways (think of Ignatius, for instance).
The Trinity broshure is indeed quite dishonest in its use of patristic sources...I personally was quite upset about it at the time the broshure was released, as I had already read many of these sources and knew already that they were being mischaracterized. Not only were the statements in themselves inaccurate (i.e. Justin Martyr did not say that Jesus was a "created angel"; he said that the Son, as Angel and God, was begotten "before all creatures", Dialogue 61), they omitted ENTIRELY any notion that these very same writers referred to Jesus as God, or that Tertullian expressed an explicit trinitarian theology (tho a quite different theory than later Nicene-era writers).
The Society also is dishonest and plays word games on the relatively insignificant matter of the "cross" (tho the dishonesty is a big deal);
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/92381/1.ashx
And check out the very erroneous (if not dishonest) claims about the word parousia:
-
Cygnus
Leolaia is much smarter than I. All I can say is I recognized the Society to be dishonest when arguing against the trinity, but that doesn't make it untrue. It has its own internal logic, but a lot of its statements are far-fetched. The Jon 8:58 example is the worst. John 1:1 can be "a god" grammatically and trinitarians dislike it on purely thelogical grounds, even though they don't fully understand JW christology very well.
A Jew once told me that the Messiah being YHWH is anathema to them. I don't see anything in the OT that says the Messiah was already alive in heaven. People have bastardized John's prologue (the pronoun is neuter, i.e. "it (the LOGOS) created all things"and 1 Colossians (which speaks of the new creation, not the creation of the universe). If I were a believer I'd seriously consider the fact that Jesus came into existence when he was born, as do Christiadelphians and Abramahic Faith.
-
Narkissos
People have bastardized John's prologue (the pronoun is neuter, i.e. "it (the LOGOS) created all things"
Nope. Logos is masculine in Greek -- even though an English translation may arguably use the neuter as referring to "the Word," just as many French translations use the feminine (la Parole).
and 1 Colossians (which speaks of the new creation, not the creation of the universe)
Quite a wild assertion if you refer to Colossians 1:15ff.
-
Honesty
I'm with Kid-A on the NWT. It is a terrible translation that even a 1st year Greek or Hebrew college student is able to academically refute with no problem. Personally, I did not believe that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were one when I was a JW until I started reading the bible like a book. I then realised that God means for it to be read and understood by even the simplest person. The bible teaches that they are one and the same.
Want to blow the JW elder away? Ask him about 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 and John 21:17.
*** Rbi8 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 ***
16 Do YOU not know that YOU people are God’s temple, and that the spirit of God dwells in YOU? 17 If anyone destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him; for the temple of God is holy, which [temple] YOU people are.*** Rbi8 John 21:17 ***
So he said to him: “Lord, you know all things; you are aware that I have affection for you.”He'll try to say that it applies only to 144,000 people and then he'll do some squirming on what it means because WT doctrine refutes that God is omnipresent and omniscient.
-
stillajwexelder
He gonna get baptised even though he doesnt agree with everything stay in the truth for 10 yrs and then leave. Then come on here and complain how he was brainwashed and wasted all those yrs in a cult. If he dont agree, then STOP! that simple.
But I was advised exactly that by two presiding overseers when I was studying many years ago. The truth is great way of living I was advsied. Carry on going on the ministry and being on the TMS and answering even though I did not agree with everything. I was shown the words of the apostle Peter to Jesus