aqwsed12345

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  57

  How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  simply put; gullible people were told if they chose life on earth instead of heaven, they wouldn't have to die.

  that's how they sold it.

  the watchtower lied to people in the 1920 booklet and convention series titled "millions now living will never die!

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  aqwsed12345

  @Touchofgrey

  Your attempted deconstruction of the “minimal facts” approach is a textbook illustration of modern internet atheism: it relies not on sustained argument, but on rhetorical gestures, appeals to authority without substance, and a selective, historically illiterate skepticism that evaporates the moment you are asked to apply it outside the New Testament. Let’s dissect the carcass of this response, and see what remains once the handwaving and bluff is swept away.

  1. The “Too Minimal” Objection: A Category Mistake

  Your chief objection, endlessly repeated, is that the “minimal facts” approach fails because non-believing scholars who accept the facts remain unconvinced of the resurrection. This is not a refutation of the facts, but a comment on the interpretative frameworks scholars bring to the evidence. The entire point of the approach is to isolate a core set of historical data so widely accepted (even by critical scholars) that any adequate explanatory model must account for them. The question then becomes: What best explains these facts? That some scholars reject the resurrection despite the data is entirely predictable, given a methodological naturalism that excludes miracles a priori. You are confusing the fact of scholarly disagreement (a constant in every discipline) with the bankruptcy of the evidence itself. The same “method” would dissolve all of ancient history: Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon is accepted by most, but revisionists remain. So what?

  Further, your claim that “if a non-believing scholar accepts the facts and doesn’t convert, the argument fails” is embarrassingly naïve about the function of evidence in rational persuasion. Scholars do not operate in a worldview vacuum. That one can refuse the resurrection for philosophical reasons while accepting the facts does not refute the evidential weight of those facts. It exposes, rather, the presuppositional blinkers of contemporary secularism.

  2. The Myth of “No Evidence Outside the Bible”: Double Standard and Ignorance

  The repeated claim that the minimal facts “all come from the Bible, so they don’t count” is the height of methodological hypocrisy. First, the New Testament is not “one book” but a collection of multiple, independent sources (Paul’s letters, Synoptics, John, Acts, and more) written by different authors, to different audiences, in different genres, all within a generation or two of the events. To dismiss these as “not evidence” because they are “in the Bible” is as silly as dismissing Tacitus’s Annals because they are “in a Roman book.” The Gospels are ancient biographies and epistolary literature written in the genre and conventions of their age—precisely how we know of any figure in the ancient world.

  Moreover, external corroboration exists: Josephus and Tacitus (despite atheist efforts to dismiss or minimize), Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and even the hostile Talmudic references collectively affirm the core elements: Jesus existed, was crucified, his followers proclaimed his resurrection, and this movement exploded in the immediate aftermath. If you dismissed every ancient historical fact that is as well-attested as Jesus’ death by crucifixion, you would be left in a sea of agnosticism so deep you’d drown before breakfast.

  3. “Appeal to Authority” and Scholarly Consensus

  The complaint that “scholarly consensus is irrelevant” is a game you would never play with evolutionary biology, the historicity of Alexander the Great, or any consensus you personally accept. When Habermas and others report that the vast majority of relevant scholars—regardless of theological commitment—accept certain facts (e.g., Jesus’ death by crucifixion, the empty tomb, post-mortem appearances), this is a report of mainstream academic judgment, not a naked “appeal to authority.” You then engage in a bait-and-switch: you demand a unanimity that no field in the humanities ever achieves, then fault Christian apologists for not meeting your ad hoc standard. This is intellectual bad faith, not argument.

  4. “The Gospels Are Not Independent Accounts”

  You parade the old canard that the Gospels are just “four versions of the same story,” not independent witnesses. This betrays a total unfamiliarity with the literature on ancient historiography. Multiple attestation (independent sources or traditions affirming the same core events) is a bedrock criterion in all ancient historical research. Matthew, Luke, and John draw on independent traditions; Paul’s letters are indisputably independent and predate the Gospels; early creeds embedded in the Pauline epistles (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:3-8) are recognized by skeptical scholars like Gerd Lüdemann and Bart Ehrman as pre-Pauline, i.e., within a few years of the crucifixion. To compare this level of attestation unfavorably to, say, the death of Socrates or the campaigns of Hannibal is an act of selective skepticism bordering on farce.

  Your “testimony about testimony isn’t evidence” move would vaporize the entire discipline of ancient history. We have no contemporaneous, “firsthand” written accounts of Caesar crossing the Rubicon; we have what later historians wrote, based on earlier (now lost) sources, oral tradition, and public knowledge. To dismiss the Gospel accounts as “not evidence” because they reflect the memory of the early Christian community is to erase all of history prior to the modern era.

  5. The Empty Tomb and Resurrection Appearances

  You claim there is no evidence for the empty tomb or resurrection appearances outside the New Testament, and that even within, it’s just “what people believed.” But this is how all ancient history is reconstructed: by testimony, corroboration, and the explanatory power of hypotheses. What makes the resurrection appearances unique is not that people believed in a resurrection—Jewish and pagan parallels do not resemble the explosive and world-altering character of the Christian claim—but that skeptical, even hostile witnesses (e.g., James, Paul) are themselves convinced and transformed. The “legendary accretion” hypothesis is utterly unable to account for the speed, geographical breadth, and social cost of the resurrection proclamation.

  6. Paul’s Testimony and Apostolic Witness

  You object that Paul was “not one of the twelve,” and that his testimony is suspect. This, again, misses the point. Paul’s independence from the original circle is what gives his testimony added weight: a persecutor, turned convert, with direct contact with Peter and James within a few years of the events (cf. Galatians 1-2). His letters contain creedal formulas recognized as earliest of all, far predating the Gospels. The claim that “none of the apostles left written testimony” is simply false: Peter and John’s authorship of epistles is far better attested than most classical authorship traditions. Moreover, the primitive Christian kerygma is demonstrably early, pre-literary, and built around resurrection conviction—not legendary aggrandizement. To dismiss all apostolic tradition as “fraudulent” or “forgery” is convenient for your skepticism, but requires you to level the same charge at every document of antiquity whose direct provenance is unclear.

  7. The “Believers Only” Gambit and the Smokescreen of Superstition

  You dismiss the evidential force of resurrection belief on the grounds that “ancient people were superstitious, so their beliefs don’t matter.” This is cultural chauvinism disguised as argument. The early Christians were not credulous; Second Temple Judaism had no category for an individual rising from the dead before the general resurrection. The resurrection claim was as scandalous, counterintuitive, and disruptive then as now. That they believed—and died for—the claim is not an argument for the truth of any miracle claim, but evidence of the distinctive and catalytic impact of a specific event they regarded as fact.

  8. Epistemic Circularity? A Failure to Grasp Historical Method

  You charge “circularity” because Christians use the biblical texts as evidence. This is false. The “minimal facts” approach makes no assumption of inspiration or inerrancy; it treats the New Testament as what it manifestly is: a diverse collection of ancient documents, evaluated by the same critical criteria as Josephus or Tacitus. Only a mind determined to disbelieve could find “circularity” in treating ancient texts as evidence for the events they purport to describe.

  9. Your Standard: Radical Skepticism for the New Testament, Gullibility for Everything Else

  You repeatedly demand standards for Christian claims you would never apply to your own beliefs about ancient or even modern history. You demand “external corroboration,” “firsthand testimony,” “unanimous scholarly agreement,” and a total absence of textual transmission or interpretive dispute. Yet you have no parallel skepticism about your knowledge of Caesar, Alexander, Socrates, or your own family genealogy. Your methodology, in short, is not a recipe for rationality, but for nihilism.

  10. Miracles and the Philosophical Bankruptcy of Methodological Naturalism

  You close by insisting “atheists don’t believe in miracles,” as if this were an argument. But that is precisely the point at issue: if God exists, miracles are possible, and if a miracle is the best explanation of the historical evidence, a worldview that rejects it out of hand is simply dogmatic naturalism masquerading as rationality. The question is not what your metaphysical prejudices allow, but what the evidence, honestly weighed, actually points to.

  Conclusion

  The minimal facts argument is not “minimal results for minimal minds,” but a deliberate effort to bracket confession and test the core of Christian claims by the strictest standards available—your own standards, in fact. If you want to retreat into solipsism, denying that any historical event can be known, so be it; but if you grant that ancient history is accessible to rational inquiry, you are forced to reckon with the resurrection claim as one of the best-attested, most transformative, and rationally explicable events in the historical record.

  Your entire response, stripped of bluster, is an exercise in strategic skepticism, not critical thought. Until you can apply your “method” consistently, or offer an alternative that actually explains the data without ad hoc recourse to skepticism, the intellectual foundations of Christianity—and the unique explanatory power of the resurrection—stand unshaken.
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  66

  Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

  by BoogerMan in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  (matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

  (jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

  (acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

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  aqwsed12345

  @slimboyfat

  The antithesis you propose rests on two passages—John 13 and John 14 —read in isolation, lifted from their literary and theological setting, and treated as though the Fourth Gospel were a string of pro-Trinitarian and anti-Trinitarian slogans. Proper exegesis cannot proceed by extracting a single clause (“the messenger is not greater than the one who sent him,” “the Father is greater than I”) and allowing that clause, abstracted from both context and Christology, to overrule the evangelist’s own overarching depiction of Jesus. It is precisely because the early Church took the total Johannine witness with absolute seriousness that it repudiated Arianism and eventually employed Chalcedonian language to articulate who the incarnate Son is. To grasp why your reading fails, one must attend to (i) literary context, (ii) semantic nuance, and (iii) Johannine theology as a whole.

  John 13 is an enacted parable: the incarnate Lord kneels to wash the disciples’ feet, then explains that his gesture is paradigmatic for their own life of humble service. He therefore frames the lesson in proverbial form: “A slave is not greater than his master, nor a messenger (apostolos) greater than the one who sent him.” The point is hortatory, not metaphysical. Jesus does not here undertake an ontological taxonomy of masters versus slaves or senders versus agents; he reinforces the moral inversion he has just dramatized. To wrench the proverb out of its parenetic setting and make it a metaphysical proof that every “sent one” is by nature inferior to the sender is to miss the rhetorical genre entirely. The same Gospel has already declared of the Son, “Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (5:23)—an impossible formulation if “sending” entailed ontological inferiority. Indeed, the evangelist insists in the same chapter that the Son does “whatever the Father does” (5:19); such unrestricted sharing of the divine prerogative cannot be squared with creaturely status.

  John 14 is uttered the night before the cross, in the very discourse where Jesus promises the Paraclete and foretells his own glorification. “The Father is greater than I” is thus spoken at the climax of the Son’s self-emptying mission, moments before Gethsemane. Patristic writers from Athanasius through Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria recognized the obvious: one must distinguish the eternal Son “in the μορφή of God” (Phil 2:6) from the same Son who, “having taken the form of a servant,” now stands poised to suffer. It is the condescended, incarnate economy—his visible, kenotic state—that is decidedly less “great” than the ineffable glory in which he subsists ab aeterno with the Father. Two chapters later Jesus will pray, “Glorify me, Father, with the glory that I had with you before the world existed” (17:5), explicitly locating that pre-temporal glory on the same side of the Creator–creature divide as the Father’s own majesty. The evangelist gives no hint that Jesus was ever a mere creature subsequently “promoted”; rather, the Son voluntarily “came forth from the Father and has come into the world” (16:28). The Church Fathers therefore read “greater” (meízōn) as a relational predicate applicable to the condition of the incarnate Son, not a denial of the one divine essence (ousia) that Father and Son hold indivisibly.

  Your appeal to “common sense” is simply an appeal to an unexamined anthropological model of mission. In human affairs, yes, the sender often outranks the envoy; but Scripture itself furnishes counter-examples in which the envoy’s status equals or even exceeds that of the sender (Joseph sent by Pharaoh with plenipotentiary power; the Davidic king sent as Yahweh’s vice-regent). More to the point, intra-Trinitarian sending cannot be mapped one-to-one onto creaturely analogies, because the divine processions differ categorically: the Son’s being-from-the-Father is an eternal, indivisible communication of the divine nature. The temporal mission simply manifests that eternal relation within history. Hence Augustine’s dictum in De Trinitate: missio sequitur originem—mission follows upon, but does not diminish, eternal generation.

  Finally, if one actually follows John’s narrative arc, the cumulative Christological data insist on equality of essence: the Word was God (1:1); the Son gives life as the Father does (5:21); the Son, like the Father, is to be “honored” with the honor due to God alone (5:23); Isaiah’s vision of Yahweh’s glory is said to be the Son’s glory (12:41); Thomas confesses the risen Christ as ho Theós (20:28) and the author ratifies that confession. Any interpretation of 13:16 or 14:28 that reverses those affirmations places the reader, not the evangelist, in the seat of judgment.

  Therefore, the “greater than” proof-text, rehearsed ad nauseam since the days of Arius, fails to trouble Chalcedonian Christology for the simple reason that it misconstrues genre, ignores context, and truncates the wider theological horizon of John’s Gospel. The Church reads Scripture neither by suppressing “common sense” nor by clinging to one-line slogans, but by listening to the full symphony of revelation—a symphony in which the incarnate humility of the Son never negates, but precisely reveals, the eternal glory he shares with the Father.
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  65

  Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  here's how this verse should read: .

  take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the holy ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of god, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

  - kjvhere's how it reads in the nwt: pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the holy spirit has appointed you overseers, to shepherd the congregation of god, which he purchased with the blood of his own son.. here is how it reads in the kjv with the greek keyed to strong's: take heedg4337 thereforeg3767 unto yourselves,g1438 andg2532 to allg3956 theg3588 flock,g4168 overg1722 the whichg3739 theg3588 holyg40 ghostg4151 hath madeg5087 youg5209 overseers,g1985 to feedg4165 theg3588 churchg1577 of god,g2316 whichg3739 he hath purchasedg4046 withg1223 his owng2398 blood.g129 .

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  aqwsed12345

  @slimboyfat

  The assertion that the phrase “his own” (tou idiou) in Acts 20:28 is merely an idiomatic expression for “his own Son” and not a direct ascription of divinity to the crucified Christ is not supported by the primary philological, textual, and early patristic evidence. While it is true that languages often use possessive pronouns in an idiomatic way, a rigorous examination of the Greek text, its syntactical structure, and its context within both the Lukan corpus and the broader NT canon strongly favors the traditional reading: that it is the Son—who is called “God” in this passage—who sheds “his own blood.”

  First, it is essential to address the Greek grammar directly. The phrase tou idiou (“his own”) functions here as an adjective modifying “blood” (haimatos), not as a substantival noun for “Son.” If Luke had intended to specify “Son,” the expected Greek would be tou idiou huiou (“of his own Son”), which we do not find in any extant manuscript tradition. The theory that huiou (“Son”) dropped out by accident due to homoioteleuton (similar endings causing a copyist’s error) is not only speculative but contradicted by the remarkable textual stability of this verse. In fact, every Greek manuscript we possess, as well as the earliest Sahidic Coptic and Peshitta Syriac versions, omits “Son.” To suggest otherwise is to substitute conjecture for hard textual evidence.

  The analogy proposed, that “his own” is akin to the idiom “we look after our own,” misses the particularity of the Lukan construction. The phrase “with his own blood” (dia tou haimatos tou idiou) does not occur in a vacuum; similar constructions in the NT—such as dia tou idiou haimatos (“through his own blood,” Hebrews 13:12)—unambiguously attribute the blood to the subject of the clause, not to an unexpressed relative. Furthermore, the attempt to read “his own” as a substantive (i.e., “his own one,” meaning “Son”) lacks corroborating parallels in the NT. Nowhere is Christ called ho idios (“the own one”) as a title, whereas terms like “the Beloved” or “the Righteous One” have multiple, uncontested occurrences. The attempt to make idios serve as a substantive title for Christ is a modern invention, unsupported by early Christian usage.

  Moreover, the historical context and the reception of this verse in the patristic era further strengthen the traditional reading. Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the early second century, famously refers to “the blood of God” (tou haimatos tou theou) in his Letter to the Ephesians (1:1), a phrase that would have been scandalous if not grounded in apostolic tradition. Ignatius was writing to the very community to which Paul addresses the elders in Acts 20:28, indicating a theological and linguistic continuity. Early Christian writers were acutely aware of the metaphysical distinction between the Father and the Son (contra patripassianism), yet they consistently used language attributing divinity to the suffering Christ without confusion of persons. The doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, articulated explicitly at the Council of Chalcedon (451), maintains that what is predicated of Christ’s humanity may be predicated of the single person of the Word. Thus, while the divine nature itself does not bleed or die, the person who is the Son of God (and therefore God by nature) can be said to have shed blood—God’s blood—by virtue of the hypostatic union.

  It is also crucial to recognize that the argument does not rest on a supposed confusion of persons within the Trinity. Trinitarian orthodoxy explicitly denies that the Father suffered on the Cross (a heresy called patripassianism or modalism). Rather, it is the Son who, being consubstantial with the Father (“God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”), took on human nature and in that nature suffered and died. The apostolic and patristic tradition does not hesitate to speak of the crucified as “God,” for it is the person of the Word, not the essence of divinity, who endures the Passion. Therefore, Acts 20:28 is a forceful testimony, not to the death of the Father, but to the divinity of the Son: the Church is purchased with “the blood of his own”—namely, God’s own blood, shed by the incarnate Word.

  From the standpoint of systematic theology and exegesis, the anti-Trinitarian interpretation relies not on a close reading of the Greek but on an a priori theological commitment to denying the full deity of Christ. This is precisely why the NWT inserts “Son” into the text, despite its absence from all Greek manuscripts—revealing more about the translators’ ideology than about the biblical text itself.

  To sum up, the phrase “his own blood” in Acts 20:28, read in light of its grammatical construction, manuscript evidence, patristic reception, and Chalcedonian Christology, unambiguously refers to the blood of Christ, who is here called “God.” The passage does not confound the Father and the Son but rather reveals the high Christology of the apostolic Church. The idiomatic explanation is both grammatically unsustainable and historically anachronistic, and it cannot withstand the combined witness of the Greek text and the faith of the early Church. Thus, this verse stands as a powerful declaration of the deity of Christ and the unity of the Trinity in the work of redemption.
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  10

  The Deficient Theism of the Watchtower

  by aqwsed12345 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  "for my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the lord.

  for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

  " (isaiah 55:8-9).

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  aqwsed12345

  @slimboyfat

  Classical Christian theism does not posit the crude “dodgy-referee” caricature you reject, nor does it elevate a selectively ignorant deity to “greater” status. Rather, it holds that God’s intellect is the very act by which every possible creaturely reality—actual or merely possible—receives intelligibility. Consequently, the contrast you propose between a “predestinarian God” who sees only one future and “Jehovah” who surveys a field of options is a false dilemma; in fact, both fall short of what reason and revelation jointly require.

  Because God is pure act, His knowledge is identical with His being. He sees all possibles in the single, timeless intuition of His own essence. Within that eternal “now” He knows unerringly which possibilities He freely wills to actualize and which He leaves in mere potency. From the creature’s temporal vantage, the future remains open until a free choice is made; from God’s atemporal vantage, that very choice—including the liberty with which it is made—stands luminously present. Thus, divine omniscience embraces every counterfactual permutation you imagine while simultaneously grasping, with infallible certitude, the one history that creatures will in fact enact. To know both the entire modal order of “might-be” and the single line of “will-be” is a perfection, not a deficiency.

  Your claim that a God who foreknows only the actual future is “less” than one who knows an encyclopedia of hypothetical futures confuses the metaphysics of knowledge with the drama of suspense. Human cognition gains more by adding new data; the divine intellect does not. For God, to know Himself is already to comprehend, in causa, every determinate and indeterminate feature of any possible creation. That is why Aquinas can say that God knows future contingents “not because they are, but because He is” (ST I, q. 14, a. 13). A being that peeks selectively into the fog of tomorrow, learning as events unfold, would be ontologically smaller, not larger—subject to something outside itself that first determines what there is to be learned.

  Nor does foreknowledge entail “fixing the match.” Knowledge is not causation. If I watch a recorded game, my perfect certainty about each pass does not impose necessity on the original players. The Divine vision is analogous: it transcends time altogether, embracing in one act what we experience successively. Human and angelic freedom unfold within the order of secondary causes; God’s predetermining concursus elevates and sustains their very ability to choose without coercing the choice. If this sounds paradoxical, it is only because we are trying to map an eternal mode of knowing onto temporal categories. But there is no logical contradiction: necessity in the order of knowing (for God) is compatible with contingency in the order of being (for creatures). Deny that, and you must also deny every biblical prophecy whose fulfilment remains genuinely free—yet Scripture never treats prophecy as a threat to freedom.

  Finally, the alleged superiority of a deity who “lets reality surprise Him” collapses when we confront evil and suffering. A God “surprised” by Auschwitz or a child’s leukemia is either impotent or careless. The classical doctrine of providence, by contrast, allows us to say both that God sovereignly wills only good as first cause and that rational creatures tragically introduce evil as deficient causes. Because He foreknows every sin, He already holds within His universal decree the redemptive wisdom by which He can draw a greater good from it—above all, the Cross. The open-theist alternative, which the Watchtower echoes, leaves us with a deity scrambling in real time to improvise remedies to horrors He did not see coming.

  In sum, the Thomistic God is not a game-fixer who rigs outcomes, nor a limited referee who merely prognosticates. He is ipsum esse subsistens: the subsistent Act-of-to-be whose single, all-embracing glance grounds both the realm of genuine possibilities and the concrete history that free agents enact. Such a God is maximally perfect, truly omniscient, and unfailingly provident—precisely the God whom both reason and the Catholic faith confess.
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  65

  Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  here's how this verse should read: .

  take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the holy ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of god, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

  - kjvhere's how it reads in the nwt: pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the holy spirit has appointed you overseers, to shepherd the congregation of god, which he purchased with the blood of his own son.. here is how it reads in the kjv with the greek keyed to strong's: take heedg4337 thereforeg3767 unto yourselves,g1438 andg2532 to allg3956 theg3588 flock,g4168 overg1722 the whichg3739 theg3588 holyg40 ghostg4151 hath madeg5087 youg5209 overseers,g1985 to feedg4165 theg3588 churchg1577 of god,g2316 whichg3739 he hath purchasedg4046 withg1223 his owng2398 blood.g129 .

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  aqwsed12345

  The New World Translation (NWT), utilized by Jehovah’s Witnesses, has been subject to scrutiny for its rendering of certain biblical passages, particularly those with implications for the deity of Jesus Christ. One prominent example is Acts 20:28, where the NWT inserts the word "Son" into the phrase "the blood of his own," altering the verse’s meaning to align with the Watchtower Society’s theological framework. This article examines the textual and grammatical basis of the verse, the theological motivations behind the NWT’s rendering, and addresses common defenses raised by Jehovah’s Witnesses’ apologists, demonstrating that the traditional translation is both textually accurate and theologically coherent.

  Textual and Grammatical Analysis

  The King James Version (KJV) renders Acts 20:28 as: "Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood." The original Greek text reads: "ποιμαίνειν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ, ἣν περιεποιήσατο διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου." The phrase "διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου" translates literally to "through the blood of his own," where "τοῦ ἰδίου" (tou idiou) is an adjectival phrase modifying "blood" (αἵματος, haimatos), indicating "his own blood." The subject of the clause, "he," refers to God, suggesting that God purchased the church with his own blood.

  In contrast, the NWT renders the verse as: "to shepherd the congregation of God, which he purchased with the blood of his own Son." The insertion of "Son" (υἱοῦ, huiou) is not supported by any extant Greek manuscript. Textual criticism confirms that the phrase "διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου" is consistent across all known manuscripts, with no evidence for the inclusion of "Son." Variants exist for the phrase "the church of God" (τοῦ θεοῦ) versus "the church of the Lord" (τοῦ κυρίου), as noted in the Nestle-Aland critical apparatus, but these do not affect the phrase in question. Early translations, such as the Sahidic Coptic and the Peshitta, further corroborate the reading "his own blood," reinforcing the textual integrity of the traditional rendering (Stack Exchange: Acts 20:28 variants).

  Some scholars, such as F. J. A. Hort, have speculated that the original text might have included "Son" (υἱοῦ), which was accidentally omitted due to its similarity to "τοῦ ἰδίου." However, this hypothesis lacks manuscript support and is widely rejected by contemporary scholars. Others have proposed construing "τοῦ ἰδίου" substantivally, meaning "of his own [one]," implying the Son. This interpretation is grammatically possible but unlikely for several reasons. First, other Christological titles in the New Testament, such as "the Beloved" or "the Righteous One," have multiple attestations and were recognized by the early church, whereas "his own" as a title for Christ is unattested elsewhere. Second, the adjectival reading, "his own blood," is the simplest and most natural interpretation, as acknowledged even by the NWT Reference Bible, which notes that this is "the usual translation" ([NWT Reference Bible, p. 1580]). Third, the substantival reading appears driven by theological prejudice against the notion of "God’s blood," rather than by textual evidence. Fourth, early copyists who were uncomfortable with the phrase altered "God" to "Lord" rather than reinterpreting "τοῦ ἰδίου," indicating that they understood it adjectivally. Fifth, early Christian writers, such as Ignatius of Antioch, used phrases like "the blood of God," suggesting that the adjectival reading was accepted in the early church. Sixth, similar New Testament passages, such as Ephesians 1:7 ("through his blood") and Hebrews 13:12 ("through his own blood"), use comparable language, supporting the adjectival interpretation.

  Theological Motivations for the NWT’s Rendering

  The Watchtower Society’s insertion of "Son" into Acts 20:28 reflects their theological stance that denies the full deity of Jesus Christ, viewing him as a created being subordinate to God the Father. By rendering the verse as "the blood of his own Son," the NWT avoids the implication that God has blood, which would affirm Christ’s divinity within the framework of the incarnation. This alteration aligns with Jehovah’s Witnesses’ broader pattern of modifying passages that suggest Christ’s deity, such as John 1:1, where "the Word was God" is rendered "the Word was a god." In Acts 20:28, the addition of "Son" separates the act of shedding blood from God, reinforcing the Watchtower’s non-Trinitarian theology.

  Theological Significance of the Traditional Rendering

  The traditional translation of Acts 20:28, "the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood," has profound theological implications, affirming the deity of Christ through the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum. This Christological concept, formalized at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, posits that the divine and human natures of Christ are united in one person without confusion, change, division, or separation. Consequently, attributes of either nature can be ascribed to the person of Christ. Thus, while God in His divine essence is immortal and impassible, Christ, as God incarnate, assumed a human nature capable of shedding blood. The communicatio idiomatum allows the statement "God purchased the church with his own blood" to be theologically coherent, as the person who shed blood is both fully God and fully man.

  This interpretation is consistent with other New Testament passages that attribute human experiences to the divine Christ. For example, Acts 3:15 refers to Jesus as "the Author of life" whom the Jews killed, and 1 Corinthians 2:8 speaks of "the Lord of glory" being crucified. These passages rely on the same Christological framework, where the divine person of Christ undergoes human experiences through his incarnate nature. The traditional rendering of Acts 20:28 thus underscores the infinite value of Christ’s sacrifice, as only the God-man could achieve redemption for humanity.

  Addressing Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Apologetic Defenses

  Jehovah’s Witnesses’ apologists commonly raise two objections to the traditional translation of Acts 20:28. The first is that "God cannot have blood," as God is a spirit and thus incapable of physical attributes like blood. This objection misunderstands the doctrine of the Incarnation and the communicatio idiomatum. In Christian theology, Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, divine and human. While God in His divine essence does not have blood, the divine Son, through the incarnation, assumed a human nature capable of shedding blood. Thus, the person of Christ, who is fully God, can be said to have shed "God’s blood" without compromising divine immutability. This understanding resolves the apparent paradox and aligns with the New Testament’s portrayal of Christ’s dual nature, as seen in passages like John 1:14 ("the Word became flesh") and Colossians 2:9 ("in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily").

  The second objection is that other translations render Acts 20:28 similarly to the NWT, suggesting that their interpretation is not unique. While some translations, such as the New Jerusalem Bible and the New Revised Standard Version, interpret "his own" as referring to the Son, these are in the minority. The majority of translations, including the KJV, NIV, ESV, and NASB, render the phrase as "his own blood," reflecting the Greek text’s clear meaning. Moreover, the scholarly consensus, as evidenced by critical editions like the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, supports the adjectival reading of "τοῦ ἰδίου" as "his own blood." Even translations that interpret "his own" as referring to the Son are making an interpretive choice, not a direct translation, as the Greek text does not include "Son." The NWT’s rendering is particularly problematic because it is driven by a theological agenda to deny Christ’s deity, rather than by fidelity to the text.

  Supporting Evidence from Early Christian Writings

  Early Christian writers provide further evidence for the traditional interpretation of Acts 20:28. Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the early second century, refers to "the blood of God" in his Letter to the Ephesians: "Being imitators of God and rekindling yourselves in the blood of God, you have perfectly accomplished the work that was connatural to you.". This phrase, likely influenced by Paul’s words to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:28, reflects the early church’s understanding that the divine Christ shed his blood for the church. Ignatius’s use of "the blood of God" indicates that the adjectival reading of "τοῦ ἰδίου" was accepted in early Christianity, further undermining the substantival interpretation favored by the NWT.

  Conclusion

  The NWT’s insertion of "Son" into Acts 20:28 is textually unjustified and theologically motivated by the Watchtower Society’s denial of Christ’s deity. The original Greek text, supported by all extant manuscripts and early translations, clearly states that God purchased the church "with his own blood." This rendering affirms the deity of Christ through the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, which allows human attributes like shedding blood to be ascribed to the divine person of Christ. The traditional interpretation is consistent with other New Testament passages and early Christian writings, such as those of Ignatius of Antioch. Jehovah’s Witnesses’ defenses, such as the claim that "God cannot have blood" or that other translations support their rendering, fail to withstand scrutiny when examined against the textual evidence and theological framework of historic Christianity. Acts 20:28, when properly translated, stands as a powerful testament to the deity of Christ and the infinite value of his redemptive sacrifice.
• 
  10

  The Deficient Theism of the Watchtower

  by aqwsed12345 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  "for my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the lord.

  for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

  " (isaiah 55:8-9).

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  aqwsed12345

  @peacefulpete

  Your remark that the traditional “drift” toward transcendence has evacuated God from the sphere of “warm” religious experience is an understandable worry, but it rests on an equivocation that the classical tradition—patristic, conciliar, Thomistic, and, yes, biblical—explicitly resists. Transcendence in the strong sense affirmed by Nicea, Augustine, and Aquinas does not mean metaphysical “remoteness,” still less psychological indifference. Rather, it is the ontological condition that alone makes genuine immanence, providence, and intimacy possible. A God who differs from creatures merely by degree, who is in the cosmos the way Sirius is farther but still among the stars, cannot be the ground of being for every creature, cannot be closer to the sinner than the sinner is to himself (cf. Psalm 139; Acts 17:28), and therefore cannot answer prayer with sovereign efficacy. Only a God who is the transcendent source of all finite esse can hold every creature in being and simultaneously address each one personally without distraction or division.

  Classical theism insists on holding two poles together: divine immutability and divine personal agency. When Scripture says God “repented,” “was moved with pity,” or “felt jealous,” the sacred writers are not reporting shifts in the divine psyche (which would imply potency and thus contingency) but employing analogical language to describe changing relations of creatures to the single, unwavering act by which God wills and knows all things. On the creature’s side there is succession—Israel sins, then repents—and so the covenant partner experiences God now as Judge, now as Father. On God’s side there is one eternal act of will in which justice and mercy are never in conflict because both are simply expressions of the single, simple essence that is ipsum esse subsistens. Your own concern echoes an old objection Thomas faced in De Potentia and Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, a. 7: if God is immutable, why pray? His answer is two-fold. First, God’s decree includes not only what He will bestow but the manner in which He will bestow it—namely, through secondary causalities, among which the free, meritorious prayer of rational creatures is itself a divinely willed instrument. Second, because God is the universal cause, He is “closer to us than we are to ourselves”; prayer is not information transfer to a distant magistrate but conscious cooperation with the ever-present First Cause who already knows our need (Mt 6:32) and invites us into filial dialogue.

  You suggest that the proliferation of “second-power” mediators—angels, demiurges, or, in Christian confession, the incarnate Logos—represents a psychological compensation for a God made unreachable by philosophical abstraction. The fathers and scholastics would reverse the causal arrow. Given that God is sheer act and therefore incommunicable in His essence, any participation of creatures in His life can occur only if God Himself freely bridges the ontological gap. The Incarnation is not a concession to an embarrassing metaphysical mistake but the very mode chosen ab aeterno by the immutable Trinity to manifest and communicate divine life within history. The Son does not reduce divine transcendence; He expresses its gratuity. A Christ who is less than fully divine cannot unite humanity to God—he would merely insert one more finite rung in Jacob’s ladder. A truly transcendent, immutable God who freely assumes a passible human nature in hypostatic union is the only adequate soteriological solution: immutabiliter mutatur, Augustine says—He changes unchangeably, that is, He embraces temporal predicates without forfeiting eternal identity (De Trin. I.7). The anthropomorphic intuitions to which you appeal are not suppressed by this doctrine; they are purified and elevated. Yes, the heart yearns for a God who “gets us,” but only because it was made for the One who, transcending created categories, can personally indwell them without remainder.

  Your deeper worry echoes the modern existential critique: does an immutable God care? Here the Thomistic account of divine simplicity again proves decisive. Because God is not composed of act and potency, He is not subject to affective oscillations that would imply dependence on an external source for His beatitude. Yet precisely for that reason His benevolent willing is maximally intense, unsullied by the fluctuations that beset creaturely emotion. The scholastic aphorism immutabiliter diligit—He loves immutably—means that the divine will, eternally ordering creatures to their good, is the ultimate ontic foundation of every instance of creaturely flourishing, every answered prayer, every whisper of consolation. Far from rendering God “icy,” simplicity guarantees that the divine will is never distracted, never half-hearted, never compromised by competing passions. It is because God’s “face” does not change that the covenant cannot fail. Hence Thomas can say, following Augustine, that God is “more intimate to me than I am to myself” and yet “higher than my highest.” Transcendence and immanence are not competing coordinates; they are dialectically interpenetrating prerogatives of the one true God.

  Your final point, that modern people “deep-down prefer the anthropomorphic God,” is pastorally astute but theologically ambiguous. Desire for relational immediacy is natural; idolatry is precisely the attempt to satisfy that desire with an image proportionate to finite imagination. Biblical revelation wages a relentless polemic against such images—not to sever relationship but to protect it from self-projection. Classical theism, by disciplining the imagination, actually liberates the believer to encounter the living God who exceeds and thus fulfills every finite longing. In the Catholic mystical tradition—from Gregory of Nyssa through John of the Cross—the via negativa does not negate affective piety; it purges it, so that the soul can pass beyond consolations to unmediated union with the Deus absconditus who is simultaneously Deus intimior. The temptation to domesticate God into a grand-scale human agent is powerful, but it ends either in the disappointment of unmet expectations or in the theological minimalism exemplified by the Watchtower’s finite “deity.” By contrast, a God who is at once transcendent Act and incarnate Word invites both intellectual adoration and filial confidence: the mind is stretched by immensity; the heart is soothed by mercy.

  In sum, the trajectory from concrete biblical theophany to metaphysical transcendence you outline is not a loss but a deepening clarification. The God who spoke from Sinai is indeed the unbounded I AM whom Greek vocabulary helped us distinguish from the gods. Far from displacing immediacy, that clarification opened the conceptual space for a true mystery of mediation—one in which the immutable God freely takes flesh, suffers, dies, and rises while remaining the eternal Fons esse. Thomistic metaphysics, far from incarcerating God in abstraction, secures both His sovereign otherness and His unsurpassable nearness. To relinquish that achievement is not to recover biblical “warmth;” it is to exchange the living fountain for broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer 2:13).

  ---

  @slimboyfat

  The premise that God could “choose what to know” in order to safeguard human freedom originated not with historic Christianity but with the anti-Trinitarian Socinians of the late-sixteenth century. Fausto Sozzini and the Racovian Catechism rejected divine simplicity, immutability, and the exhaustive foreknowledge affirmed by virtually all the Fathers. In Watchtower literature that same proposal re-appears under the rubric “selective foreknowledge,” yet the underlying metaphysics remains recognizably Socinian: God is conceived as a temporal spectator whose cognition can be bracketed off, expanded, or curtailed at will. Classical theism—and specifically the Thomistic synthesis adopted by the Catholic Church at Trent, Vatican I, and in contemporary magisterial teaching—finds such a notion unintelligible.

  In St Thomas’s language God is actus purus, pure actuality without admixture of un-actualized potency. Omniscience in such a being cannot be a detachable attribute or a field of data that may be “accessed” or “muted”; it is identical with His very act of existence (esse). God knows all things by knowing Himself; He is the universal cause, and every created actuality is a finite participation in the power explicated in His own essence. To suppose that God might abscond from some future truths is therefore to imagine a real potency in the divine intellect—an open slot of “could-know-but-does-not”—which contradicts the very definition of actus purus. One may as well speak of a two-sided triangle.

  You ask whether a God who cannot avoid knowing the future is “less powerful” than one who may choose to remain ignorant. The dilemma conflates power with privation. Power, strictly considered, is the capacity to bring about being; ignorance is not a perfection but a negation. To call voluntary ignorance a “greater power” is analogous to calling blindness a “greater power” over light. Omnipotence and omniscience are convertible per essentiam in the simple God: He is powerful precisely because nothing escapes His intellect, and His intellect comprehends because His causal power extends to all that is or could be.

  The second question presupposes a similar equivocation. Thomists freely admit that God does not exercise His infinite power ad extra in the same mode at every moment; the act of creation encompasses ordered degrees of participation, and God ordinarily governs by secondary causes rather than by perpetual miracle. Yet the possession of an unexercised causal power is not parallel to the possession of an unexercised knowledge. Causal power belongs to the divine will, which is free to choose how its effect shall participate in being; knowledge in God is not an externally directed operation but His own eternal, interior act (intelligere). For that reason, the limitation of power ad extra entails no diminution ad intra, whereas the limitation of knowledge would constitute an internal defect.

  Your line of questioning exposes a deep confusion in the very notion of “a God who is not omniscient” and, more fundamentally, reveals the metaphysical bankruptcy of the JW approach to divine attributes. The issue is not a contest of “who is more powerful”—a God who must know everything, or one who can “choose what to know”—but whether such a God can even exist without collapsing into contradiction and absurdity. This is where the difference between true omnipotence and the Watchtower’s anthropomorphic pseudo-omnipotence becomes inescapable.

  Omnipotence and omniscience, as understood in classical theism and especially in Thomism, do not mean the capacity to do the logically impossible or the power to negate one’s own essence. God is all-powerful and all-knowing precisely because He is pure actuality (actus purus): His being is absolute, unlimited, and entirely self-consistent. The “limitations” on divine power—such as God not being able to make a square circle, make the past never have happened, sin, or annihilate Himself—are not limitations at all, but logical necessities. As St. Thomas Aquinas taught, omnipotence extends to all things that are possible, that is, all that truly can be. Logical and metaphysical contradictions are not “things,” but nothings; they have no being and therefore cannot be the object of any action, not even God’s. “It is more accurate,” Aquinas says, “to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them” (Summa Theologiae I, q.25, a.3).

  This is why the idea of a God who can “choose not to know” is incoherent. Ignorance is not a perfection but a privation, a lack of being. For God, to “not know” is not an exercise of a greater power, but a defect—akin to asking whether God could make Himself less than God. The same logic applies to questions like, “Can God cease to exist?” “Can He sin?” or “Can He contradict Himself?” As St. Augustine rightly insisted, “Because He is omnipotent, He cannot die, cannot be deceived, cannot lie, and as the Apostle says, He cannot deny Himself or be unfaithful to Himself” (De Symbolo ad Catechumenos I, 1; cf. Civ. Dei V, 10). The divine omnipotence is one with God’s wisdom and holiness; it is the very source of logic and moral order, not subject to them or their negation.

  When JWs imagine a God who intentionally “limits” His knowledge in order to preserve “free will,” they misunderstand both God’s nature and the very concept of possibility. A God whose omniscience is subject to self-limitation is not truly omniscient, but rather a finite being—one who might learn something new, might be surprised, might “un-know” what He once knew. But such change and potentiality are marks of imperfection, of mutability and limitation; they belong to creatures, not to the Creator. If God could “not know” part of the future, then knowledge itself would exist independently of God, and God would be measured by something outside Himself—a notion that contradicts His aseity and simplicity.

  The analogy used (“God can choose not to use all His power at all times, so why not choose to limit His knowledge?”) fails completely. Power is an act towards something outside oneself—God can choose not to create a universe, or not to act miraculously within it—but knowledge in God is not like this. Divine knowledge is not a function, but God’s very being. God knows all things by knowing Himself, the source and cause of all possible being. For God, to “choose not to know” would be to choose not to be God.

  Thus, the attempt to make “ignorance” a mark of divine power is as nonsensical as asking if God could make Himself cease to exist, or make 2+2=5. The early heretics (and some modern sects) failed to grasp this metaphysical point, but the great tradition of Christian theology—Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, and countless others—has always been clear: the omnipotence of God is not an arbitrary will, but the actualization of all real possibilities, and it cannot extend to impossibilities, contradictions, or defects.

  Therefore, the Watchtower’s “not-inherently-all-knowing God” is not more powerful, but simply not God. The very coherence of reality, logic, and morality depends on the existence of a God whose being, knowledge, and power are identical, infinite, and wholly perfect. Any other “god” collapses into absurdity and cannot sustain a coherent metaphysical or theological account of the universe. In short: to deny God’s omniscience is not to exalt His power, but to negate His very divinity.

  Some have attempted to rescue “selective foreknowledge” by invoking Molina’s scientia media (middle knowledge). Molina, Becanus, and Bellarmine indeed taught that God comprehends future counter-factuals of creaturely freedom “in super-comprehensione voluntatis creatae.” Their account never postulated a zone of ignorance in God; rather it tried to locate the logical ground of that knowledge in the creature’s hypothetical act as object, not in an independent realm over which God has no dominion. If middle knowledge were conceived as an external “book of possibilities” to which God must refer, the objection would follow: an order of truths existing apart from the creative act would compromise divine aseity. Hence Thomists maintain (with Cajetan and Garrigou-Lagrange) that the conditional future is known in the same eternal vision as the simple and free future: God knows what the creature would freely do precisely because the creature’s existential act is dependent upon God’s creative decree, even though the act remains contingently free ad intra creaturae. Whether one adopts the Dominican or the Jesuit analysis, neither permits ignorance in God; they differ only on the logical “moment” in which free determination is infallibly included in the decree.

  The JW concern that foreknowledge makes God an “accessory” to evil because He supplies the murderer with a body and opportunity rests on a further confusion between physical premotion and moral concurrence. God is indeed the universal cause of all finite act-of-existence; He holds both the hand of the assassin and the beating heart of his victim in being. Yet evil—the privation of due moral order—is not a positive entity requiring divine causation; it is the creature’s defective mode of acting. From the Thomistic standpoint God’s will is related to that defect merely per accidens: He permits it because He wills a higher good (e.g., the existence of rational freedom, redemption in Christ), but He does not positively intend the moral disorder. The alternative would require God to annihilate every creature the instant it willed a defect, thereby eliminating freedom altogether—hardly the “greater majesty” you wish to ascribe to Him.

  Finally, the epistemic reliability of Scripture itself presupposes exhaustive divine foreknowledge. Prophetic oracles such as Isaiah 44–48 explicitly ground God’s uniqueness in His ability to “declare from the beginning the things that are to come.” A deity who merely calculates probabilities may well mis-calculate; yet Deuteronomy 18 sets infallible fulfillment as the criterion of true prophecy. The JW position therefore places its own NWT God under the Mosaic ban of false divinity whenever His predictions exceed statistical likelihood.

  In sum, the capacity to withhold omniscience is no perfection but an incoherence. The Socinian doctrine adopted by the Watchtower dismantles divine simplicity, compromises omnipotence by introducing potency into the divine intellect, undercuts the certainty of revelation, and evacuates eschatological hope. Classical theism affirms that God’s eternal, immutable knowledge neither violates nor renders illusory the finite freedom He graciously bestows. “Known unto God are all His works from eternity” (Acts 15:18); and yet, within that omniscient providence, rational creatures truly deliberate, choose, love, and—by grace—share in the divine life that transcends every created measure.
• 
  10

  The Deficient Theism of the Watchtower

  by aqwsed12345 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  "for my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the lord.

  for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

  " (isaiah 55:8-9).

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  aqwsed12345

  @vienne

  I appreciate your candor and passion. Please know that my intention is not to shame or attack anyone, but to encourage thoughtful discussion and to present, as clearly and faithfully as I can, the Catholic understanding of God as it has been developed through centuries of reflection, debate, and prayerful study.

  I realize that for many Christians—especially those from Protestant traditions—the classic Catholic/Thomistic vision of God might seem abstract or even alien, while Watchtower theology can sometimes feel more concrete and approachable. I also know that for a lot of Protestants, it’s frustrating to see Catholic critiques that seem to lump together very different non-Catholic traditions. You’re right to insist on fairness and accuracy.

  I do try to “do my own research”—and that’s precisely why I go back to primary Watchtower sources and contrast them with classic Christian teaching, not just from Catholicism but from the early Church and the Reformers as well. My goal is never to misrepresent but to bring out those points where there really are differences in how Christians think about God’s nature.

  If you have specific places where you think I’m misreading or misrepresenting anyone’s views, or if you’d like to share your own understanding of God’s attributes, I would genuinely welcome your input. Iron sharpens iron, and the only way any of us grows in truth is by wrestling with the strongest forms of each other’s arguments—not just trading slogans or insults.

  So: if you see errors or caricatures, tell me! If you want to challenge my take on God’s omniscience, omnipresence, or other attributes, please do. My only request is that we both try to understand where the other is coming from and build the kind of conversation where even disagreement can lead to deeper insight and—who knows—maybe even a bit of mutual respect.

  If you’re open to it, I’d be glad to hear what you believe about God, why it matters to you, and where you think Catholics (and maybe I personally) have missed the mark. I promise to listen, not just argue. Thank you again for taking the time to respond, even if it was in frustration. Sometimes that’s the first step toward real dialogue.
• 
  10

  The Deficient Theism of the Watchtower

  by aqwsed12345 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  "for my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the lord.

  for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

  " (isaiah 55:8-9).

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  aqwsed12345

  "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9)

  Jehovah’s Witnesses are best known for denying the deity of the Son, Jesus Christ, insisting that He is a created being (identified with the archangel Michael). However, a deeper and arguably more fundamental question arises: does their conception of God the Father – whom they call “Jehovah” – align with the classical understanding of divine nature in historic Christian theology? This treatise argues that the Watchtower Society’s theology presents a profoundly deficient view of God, one that is anthropomorphic, finite, and even materialistic in character. The “Jehovah” of Watchtower theology is essentially a superhuman deity bound by time and space, who conflates “spirit” with “energy” and possesses only selective foreknowledge of future events. In many respects, this conception parallels the controversial theological models of open theism and process theology, which depict God as mutable and limited. By contrast, classical Thomistic theism – rooted in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and the broader Christian tradition – offers a robust and coherent understanding of God as actus purus (pure actuality), ipsum esse subsistens (Being itself), who is infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.

  In the discussion that follows, we will critically examine the Watchtower’s doctrine of God. Key areas of focus include the anthropomorphic limitations the Watchtower ascribes to God (such as a localized “spirit body”), the conflation of spirit and energy in their metaphysics, their teaching of selective divine foreknowledge (and its affinity with open theism), and their denial of God’s omniscience and omnipresence. We will contrast these ideas with the classical attributes of God as understood in Thomistic and orthodox Christian theology. In doing so, the philosophical and theological errors in the Watchtower’s theism will become evident, highlighting why it is deficient when measured against the standard of the transcendent God of Christianity. The implications of the Watchtower’s finite God – for issues like divine providence, worship, and the reliability of God’s promises – will also be explored, reinforcing the conclusion that the classical vision of God is vastly superior and more faithful to Scripture and reason.

  The Watchtower’s Anthropomorphic and Finite God

  Spatial and Temporal Limitations of “Jehovah”

  From its earliest publications, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (WBTS) has portrayed God in strikingly anthropomorphic terms. Rather than affirming the omnipresence of the Creator, the Watchtower has historically taught that God has a specific location in the universe. Charles Taze Russell and his successors speculated that God’s throne resides within the physical cosmos, notably identifying the Pleiades star cluster as the divine abode. For example, one early Watchtower-era publication stated: “one of the stars of that group is the dwelling-place of Jehovah and the place of the highest heavens. ... the Pleiades is the place of the eternal throne of God” (J. F. Rutherford, Reconciliation, 1928, p. 14). This idea was reiterated in the Golden Age magazine, which in 1924 echoed the view that “in the region of the Pleiades is located the throne of Jehovah God” (The Golden Age, Sept. 10, 1924, pp. 793–794). The Pleiades theory exemplifies the Watchtower’s tendency to depict God as a spatially localized being – essentially as an extraordinarily powerful extraterrestrial intelligence dwelling at a particular spot in the cosmos.

  Although the Pleiades speculation was officially abandoned in 1953 (the Society cautioned that dwelling on the Pleiades as God’s throne could lead to improper veneration of that star cluster – The Watchtower, Nov. 15, 1953, p. 703), the underlying concept of a localized God persisted. The Watchtower still insists that Jehovah “has a place where he resides”, possessing a form or body (albeit a “spirit body”) that cannot be everywhere at once. “God, being an individual, a Person with a spirit body, has a place where he resides, and so he could not be at any other place at the same time” (The Watchtower, Feb. 15, 1981, p. 6). In the Watchtower’s theology, God is not omnipresent; He is an embodied person who lives in heaven (conceived as a literal place) and “is not diffused everywhere throughout the universe” (Aid to Bible Understanding, 1971, p. 665). This implicitly limits God to one location at a time, much like a physical being. Indeed, the WBTS literature even went so far as to describe God in quasi-physical terms – for instance, teaching that God has a personal form that includes bodily features. One early article absurdly mused that Jehovah wears clothes in heaven (The Golden Age, Sept. 8, 1926, p. 777), a notion more at home in primitive mythology than in refined theology. Such statements reveal the almost childishly anthropomorphic conception of God’s nature within the Watchtower mindset.

  Hand-in-hand with spatial limitation comes temporal limitation in the Watchtower’s view of God. Jehovah is described as existing “from everlasting to everlasting”, but the Society interprets this to mean an infinite duration of time rather than an atemporal eternity. In other words, they depict God as a being who has existed for limitless ages within time, rather than one who transcends time altogether. God’s experience is seen as sequential; He can change, react, and even learn new information as events unfold. Watchtower publications often take scriptural anthropomorphisms at face value, suggesting that God literally “felt regret” or “was surprised” by outcomes (citing verses like Genesis 6:6 or 22:12). For example, the Society taught that God did not originally know that Adam and Eve would sin – their transgression supposedly “came as a surprise” to Him, and only after their fall did He set in motion the plan of redemption (The Watchtower, Jan. 15, 1964, p. 52). Jehovah’s Witnesses have thus embraced a concept of God that includes change and passivity: God reacts to the creation, acquires knowledge of events in time, and even alters His stated intentions under certain circumstances (such as “repenting” from planned actions as in Exodus 32:14).

  This mutable, reactive God of the Watchtower bears a marked resemblance to the deity of process theology, a modern heretical framework in which God is intrinsically bound to the world’s process and undergoes growth and change along with it. It also parallels the tenets of open theism, which rejects classical omniscience and teaches that God discovers aspects of the future as they happen. The Watchtower’s God exists in a timeline, looking ahead and making plans, but without a comprehensive decree that fixes all future events. He can be “affected” by what creatures do, experiencing emotional changes and adapting His strategies. In short, the Watchtower presents a God who, while far greater than any man, is still essentially anthropomorphic – a deity with a superhuman body, limited location, and a sequential mode of knowing. This conception stands in stark contrast to the transcendent, immutable God affirmed by classical Christianity.

  An illustration of the Watchtower’s anthropomorphic view is their explanation of how God communicates and acts at a distance. Since Jehovah is not omnipresent, the Society teaches that He employs created spirit messengers (angels) to carry out His will and relay information. Notably, early Watchtower literature claimed that it takes time for angels to travel from God’s throne to earth. One article speculated that messages from God could be delayed as angels traverse the vast expanse of space – implying that even God must wait for news to arrive (The Golden Age, Aug. 15, 1925, p. 755). Such a scenario is virtually indistinguishable from the limitations of the gods in ancient mythologies (who lived in the sky and sent messengers like Hermes or Iris to do their bidding). The need for God to rely on couriers underscores the finite, non-ubiquitous nature of the Watchtower’s deity. Rather than God being immediately present to all creation (as in Psalm 139:7–10), He is essentially a remote being, and only His power or influence (conceived almost like a radio signal or electric current called holy spirit) reaches everywhere, not His own self.

  In sum, the Watchtower’s portrayal of Jehovah is that of a finite, localized, and mutable heavenly Father. While they ascribe great power and longevity to Him, they stop short of recognizing Him as the infinite and omnipresent Reality that classical theism upholds. The implications of such a view are significant. A God who is confined to a place and time, who learns and adapts, is far removed from the sovereign Lord of Scripture who declares “I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:9–10). As we will see, this limited God cannot guarantee the unfailing accomplishment of His will, and his promises become probabilistic. First, however, we turn to another serious error in Watchtower theology: the confusion of “spirit” with “energy” that further reduces their God to something quasi-material.

  Conflation of “Spirit” with “Energy”

  A critical aspect of the Watchtower’s deficient theism is its materialistic conception of spirit. In classical Christian philosophy, a fundamental distinction is drawn between material reality (which is extended in space, made of matter/energy, and subject to change) and spiritual reality (which is immaterial, not located in space, and not composed of divisible parts). God, as well as angels and souls, belong to the order of spirit, not matter. The Watchtower, however, blurs this distinction by treating “spirit” almost as a subtle form of matter or energy.

  Watchtower literature frequently describes God’s nature as spirit in quantitative, physical terms. A particularly telling example appears in a doctrinal article which asserted: “Jehovah has vast reserves of dynamic energy” that He used in creating the universe (The Watchtower, Feb. 1, 1992, p. 9). This language – “vast dynamic energy reserves” – implies that God’s power is a measurable reservoir that can be depleted or expended, much like a fuel tank. Creation, in this view, was not creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing by the sheer fiat of God’s will), but rather the expansion or deployment of pre-existing energy from God’s own being. The Insight on the Scriptures reference work (the successor to Aid to Bible Understanding) explicitly equates spirit with energic force, saying that God’s spirit is a kind of invisible active force that can be likened to electricity. Even God’s own person is described as consisting of “spirit,” which the Watchtower interprets as an actual substance or matter (albeit invisible).

  By conflating spirit with energy or matter, the Watchtower reduces God to the level of a creature – a being who exists within the same ontological continuum as the physical universe. In effect, they imagine God as part of the furniture of the cosmos: enormously powerful and ancient, yes, but ultimately a thing among things, composed of something, existing somewhere, and bound by the same sort of physical realities (like space, time, and energy) that constrain everything else. This is a radically unbiblical and philosophically naive view of God. In Scripture, God is “Spirit” (John 4:24), meaning immaterial and of a higher order of existence than creation. He is “the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity” (Isaiah 57:15), not one who inhabits a region of space.

  Thomistic metaphysics helps clarify the error here. Matter (and energy, which modern physics shows to be interchangeable with matter) is the principle of potentiality in things – it is what can change, be extended, be divided, and be acted upon. Spirit, by contrast, is a principle of actuality not limited by matter – it cannot be divided or quantified, and it isn’t bound by spatial dimensions. God, as pure spirit, is utterly simple (having no parts) and immutable. The Watchtower’s notion of a “spirit body” composed of energy is self-contradictory: a body made of energy is basically a material entity, since it has parts and occupies space (even if those “parts” are energy quanta or whatnot). The Society has essentially constructed a view of God akin to a science-fiction “energy being” – like a powerful alien composed of electromagnetic energy who can take form and expend power. This is miles away from the transcendent Spirit of historic Christianity.

  One might trace this confusion to the Watchtower’s reliance on human reason unaided by sound philosophy, and perhaps to occult influence. Notably, the Watchtower in the past endorsed (and even translated) the works of Johannes Greber, a spiritist whose descriptions of God were shaped by occult spirit communications. Greber’s book Communication with the Spirit World of God described God as “a spirit personality with a form” and suggested that God’s knowledge was acquired through a chain of intermediary spirits (Greber, 1932, pp. 260–265). This eerily resembles the Watchtower’s teaching that God has a spirit form and uses angels to gather information. The convergence of Watchtower doctrine with occult ideas is troubling, and it underscores how far afield from classical theism the Society has strayed. Instead of recognizing spirit as supramaterial, the Watchtower effectively dumbs down the divine to something quasi-physical.

  By treating “spirit” as essentially energy, the WBTS also stumbles into other theological problems. For instance, if God’s creative act was simply using up some of His “energy reserves” to fashion the universe, this implies a finite limit to what God can do – energy, after all, is a finite quantity in any system. It also implies pantheism or emanationism, since creation would consist of God’s own substance (energy) in another form, rather than being totally distinct from God. The Society would deny pantheism, but its terminology blurs the Creator/creature distinction dangerously. Classical Christian doctrine safeguards the distinction: God’s act of creation is ex nihilo, not from preexisting material and certainly not from God’s own essence. An omnipotent deity does not lose “energy” when creating; He simply wills things into being and they exist, without any depletion of His power. The Watchtower’s language, however, portrays God almost as a cosmic engineer who burns divine calories to get things done, thereby lowering God to the level of a creature constrained by resources.

  To sum up, the Watchtower’s conflation of spirit with energy contributes to a materialized and debased concept of God. Instead of the pure, infinite Spirit upholding all reality, their Jehovah is essentially a kind of super-powerful alien made of a refined form of matter. This not only conflicts with Scripture (“God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all” – 1 John 1:5 – indicating God’s perfection and immaterial purity), but it also fails the test of philosophical coherence. A being composed of parts (even energy parts) would need a composer; it would be a contingent being, not the ultimate ground of being. The Thomistic vision, on the other hand, understands God as ipsum esse – the fullness of Being Itself, qualitatively distinct from any composite or material entity. The deficiencies in the Watchtower’s view become even more apparent when we examine how they handle divine knowledge and foreknowledge, to which we turn next.

  “Selective Foreknowledge”: The Watchtower’s Open Theism

  One of the most striking (and troubling) doctrines promoted by Jehovah’s Witnesses is the idea of selective foreknowledge. According to the Watchtower, God is able to know all future events, but He chooses not to know certain things that free moral agents will do. In other words, Jehovah self-limits His omniscience in order to allow creatures absolute freedom of choice. This teaching is a cornerstone of Watchtower theodicy – it is used, for example, to explain the presence of evil (God supposedly did not foreknow Adam’s sin, so He did not prevent it, giving Adam a genuine chance to exercise free will). The Society’s Aid to Bible Understanding reference book stated this doctrine clearly: “Selective foreknowledge means that God could choose not to foreknow (indiscriminately) all the future acts of his creatures.” (Aid to Bible Understanding, 1971, p. 595). Similarly, Insight on the Scriptures explains that Jehovah, out of respect for our free will and motivated by love, decided not to predetermine or even foreknow humanity’s fall into sin (Insight on the Scriptures, vol. 1, p. 852–853).

  This concept of selective foreknowledge aligns almost exactly with open theism, a theological position developed by some modern Protestant thinkers (though the Watchtower arrived at it independently earlier). Open theism contends that in order for human freedom to be meaningful, the future must be partly “open” even to God – meaning God knows all possibilities but not all actual future choices, because those choices aren’t decided until free beings make them. The Watchtower’s Jehovah, in like manner, is portrayed as having opted not to peer into the future decisions of His creatures. The result is a God who often discovers things as they happen. Watchtower articles have asserted, for instance, that Jehovah “was disappointed” by how some of his angelic sons behaved (turning wicked during Noah’s time), implying He didn’t fully anticipate it; or that Jehovah “came to know” Abraham’s loyalty only after Abraham raised the knife to sacrifice Isaac, as if that were new information to God (see their interpretation of Genesis 22:12).

  The logical and theological problems with this view are manifold. Firstly, logic: As critics have pointed out, the notion of “choosing not to know” presupposes an already existent knowledge. The Christian apologist Robert Morey put it succinctly: “For God to refrain from knowing something, He would first have to know that thing in order to decide not to know it” (Morey, Battle of the Gods, 1989, p. 68). In other words, the idea is self-defeating – a truly ignorant God wouldn’t know what He’s missing, and an omniscient God cannot unknow what He by nature knows. The Watchtower’s explanation is that God’s perfect power gives Him the ability to limit or compartmentalize His own knowledge, but this runs into paradoxes (can God perform the intellectual equivalent of plugging His ears and saying “I choose not to hear that”?).

  Secondly, biblical evidence overwhelmingly affirms God’s complete foreknowledge. Jehovah’s Witnesses appeal to verses like Genesis 6:6 (“Jehovah regretted that He had made men on the earth”) or Genesis 22:12 (“Now I know that you fear God”) to support their view. But these verses, understood in context and alongside the whole counsel of Scripture, are clearly anthropomorphic – they describe God’s interaction in human terms, not literal deficiencies in God’s knowledge. In contrast, many scriptures explicitly teach that nothing is hidden from God’s sight (Hebrews 4:13), that He “knows all things” (1 John 3:20), and that He declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10). The Watchtower even concedes that God accurately foretells many specific events – their entire eschatology is built on the premise that Jehovah has infallible prophetic knowledge. It is inconsistent to assert God precisely foretold the rise and fall of empires (as in the book of Daniel) but somehow did not know the pivotal event of Adam’s fall until after it happened. The Society tries to resolve this by saying God foreknows whatever He chooses to and deliberately avoids foreknowing other things. Yet this selective approach finds no support in Scripture – one searches the Bible in vain for a statement like “God has deliberately not foreseen certain choices of man.” This appears to be an ad hoc solution to a theological conundrum (the problem of evil and free will), rather than a revealed truth.

  The practical implications of selective foreknowledge are unsettling. If God’s knowledge is contingent and probabilistic, then God could, in theory, be surprised by outcomes. The Watchtower assures believers that Jehovah’s wisdom is so great He can anticipate possibilities better than anyone; He is likened to a master chess player who can foresee many moves ahead. But “foreseeing many moves” is not the same as guaranteeing a checkmate. In fact, former Jehovah’s Witness Duane Magnani humorously dubbed the Watchtower’s God “the Heavenly Weatherman”, because He predicts the future with impressive (but not absolute) accuracy, much as a skilled meteorologist predicts weather patterns (Magnani, The Heavenly Weatherman, 1987, pp. 197–287). Yet even the best weatherman can be wrong. If Jehovah is in the position of a cosmic prognosticator rather than the author of history, can His promises be trusted unconditionally? For example, Jehovah promises in Watchtower teaching that a paradise earth will soon be reality and that He will wipe out evil. But if human freedom is truly indeterminate to God, what if some free agents (say, future “perfect” humans in paradise or an unforeseen new Satan) choose rebellion again? Could not the saga of sin repeat itself, surprising God once more? The Watchtower’s answer might be that God now chooses to foresee that such will not happen – but one begins to see the arbitrary nature of this doctrine.

  By contrast, classical theism (and indeed the Bible itself) presents divine foreknowledge as absolute yet mysteriously compatible with human freedom. God’s knowledge of future free acts does not cause those acts in a coercive way (from our time-bound perspective we choose freely), but if God is eternal (outside time), then all moments of time are equally present to Him in one eternal now. Thus, God doesn’t foresee in the sense of looking down the corridors of time; rather, He simply sees reality – all of it – in His eternal vision. From our vantage, events are future; from God’s vantage, all events – past, present, future – are immediately before Him. He comprehends our free acts as part of His single act of knowing and willing. The Watchtower misses this profound view because it insists on picturing God as a temporal being who has to deliberately “decide” whether or not to look at future time. In doing so, they diminish God’s sovereignty and undermine the very basis of prophecy and providence.

  It is noteworthy that the Watchtower’s stance on foreknowledge seems driven more by philosophical bias (a commitment to libertarian free will at all costs) than by exegesis. In their aversion to what they see as “predestinarian” implications of God’s complete foreknowledge, they have swung to an extreme that creates a limited God. This resembles the error of ancient pagans who could conceive of powerful gods, but not an all-knowing one – in mythology, gods often are deceived or taken by surprise. The God of the Bible, however, issues challenges like: “Who then is like Me? … Let them declare to them the things that are coming and that will happen” (Isaiah 44:7). God’s foreknowledge is a hallmark of His true Deity, separating Him from false gods. By attributing to Jehovah ignorance of even some future events, the Watchtower inadvertently demotes Him to something less than fully God in the classical sense. This is a grave theological deficiency.

  In summary, the Watchtower’s doctrine of selective foreknowledge thrusts it into alignment with open theism, a position widely considered heterodox in Christian theology. It portrays God as not truly omniscient, introduces logical paradox into His knowledge, and sows doubt about the certainty of His purposes. We will later contrast this with the Thomistic understanding of how God’s omniscience and human freedom coexist. But before that, we should note another parallel concept in Watchtower theology: the resemblance of their mutable, limited God to the God of process theology, as mentioned earlier.

  Parallels with Process Theology and Pagan Myth

  It has been observed by religious scholars that the Jehovah’s Witnesses conception of God shares similarities not only with open theism but also with process theology (a 20th-century theology influenced by Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy). Process theology asserts that God is in some respects changeable, growing in knowledge and affected by temporal events – God has a dual aspect, one eternal and unchanging aspect and another that is mutable and in process. While the Watchtower would reject many tenets of process philosophy, it effectively embraces the idea of a mutable God by insisting that God experiences sequences of before and after (e.g., “God was sorry that…” or “God became happy that…”). The God of the Watchtower learns, reacts, and even changes His mind (they often cite examples like Jonah’s prophecy against Nineveh which God revoked when Nineveh repented, as evidence that God’s purposes are flexible).

  In Watchtower teaching, Jehovah’s attributes such as love and justice can motivate Him to adjust His dealings based on new circumstances. This is a sort of “dipolar” God concept: His character is consistent, but His actions and knowledge can vary with the flow of history. This is quite akin to process thought, in which God’s knowledge is said to increase as new events occur and God’s experience of the world deepens. While the Society would not frame it as “God evolving,” the functional picture is similar: a God who is co-temporal with creation and undergoes a kind of history alongside creation. This is dramatically different from the immutable, impassible God of classical theism, who dwells in eternity and for whom there is no change or shadow of turning (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17).

  Furthermore, one cannot help but notice that the Watchtower’s God has more in common with pagan gods than with the God of historic Christian orthodoxy. Consider the characteristics of many ancient Near Eastern deities or Greco-Roman gods: they were thought of as superhuman beings residing at specific locations (e.g., on Mount Olympus or in a temple), having humanoid forms, limited power (though greater than humans), and not knowing everything (they could be deceived or surprised). They often had to gather information (e.g., Zeus might send Hermes to find out something) and could be thwarted or change plans. The Watchtower’s description of Jehovah is arguably a modern, monotheistic re-casting of that kind of finite deity concept. Indeed, J.F. Rutherford (the early Watchtower president) explicitly ridiculed the traditional Christian God as “formless and bodiless,” favoring instead a God who could be more concretely imagined. The irony is that by fleeing from what he saw as an abstract deity, Rutherford and the Watchtower fell into an opposite extreme – a God all too creature-like and limited.

  Modern cult researchers and Christian apologists have sometimes connected the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ theology to the “ancient astronaut” ideas that pervade some new religious movements. William J. Alnor, in UFOs in the New Age (1992), documents how some new age channeled messages claim that the biblical God is actually an extraterrestrial from the Pleiades (a curious convergence with early Watchtower Pleiades teachings). While Jehovah’s Witnesses do not claim “Jehovah is an alien from space” in those terms, their theology practically describes Him as an extraterrestrial life-form (just one that is the highest and uncreated). Ken Raines, a researcher on Watchtower history, noted that during the Rutherford era, Jehovah was essentially portrayed as “a space-bound humanoid” – residing in the star cluster, driving a celestial chariot if you will, dispatching angels across the cosmos (Ken Raines, “Jehovah: Ancient Astronaut from the Pleiades?”, 2006). Raines even jested that the Watchtower’s God and angels scenario “sounds more like Erich von Däniken’s gods from outer space than the Alpha and Omega of Scripture” (von Däniken being the proponent of the theory that gods were aliens). This is a provocative comparison, but it underscores the theological poverty of a system that brings God down to the creaturely level.

  Having surveyed the major features of the Watchtower’s doctrine of God – anthropomorphism, materialized spirit, selective foreknowledge, mutability – we can already see that it diverges sharply from the mainstream Christian conception of a maximally great Being. To further highlight the contrast, we will now turn to Thomistic theism, which provides a classical model for understanding God’s nature. In examining the Thomistic attributes of God, the deficiencies of the Watchtower’s theism will become even more apparent by comparison.

  Thomistic Theism: God as Actus Purus (Pure Act)

  In Catholic and broader Christian philosophical theology, the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) remain a pinnacle of clarity on the doctrine of God. Aquinas synthesized biblical revelation with the sound philosophical insights of Plato and Aristotle, yielding a conception of God that has withstood centuries of scrutiny. Thomistic theism can serve as a corrective lens through which to view the Watchtower’s claims. Where the Watchtower portrays a God who is finite and changeable, Thomism proclaims a God who is infinite and immutable. Where the Watchtower sees God as a being within the universe (albeit the highest one), Thomism understands God as absolutely transcendent, the creator of even space and time. Key Thomistic principles about God include His aseity, simplicity, eternity, immutability, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Let us examine these and contrast them with the Watchtower’s view:

  God’s Aseity and Simplicity: Ipsum Esse Subsistens

  Aseity means that God exists in and of Himself, depending on nothing else. This is encapsulated in God’s declaration “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14) – God is the self-existent One. The Watchtower would agree that God is uncreated and the source of life. However, their theology does not fully appreciate the implications of aseity because they still envision God as composed of “something” (even if it’s spirit substance) and existing in a place. Thomistic aseity goes hand-in-hand with the doctrine of divine simplicity, which Aquinas articulates: God is not just another being, He is Being Itself (Latin: ipsum esse subsistens). God’s essence is existence. In created things, we can distinguish what a thing is (its essence) from the fact that it is (its act of existence). But in God, there is no composition of essence and existence – they are one and the same. Therefore, God is not composed of parts, properties, or any kind of constituents; if He were, those parts would be more fundamental than He, and He’d depend on them, which violates aseity.

  In Thomistic thought, all the attributes of God (omniscience, will, power, goodness, etc.) are ultimately identical with God’s simple essence. We speak of them as different attributes from our finite perspective, but in God they are one. “God is whatever He has”, as Augustine said; thus God doesn’t merely have knowledge or have power – He is knowledge, He is power, in the sense that His singular simple being includes these perfections intrinsically. This contrasts strongly with the Watchtower’s quasi-anthropomorphic picture where God has separate qualities that could, theoretically, be segmented or modulated (like deciding to use knowledge here but not there). The Watchtower even entertains the idea that love is God’s paramount attribute, sometimes played against justice, etc., as if these were separable components of His psychology. Classical theism instead insists that God’s attributes are all perfectly harmonious expressions of his one essence.

  Because God is simple and self-existent, He is absolutely immutable (unchangeable). Change implies a transition from potential to actual, or the gain/loss of some attribute; but a simple, pure act has no potential to gain or lose anything – it simply is all that it is, infinitely. Scripture echoes this: “I, Jehovah, do not change” (Malachi 3:6). The Watchtower tries to circumvent this by suggesting God’s principles don’t change but His dealings can, yet this is only a semantic half-measure. Thomism maintains that in God Himself there is literally no change – what changes is the created effects or relations as they experience God differently. For instance, when a sinner becomes a saint, God is not the one who changed; the person changed in relation to the unchanging goodness of God. This solves the biblical language of God “repenting” or “becoming angry” without attributing real internal changes to God’s being. Such language is understood as analogical or figurative, describing changes in God’s actions toward us or changes in our standing before God, not changes in God’s inner state. Jehovah’s Witnesses, lacking this nuance, end up with a God who really changes in knowledge or mood, which is philosophically problematic. A changing God is inevitably a dependent God – dependent on the world to be this way or that at different times.

  God’s Eternity and Omnipresence (Transcendence of Space-Time)

  Another vital Thomistic (and broadly classical) doctrine is God’s eternity. Eternity, in the theological sense, does not just mean “lasting forever”; it means outside of time altogether. Aquinas defines eternity as “the simultaneously-whole and perfect possession of interminable life.” God’s life is not stretched out in a series of moments – He does not “live through” a timeline as we do. Rather, He is altogether beyond the flow of time. All times are present to Him at once. This concept far exceeds the Watchtower’s view of God as simply extremely ancient and everlasting within time. If God truly created all things, that must include time itself (since time is a feature of the created, physical universe, per modern cosmology and implied in Genesis 1: “in the beginning…”). A temporal deity cannot be the creator of time; he would be constrained by a dimension he didn’t originate. Classical theism rightly positions God as the Lord of time who can step into time (as in the Incarnation) but whose proper state is timeless.

  The omnipresence of God flows from His transcendence of space. God is not a being with a size or location at all. Rather, in a metaphysical sense, God is present to every location because every creature is completely dependent on God’s creative act at every moment. In Aquinas’s view, God is in all things by essence, presence, and power. By essence, meaning everything is ontologically sustained by God’s being (not that things are part of God, but they exist participating in the existence God grants). By presence, meaning God’s knowledge and attention encompasses all places (nothing escapes His sight). By power, meaning His power extends everywhere to uphold and govern. Importantly, God’s omnipresence is not an instance of God “stretching out” like an ether. God is fully present in Los Angeles and fully present in Tokyo at the same time, not as a part here and a part there, but wholly (because God has no parts). This is beyond our full comprehension, but it underscores that God’s mode of existence is utterly unlike a physical body.

  The Watchtower’s rejection of omnipresence (because they imagine it would mean God has to be a spirit gas diffused in space) stems from picturing God in creaturely categories. Thomism warns against such imagination-driven theology. We do not apprehend God by picturing a larger and larger entity; we apprehend Him by abstracting and understanding being itself and its source. God, as infinite spirit, can be everywhere precisely because He is not a localized thing. Psalm 139 beautifully conveys this omnipresence: “Where can I go from Your Spirit? … If I ascend to heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.” The Watchtower might answer, “God is in heaven, but His spirit (active force) can reach Sheol.” The classical reply is that God’s own being and knowledge are directly in Sheol and everywhere else, sustaining it, not through a long-distance medium, but by ontological necessity – if God withdrew His sustaining will, the place would cease to exist.

  God’s Omniscience and Omnipotence

  In Thomistic theism, God’s knowledge (omniscience) and power (omnipotence) are also understood in a distinctive way that magnifies God far above the Watchtower’s conception.

  Omniscience: God knows all things by knowing Himself. Because God is the cause of all that exists, and because He is outside time, God’s knowledge is not discursive (reasoning step by step) nor derived from things outside Himself. Rather, God eternally knows His own essence perfectly, and in knowing Himself, He knows every way in which His power could be imitated or participated in by creatures. This means God knows not only all actual things, but all possible things – every event that could happen under every hypothetical scenario (this is sometimes called God’s knowledge of “middle knowledge” or conditional futures in later theology). Aquinas explains that God’s knowledge is simultaneous, not successive – one eternal act of intellect that comprehends all truth (Summa Theologiae I, q.14, a.7). This sublime view stands in stark contrast to the Watchtower’s limited God, who apparently engages in selective ignorance. The idea of God learning is anathema in classical theism: “Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord, or as His counselor has taught Him?” (Isaiah 40:13). The rhetorical answer is no one, because God has never lacked any knowledge to be taught. The dynamic of God “finding out” or “realizing” something is simply not applicable to the true God. It only appears so when scripture accommodates our perspective; for instance, when God “tests” someone to manifest their qualities, the test is for their sake or for the sake of others, not because God literally needed to find something out (cf. John 2:24–25, which says Jesus “knew what was in man” and had no need to be told anything about human hearts).

  Omnipotence: The Watchtower certainly calls God “Almighty,” but their theological framework again diminishes this attribute. As noted, picturing God’s power as a stored energy reserve is a very limiting idea. Classical theism maintains that God’s power is infinite, meaning there is no effect possible that God cannot produce, unless it’s a logical contradiction or against His nature (for example, God cannot lie, because lying is a deficiency and God is perfect truth). God’s omnipotence is such that He creates from nothing and is not taxed by any exertion. Jeremiah 32:17 exclaims, “Nothing is too difficult for You.” For God, causing a million galaxies or moving a mountain is no harder than causing a single atom – He wills it, and it is. Since God is not a material force, His power is not expended by use. A Thomist would cringe at the notion of God having a finite “amount” of power. Rather, God is the perpetual source of all the power that exists in creation; all creaturely power is just a participation in His.

  This means, importantly, that God’s power is not in competition with creaturely power. This is an area where the Watchtower’s misunderstanding of sovereignty versus freedom leads them to open theism. In classical theism, God can sovereignly will an event and a creature can freely will it, without conflict, because God’s causality works at a higher ontological level (primary cause) enabling and encompassing the creature’s causality (secondary cause). God’s omnipotent providence can ensure His plan while not violating the nature of the creaturely causes He has ordained (including free human choices). The net effect is that God’s plan is never in jeopardy; His omnipotence extends to the direction of history itself, not by micromanaging every choice, but by infallibly integrating every choice (foreknown infallibly) into His overarching purpose (Romans 8:28, Ephesians 1:11). The Watchtower’s God, lacking full foreknowledge, cannot guarantee such sovereignty – hence their theology often places the completion of God’s purpose contingent on what humans decide (for example, their Armageddon timing doctrines have historically shifted when expected human responses or dates didn’t pan out).

  Summary Comparison

  To crystallize the differences, we can briefly compare the Watchtower’s theism and Thomistic theism side by side on key attributes:

  • Being and Nature: Watchtower: God is a being, an individual person with a spirit body, composed of spirit “energy,” dwelling in one location in the spirit realm. He is the highest being but part of the continuum of reality. Thomism: God is Being Itself, utterly simple and immaterial, the source of all existence. He has no body, no composition, and is ontologically separate from creation (transcendent).
  • Omnipresence: Watchtower: Denied in the proper sense. God’s power or influence can reach everywhere (via "holy spirit" as a force), but God’s person itself is localized in heaven. He is not personally present in multiple places at once. Thomism: Strongly affirmed. God is fully present to every place and every creature, not as a localized entity but as the sustainer. There is nowhere and no moment from which God is absent.
  • Eternity (Relation to Time): Watchtower: God is eternally existent through time, but time is the duration of His being. He experiences sequence (before/after). He had an existence “before” creation but still in a temporal sense of duration (they sometimes use “eternity” to mean endless time). Thomism: God is completely outside time; time began with creation. God’s life is a single eternal now. All times are present to Him at once. Thus, “foreknowledge” is a human way of speaking; God simply knows, eternally.
  • Omniscience: Watchtower: God is all-knowing in capacity, but in practice withholds His knowledge of some future free acts (“selective foreknowledge”). He learns certain things as they occur. His knowledge is great but can be described as “progressive” in some respects (He can express regret, change stated outcomes based on new developments). Thomism: God’s knowledge is complete and unchanging. There is no potential in God’s knowledge (He never comes to know something new). What appears as God changing His mind is from our temporal view only. All events and possibilities are comprehended in the single act of God’s self-knowledge.
  • Omnipotence: Watchtower: God is almighty but works mainly through His impersonal active force. Creation was accomplished by using “dynamic energy.” His power, though immense, is conceptually finite (bounded by the amount of energy and the decision of how to use it). He cannot do what is against logical possibility (which is true in classical view as well), but moreover Watchtower implies certain things God chooses not to do to respect creaturely freedom (thus will not or cannot intervene in certain ways, limiting His exercise of power). Thomism: God’s power is truly infinite. Creation did not diminish God’s power one iota. He can do all things that are not self-contradictory or against His nature. His will is always accomplished, though it can allow subordinate freedoms. There is no external limit on God’s power; only His wisdom and goodness “channel” it (He doesn’t do evil or nonsense because omnipotence is not the power to do the logically impossible).
  • Immutability and Emotions: Watchtower: God has emotions in a literal sense (love, anger, sorrow) and can change in how He feels or in His intentions in response to creaturely actions. He is not impassible; they argue God’s impassibility would contradict scriptures that show Him loving, getting angry, etc. They thus see God as having a psychology somewhat analogous to human experience (though perfectly controlled). Thomism: God is impassible – meaning He cannot undergo emotional fluctuations or suffering due to an external agent. God’s love and wrath in scripture are analogical, describing either His benevolent will or His justice in action, not emotional tides. God is unchangeable in His being and decrees. Immutability doesn’t mean God is inert; it means He is so perfect that He does not change. Love in God is an eternal willing of good, not a passion that comes and goes.

  It becomes evident that the Watchtower’s God is a being far smaller and more limited than the God of classical theism. The differences are not in degree but in kind. We essentially have two different concepts of God: one sees God as the highest creature-like entity in a hierarchy, the other sees God as the transcendent ground of all reality. Thomistic theism provides a coherent, exalted view that honors the mystery of God’s infinity, whereas the Watchtower’s view almost evacuates the term “God” of its classical meaning.

  Philosophical and Theological Errors in the Watchtower’s Doctrine

  The deficiencies of the Watchtower’s theism are not merely a matter of missing some abstract philosophical niceties; they strike at the heart of what it means for God to be God. Here we will highlight some overarching errors in the Watchtower conception and why they matter:

  1. Failure to Ground God’s Uniqueness: In Christian thought, God’s attributes of infinity, omniscience, omnipotence, etc., are what set Him apart absolutely from creation. By attributing finitude to God (whether spatial, cognitive, or temporal), the Watchtower blurs the line between Creator and creature. Their God is essentially on the same spectrum of being as angels and humans – differing in magnitude, but not in fundamental type of existence. This raises the classic question: Why then is there only one such god? If God is just a very powerful being within the universe, one could conceive of others or ask what power produced Him. The Watchtower dodges this by affirming monotheism from Scripture, but it lacks a metaphysical rationale for why only one God can exist. Classical theism, on the other hand, shows that ipsum esse must be unique (you cannot have two “infinites” or two Acts of Being Itself, as they would limit each other). The Watchtower’s God does not clearly meet the criteria of the necessary being in philosophical terms. He is everlasting and powerful, but not obviously the source of all being in a radical sense (especially if His creative act is reforming energy rather than true ex nihilo creation).
  2. Incoherent View of Omniscience: The idea of selective foreknowledge introduces internal inconsistency in God. If God is truly almighty and all-wise, His deliberate ignorance is either impossible (He would automatically know whatever is knowable) or it implies a lack in God’s beatitude (He is willfully limiting a perfection). It also makes God’s knowledge contingent on creaturely decisions, which subordinates God to time and history – a metaphysical absurdity if God is the creator of time and history. Essentially, the Watchtower’s God depends on the world to determine what He knows, whereas in classical theism the world depends on God’s knowledge to determine what it becomes. This is almost an inversion of the proper Creator-creature relationship.
  3. Undermining of Providence and Trust: A God who does not know the future exhaustively cannot give a guarantee of how things will turn out except in the most general terms. The Watchtower teaches that Jehovah chooses to know certain key prophecies (like the Battle of Armageddon’s outcome), but once one allows uncertainty into God’s knowledge, logically any detailed promise could be subject to revision. The biblical assurance that “all things work together for good to those who love God” (Rom 8:28) rests on God’s sovereign orchestration of all events – something the Watchtower’s God would struggle to ensure without full foreknowledge. This might explain why Jehovah’s Witnesses have historically had to adjust their expectations (numerous end-time dates and interpretations have failed), because in a sense their theology expects God to adjust to circumstances. It fosters a mindset of conditional confidence: “Jehovah will deliver us… unless something unexpected necessitates a change.” In contrast, the classical view of providence gives unshakable confidence in God’s plan (Eph 1:11, Isa 14:24).
  4. Diminished Worship: A God who is not infinite and ultimately mysterious ends up being less awe-inspiring. The Watchtower, in its effort to make God understandable and approachable, has paradoxically made Him smaller in the eyes of worshipers. Their worship tends to stress God’s deeds (like creation, miracles) and His moral qualities, which are good, but there is little sense of the mystical adoration that comes from realizing God’s ineffable greatness and transcendence. The grand liturgical praises of historic Christianity (“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, heaven and earth are full of Your glory”) reflect a recognition of God’s boundless majesty – something one misses in the rather prosaic descriptions found in Watchtower literature. If God is viewed almost as an elder brother in the universe (just older and stronger), the depth of reverence is curtailed. The Watchtower also denies the Trinity, which is beyond our scope here, but suffice it to say that in doing so they also lose the richness of understanding God as a being of infinite love in Himself (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). A finite, lone monad deity is actually poorer in a religious sense.
  5. The Company It Keeps: Theologically, the Watchtower’s doctrines about God align with groups far outside the Christian mainstream – not just open theists and process theologians, but even with Mormonism and certain occult or New Age ideas. For instance, Mormonism teaches that God is an exalted man living in space-time (even on a planet or star named Kolob in their lore) – a startling parallel to Watchtower’s early Pleiades teaching. Both deny classical omnipresence and eternity. Occult/New Age spirituality often posits finite “gods” or cosmic beings who are part of the universe. By contrast, virtually all branches of historic Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant), despite their differences, have agreed on the core divine attributes of infinity, omniscience, omnipresence, immutability, etc. When one finds oneself defining God more like the pagans or heretics did, it’s a strong sign of error. The Watchtower rails against what it calls “Christendom’s” teachings, yet on the doctrine of God, it is Christendom that has preserved the truth of God’s greatness, while the Watchtower has embraced concepts reminiscent of the very religions it claims to oppose.
  6. Biblical Misinterpretation: Much of the Watchtower’s deficient theology stems from an overly literal or wooden interpretation of certain biblical texts, coupled with a disregard for the broader systematic context. They read passages about God’s “face,” “hands,” or dwelling place and deduce a literal body and location, not appreciating anthropomorphism. They read about God’s “repentance” or “not remembering sins” and think it denotes literal gaps in knowledge or changes in mind, instead of metaphorical language for forgiving or for humanly-understood relational changes. They insist that if Jesus said “only the Father knows the day and hour” (Mark 13:32), it must mean the Father could choose not to know something – rather than seeing it as a statement about Jesus’ incarnational role or the idiom of the Son voluntarily not disclosing it. A robust hermeneutic, guided by the totality of Scripture and the illumination of theological tradition, would avoid such pitfalls. The result of the Watchtower’s approach is a patchwork theology that lifts certain verses out of context to construct a picture of God at odds with the overarching biblical revelation of His omnipotence and omniscience.

  In light of all this, one must conclude that the Watchtower’s God is too small. The Society has effectively crafted a depotentiated deity – one who may be easier for the human mind to grasp or for their own system to manage (since a less sovereign God gives their human organization a larger controlling role in the outworking of God’s plan), but who ultimately cannot bear the weight of being the ultimate explanation of reality. Theologically, it is a form of idolatry – not in the sense of an intentional false god, since they intend to worship the God of the Bible, but in the sense of a false idea of God, an image made by human imagination and reasoning that falls far short of God’s glory (cf. Psalm 50:21, “you thought that I was one like yourself”).

  Implications and Conclusion

  The differences between the Watchtower’s theism and Thomistic (biblical-classical) theism are not mere academic quibbles; they have far-reaching implications for faith and practice. A few closing reflections on why this issue matters:

  • Reliability of Divine Promises: A classical, omniscient, omnipotent God can unconditionally promise, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” and “nothing can snatch [the sheep] out of My hand” (Hebrews 13:5, John 10:28), and the believer can trust such promises absolutely. In the Watchtower framework, one might wonder: could God be taken by surprise or caught off-guard such that plans change? Jehovah’s Witnesses live with a level of eschatological anxiety – dates like 1914, 1925, 1975 were heralded for the end, only to pass, often blamed on human misunderstanding. But perhas a theology where God Himself isn’t fully certain opens the door to such disappointments. By restoring a high view of God’s sovereignty, Christians find assurance that no purpose of God’s can fail (Job 42:2).
  • Spiritual Intimacy and Presence: The denial of omnipresence in Watchtower theology also affects how one relates to God. Jehovah’s Witnesses are taught to think of Jehovah as hearing prayers in heaven (perhaps relayed by angels) and dispatching help via His spirit. But the sense of God’s immediate indwelling presence is absent – something Christians through the ages have found deeply comforting (e.g., practicing the presence of God, the Holy Spirit living in us as God’s personal presence). If God is not personally everywhere, one might feel a certain distance. Indeed, many ex-JWs report that their relationship with God felt impersonal, like serving a distant monarch through organizational protocols. Classical theism combined with the doctrine of the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit provides a balance of transcendence and immanence: God almighty, high and lifted up, yet closer to us than we are to ourselves. The Watchtower theology tilts toward transcendence in an out-of-reach way (God far off in the heavens) while also oddly not transcendent enough (as we’ve seen, their God is bound by many creaturely limits).
  • Approach to Scripture and Mystery: The Watchtower prides itself on having a "logical" (?) answer for everything, often deriding the mysteries of Christian theology (like the Trinity or the dual nature of Christ) as “confusion”. In doing so, however, they have sacrificed mystery for simplicity at the cost of truth. A God who can be fully comprehended and never surpasses our reason is likely a God made in our image. Thomistic theism acknowledges via negativa – we often best describe God by what He is not (infinite = not finite, immortal = not mortal, etc.), recognizing the limits of human language. Embracing that God is beyond our full understanding is itself a form of worship. The Watchtower’s hyper-rationalism leads them to cut God down to size so that nothing transcends their interpretive schema. In an academic sense, this could be seen as epistemological hubris. Paradoxically, a more academic approach would be to respect the mystery when evidence warrants – e.g., the Bible portrays God as knowing all, ordaining all, yet humans as responsible; rather than drop one truth (omniscience) to save another (free will), classical theology holds both in tension.

  In conclusion, when judged by the standards of classical theism (and, we would argue, by the testimony of Scripture rightly understood), the Watchtower’s view of God is profoundly deficient. It is not simply a case of a few peripheral errors; it is an entire reimagining of God along sub-biblical lines. The Watchtower has made God smaller, weaker, and more like us, whereas true religion calls us to recognize God as infinitely greater, stronger, and other than us. In doing so, Jehovah’s Witnesses inadvertently rob God of much of His glory and undermine the foundation of trust and worship that His true nature provides.

  The Thomistic vision of God, as actus purus, infinite Being and perfect Goodness, offers a far more compelling and coherent object of faith. This God can be fully trusted, because nothing can thwart His will. This God can be deeply adored, because His greatness is unsearchable and inexhaustible. And this God can genuinely be called the Almighty without reservation, for no part of reality lies outside His sustaining power and knowledge. Such is the God revealed in the Bible and affirmed by the sound reasoning of the Church through the ages – a God truly worthy of the name Jehovah (He who causes to be) in the ultimate sense.

  By contrast, the Watchtower’s “Jehovah” is a being of self-imposed limitations and quasi-physical constraints, a being who might be more relatable to the finite mind but at the cost of being much less than the true God. In apologetic dialogue, it is important to help Jehovah’s Witnesses see that a deficient view of God will pervade and weaken every aspect of their theology and worship. The first step in calling them (or any others in similar error) to a fuller Christianity is to reintroduce them to the real God – the God who is not an exalted creature, but the transcendent Creator; not a reactive sky-monarch, but the sovereign Lord of history; not a limited local deity, but the One in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

  In the final analysis, The Deficient Theism of the Watchtower serves as a cautionary tale. It shows how straying from the doctrine of God’s true nature can lead to a cascade of theological problems. For believers committed to classical, biblically grounded theism, it reaffirms the importance of holding fast to the high and mysterious view of God handed down through Scripture and tradition. For Jehovah’s Witnesses or others influenced by similar ideas, it is an invitation to “widen out” their conception of God – to let God be as great as He truly is, even if that shatters the comfortable categories one once had. Only then can we begin to worship God “in spirit and truth” (John 4:24) in the fullness that He deserves.

  Recommended resources:

  • The omniscience and foreknowledge of God
    
  • The Watchtower Misunderstanding of the Knowledge of God
  • The Theism Of Jehovah’s Witnesses: Possible or Impossible?
  • Refuting the Jehovah’s Witness Doctrine of Selective Foreknowledge
  • The Watchtower Rejects Biblical Authority Regarding God’s Foreknowledge
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  74

  Did God know adam and eve would sin?

  by gavindlt in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  to all those on this forum, i would love to know what your take on this vital question is..

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  aqwsed12345

  The Deficient Theism of the Watchtower

  Jehovah’s Witnesses are well-known for denying the deity of the Son, Jesus Christ, asserting that He is a created being, often identified with the archangel Michael. However, a deeper question arises: does their conception of the Father, whom they call “Jehovah,” align with the classical understanding of divine nature? This article argues that the Watchtower’s theology presents a profoundly deficient view of God, characterized by an anthropomorphic, finite, and materialistic conception that conflates “spirit” with “energy” and aligns with problematic theological frameworks like open theism and process theology. In contrast, classical Thomistic theism, rooted in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, offers a robust and coherent understanding of God as pure act (actus purus), infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Below, we explore the philosophical, metaphysical, and theological errors in the Watchtower’s doctrine, particularly their misunderstanding of “spirit” and “energy,” and contrast it with the Thomistic vision of God.

  Key Points

  • Watchtower’s Anthropomorphic God: The Watchtower portrays “Jehovah” as a spatially and temporally bound being with a “spirit body,” who learns, changes, and is surprised, resembling a pagan deity rather than the transcendent God of Christianity.
  • Conflation of Spirit and Energy: By equating “spirit” with a form of quantifiable “energy,” the Watchtower reduces God to a material-like entity, contradicting the immaterial nature of spirit in Thomistic metaphysics.
  • Alignment with Open Theism: The Watchtower’s doctrine of selective foreknowledge, where God chooses what to know, mirrors open theism, undermining divine omniscience and rendering God’s knowledge contingent and probabilistic.
  • Contrast with Thomistic Theism: Thomism defines God as ipsum esse subsistens (subsistent being itself), pure act without potentiality, transcending space, time, and change, offering a philosophically and biblically coherent view.
  • Theological Implications: The Watchtower’s finite God cannot sustain the reliability of divine promises or providence, leading to a theology that breeds uncertainty and legalism.

  The Watchtower’s Deficient God

  The Watchtower’s theology presents “Jehovah” as a being who exists within the created order, confined to a specific location (historically the Pleiades star cluster until 1953) and subject to time, change, and limited knowledge. Their publications, such as a 1992 Watchtower article, claim that Jehovah possesses “vast dynamic energy reserves” used to create the universe, implying a finite resource rather than the creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) taught by classical Christianity. This view aligns with a materialistic understanding of God, where “spirit” is misconstrued as a form of energy, akin to science fiction tropes of “energy beings.” Such a conception is not only philosophically incoherent but also theologically inadequate, as it fails to account for the necessary attributes of divinity.

  Thomistic Theism: God as Pure Act

  In contrast, Thomistic theism, as articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, defines God as pure act (actus purus), devoid of potentiality, and thus immutable, eternal, and infinite. God is not a being among beings but Being itself (ipsum esse subsistens), whose essence is identical to His existence. His omniscience is not a process of learning but an eternal, simultaneous knowledge of all things. His omnipresence is not spatial diffusion but the metaphysical reality that all things exist by participation in His sustaining act of being. This view, grounded in both reason and Scripture (e.g., Psalm 139, Ephesians 1:3-11), provides a robust framework for understanding God’s transcendence and immanence.

  Philosophical and Theological Errors

  The Watchtower’s theology shares similarities with open theism and process theology, both of which posit a God who is mutable, learns, and is affected by creation. Their doctrine of selective foreknowledge—where God chooses what to know to preserve human free will—implies a contingent deity who cannot guarantee the fulfillment of His plans. This contrasts sharply with Thomism, which holds that God’s knowledge is perfect and unchanging, encompassing all possible and actual events without compromising human freedom. The Watchtower’s God, reliant on angels for information and subject to surprise, resembles a mythological figure rather than the Creator of all reality.

  Conclusion

  The Watchtower’s conception of God is philosophically and theologically deficient, reducing the divine to a finite, anthropomorphic entity that cannot fulfill the role of the ultimate ground of being. By conflating “spirit” with “energy” and embracing a view akin to open theism, the Watchtower undermines the classical attributes of God—omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Thomistic theism, with its emphasis on God as pure act, offers a far more coherent and biblically faithful understanding, affirming a God who is worthy of worship and trust.

  ---

  Detailed Analysis

  Introduction

  Jehovah’s Witnesses are widely recognized for their rejection of the deity of Jesus Christ, asserting that He is a created being, often identified with the archangel Michael. However, a more fundamental question emerges: does their conception of the Father, whom they call “Jehovah,” meet the classical criteria for divinity? This article contends that the Watchtower’s theology presents a profoundly deficient view of God, characterized by an anthropomorphic, finite, and materialistic conception that conflates “spirit” with “energy” and aligns with problematic theological frameworks such as open theism and process theology. In contrast, classical Thomistic theism, rooted in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, offers a robust and coherent understanding of God as pure act (actus purus), infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. This analysis explores the philosophical, metaphysical, and theological errors in the Watchtower’s doctrine, particularly their misunderstanding of “spirit” and “energy,” and contrasts it with the Thomistic vision of God, addressing their alignment with open theism, process theology, and the implications of their denial of divine omnipresence and selective foreknowledge.

  The Watchtower’s Anthropomorphic and Materialistic God

  Spatial and Temporal Limitations

  The Watchtower’s theology portrays “Jehovah” as a being confined to a specific location within the created universe. Historically, their publications, such as The Golden Age (1924), claimed that Jehovah resides in the Pleiades star cluster, a belief they held until 1953 (Watchtower, November 15, 1953). Even after abandoning this specific claim, the Watchtower maintains that God exists in a particular “place” in heaven, with a “spirit body” that precludes omnipresence (Aid to Bible Understanding, 1971, p. 665). This doctrine suggests that God must rely on angels to communicate across distances, requiring time for these messengers to travel (Golden Age, August 15, 1925, p. 755). Such a view is strikingly anthropomorphic, resembling pagan mythologies where gods, like those on Mount Olympus, are localized and limited by spatial constraints.

  This spatial limitation is compounded by the Watchtower’s assertion that God exists within time, not as eternal (outside of time) but as “everlasting,” subject to temporal sequence (Watchtower, February 15, 1981, p. 6). Their God can change, learn new information, be surprised, and even regret decisions, as evidenced by their interpretation of passages like Genesis 22:12 and Exodus 32:14. This temporal and mutable conception of God aligns with process theology, which posits a God who evolves with creation, and open theism, which denies absolute divine foreknowledge to preserve human free will.

  Conflation of Spirit and Energy

  A critical error in the Watchtower’s theology is their conflation of “spirit” (spiritus) with “energy.” A 1992 Watchtower article states, “Jehovah has vast, dynamic energy reserves” used to create the universe (Watchtower, February 1, 1992, p. 9). This implies that God’s creative act was not creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), as taught by classical Christianity, but rather a transformation of His finite energy resources. In modern physics, energy is quantifiable and interchangeable with matter (E=mc²), making it part of the created, material order. By equating God’s spiritual nature with energy, the Watchtower reduces God to a material-like entity, akin to science fiction “energy beings,” rather than the immaterial, transcendent Spirit of biblical and Thomistic theology.

  This conflation is not merely a semantic error but a metaphysical one. In Thomistic metaphysics, matter (including energy, as it is quantifiable and changeable) is the principle of potency, capable of receiving different forms and undergoing change. Spirit, however, is the principle of actuality, free from potentiality and thus immutable and indivisible. God, as pure spirit, is actus purus—pure act, without any potentiality for change or limitation. The Watchtower’s “spirit body” doctrine, which posits God as a localized, energetic entity, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of spirit and aligns with materialistic and occultic views, such as those found in Johannes Greber’s Communication with the Spirit World of God (pp. 260-265), which similarly describes God as a “personality with form.”

  Selective Foreknowledge and Open Theism

  The Watchtower’s doctrine of selective foreknowledge further undermines their conception of God. They assert that God possesses the “ability” to know the future but chooses not to exercise it fully to preserve human free will (Aid to Bible Understanding, 1971, p. 595). This view, akin to open theism, posits that God’s knowledge is contingent and probabilistic, as He learns new information through angels or human actions (Awake, August 22, 1963, p. 28). For example, they claim God did not know Adam and Eve would sin until after the fact, only then planning the redemption (Watchtower, January 15, 1964, p. 52).

  This doctrine is logically incoherent. As Robert Morey notes, for God to choose what to know, He must already know everything to make an informed choice (Battle of the Gods, p. 68). Without comprehensive knowledge, God’s selective foreknowledge becomes arbitrary, akin to “rolling the dice” to decide what to know. This undermines divine omniscience, rendering God’s knowledge akin to human guesswork, as Duane Magnani describes in The Heavenly Weatherman (1987, pp. 197-287). Such a God cannot guarantee the fulfillment of His promises, as His plans could be thwarted by unforeseen events, stripping passages like Romans 8:28 of their assurance.

  Thomistic Theism: God as Pure Act

  God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens

  In contrast, Thomistic theism, as articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, defines God as ipsum esse subsistens—subsistent being itself, whose essence is identical to His existence. This doctrine of divine simplicity means that God is not composed of parts, such as a “spirit body” or “energy reserves,” nor are His attributes (knowledge, power, presence) separate from His essence. All that is in God is God, making Him immutable, eternal, and infinite.

  God’s omniscience is not a process of learning but an eternal, simultaneous vision of all things—past, present, and future—in His own essence. As Aquinas argues in the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 14, a. 5), God knows all things because He is the cause of all things, and His knowledge is not discursive but immediate. His omnipresence is not a spatial diffusion but the metaphysical reality that all things exist by participation in His sustaining act of being (Acts 17:28). His omnipotence is not the ability to do logically contradictory things (e.g., lie or create a rock too heavy to lift) but the power to actualize all that is possible without contradicting His nature (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 25, a. 3).

  The Nature of Spirit

  In Thomistic metaphysics, spirit (spiritus) is immaterial, indivisible, and free from the constraints of space, time, and change. God, as pure spirit, is actus purus—pure act, without potentiality. This contrasts sharply with the Watchtower’s “spirit body,” which implies a material-like entity subject to spatial and temporal limitations. Angels and human souls are also spiritual, but as created beings, they are finite and dependent on God’s sustaining act. The Watchtower’s conflation of spirit with energy aligns with occultic views, such as those in Greber’s work, which describe God as a “personality with form” reliant on external sources for knowledge (Communication with the Spirit World of God, pp. 260-265).

  Alignment with Open Theism and Process Theology

  The Watchtower’s theology shares significant parallels with open theism and process theology, both of which reject classical divine attributes. Open theism, as critiqued by Bruce Ware in God’s Lesser Glory (2000, pp. 156-159), posits a God who does not know the future exhaustively, as human free will introduces unpredictability. Similarly, the Watchtower’s selective foreknowledge doctrine suggests that God limits His knowledge to allow human freedom, but this creates a God who is reactive rather than sovereign. Process theology, which views God as evolving with creation, also resonates with the Watchtower’s mutable God, who changes His mind and learns from events (Watchtower, January 15, 1964, p. 52).

  These frameworks contrast sharply with Thomism, which reconciles divine omniscience with human freedom through the concept of primary and secondary causation. God, as the primary cause, knows and wills all things without negating the freedom of secondary causes (human agents) (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 22, a. 2). The Watchtower’s God, reliant on angels for information and subject to surprise, resembles a process-theological deity who is in a reciprocal relationship with creation, rather than its transcendent cause.

  Biblical Misinterpretations

  The Watchtower often cites Scripture to support their view of a limited God, but their interpretations rely on a literalistic, anthropomorphic reading. For example, Genesis 22:12 (“now I know that you fear God”) is taken to mean God learned something new about Abraham. However, as Ware argues, this is an anthropomorphic expression of God’s eternal knowledge, affirmed by passages like 1 Chronicles 28:9 and 1 Samuel 16:7, which state God knows all hearts (God’s Lesser Glory, pp. 67-74). Similarly, Jeremiah 7:31, 19:5, and 32:35 (“it never entered my thoughts”) are interpreted as divine ignorance, but these express God’s moral disapproval, as earlier warnings in Deuteronomy 12:31 and 18:10 show God’s prior knowledge of such sins (God’s Lesser Glory, p. 79).

  In contrast, Scripture affirms God’s omniscience and transcendence. Ephesians 1:3-11 describes God as working all things according to His will, predestining salvation before creation. Isaiah 40:13-14 rhetorically asks who could instruct God, implying His complete self-sufficiency. Psalm 139 and Isaiah 46:8-11 further confirm God’s exhaustive knowledge and sovereignty over all events.

  Theological and Practical Consequences

  The Watchtower’s deficient theism has profound implications. A God who is finite, mutable, and reliant on external sources cannot guarantee the fulfillment of His promises, undermining the assurance of passages like Romans 8:28. As Ware notes, a God who second-guesses His actions or regrets decisions is “unworthy of devotion, trust, and praise” (God’s Lesser Glory, p. 159). This theology fosters anxiety and legalism among Jehovah’s Witnesses, as their God’s providence is uncertain, leading to an obsession with performance to secure divine favor.

  Moreover, the Watchtower’s alignment with occultic views, as seen in parallels with Greber’s spirit-guided teachings, raises serious concerns about the spiritual origins of their doctrine. Magnani’s The Heavenly Weatherman documents how the Watchtower’s God resembles a “heavenly weatherman,” making educated guesses rather than possessing certain knowledge (1987, pp. 197-287). This diminishes the divine character and aligns with pagan and science fiction tropes, such as ancient astronaut theories, which view gods as advanced beings within the universe (UFOs in the New Age, William Alnor, 1992).

  Comparison with Classical Theism

  Aspect	Watchtower Theology	Thomistic Theism
  Nature of God	Finite, with a “spirit body” and “energy reserves”; spatially and temporally bound	Pure act (actus purus), ipsum esse subsistens, immaterial, infinite, eternal
  Omniscience	Selective foreknowledge; learns through angels, can be surprised	Eternal, simultaneous knowledge of all things; no learning or surprise
  Omnipresence	Localized in heaven; not omnipresent, relies on messengers	Metaphysically present to all things by sustaining their existence
  Creation	From finite “energy reserves,” not creatio ex nihilo	Creatio ex nihilo, by divine will, without limitation
  Theological Alignment	Open theism, process theology; anthropomorphic and pagan-like	Classical theism; biblically and philosophically coherent

  Conclusion

  The Watchtower’s theology presents a deficient and incoherent view of God, reducing “Jehovah” to a finite, anthropomorphic being who is spatially and temporally bound, reliant on angels for knowledge, and limited by “energy reserves.” By conflating “spirit” with “energy,” they align with materialistic and occultic views, echoing open theism and process theology. This conception fails to meet the classical criteria for divinity and undermines the reliability of divine providence. In contrast, Thomistic theism offers a robust vision of God as pure act, infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, aligning with both Scripture and reason. The Watchtower’s God is not the God of the Bible but a diminished, pagan-like figure, unworthy of ultimate worship. The Thomistic vision, rooted in the transcendence and immanence of God, remains the most coherent and faithful account of the divine nature.
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  57

  How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  simply put; gullible people were told if they chose life on earth instead of heaven, they wouldn't have to die.

  that's how they sold it.

  the watchtower lied to people in the 1920 booklet and convention series titled "millions now living will never die!

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  Thomist Critique of the Watchtower’s Diminished God: Why “Spirit” Is Not “Energy” and Jehovah Is Not the True God

  One of the most fundamental errors in the theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses is their profoundly anthropomorphic and essentially pagan concept of God, a view which stands in direct contradiction to the entire tradition of classical theism—especially as developed by St. Thomas Aquinas. A particular manifestation of this error is their conflation of “spirit” (spiritus) and “energy,” reducing the immaterial nature of God to a kind of hyper-refined “energy” or “spiritual matter.” This mistake is not only philosophically untenable, but theologically disastrous, undermining the very foundation of Christian monotheism and ultimately leaving Jehovah’s Witnesses with a god who is neither infinite, nor eternal, nor even truly divine.

  I. The Physics of “Matter and Energy” vs. the Philosophy of “Spirit”

  In modern physics, “matter and energy” are, in a real sense, interchangeable—Einstein’s famous E=mc²—and both are quantifiable, measurable, and subject to the laws of the created universe. Everything that can be measured, whether as “matter” or “energy,” is part of the finite, contingent, temporal order. In contrast, classical Christian philosophy, and especially Thomism, recognizes a sharp distinction between the entire created order (which includes not just “matter,” but also anything that is measurable or changeable, including “energy”) and the purely spiritual, which is absolutely and essentially immaterial, unquantifiable, and unconfined by space or time.

  To call God “Spirit” (spiritus) in the biblical and philosophical sense is not to say that He is an “energy-being” or a kind of “cosmic force,” as in science fiction or as in the Watchtower’s doctrine. Rather, to be “spirit” is to be completely above and beyond all categories of created existence, whether material or energetic, extended or non-extended, visible or invisible. Spirit is the very opposite of anything measurable, divisible, or subject to change.

  In Thomistic metaphysics, matter (in the broadest sense) is that which possesses potentiality; it is “the principle of potency,” always capable of being otherwise. Even the most subtle forms of energy are, in this sense, “material,” since they can change, move, be measured, or be present here and not there. But spirit—as God is spirit—is the principle of actuality, pure act (actus purus), in whom there is no potentiality at all, and therefore no change, division, limitation, or quantification. God is not a “super-energy” being; He is, as St. Thomas says, ipsum esse subsistens—the very act of “to be” itself, subsisting by His own necessity.

  II. The Watchtower’s Anthropomorphic and Pagan God

  The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ doctrine of God is strikingly limited and materialistic. Their official publications and leaders have repeatedly described “Jehovah” as possessing a “spirit body,” residing in a particular location (even assigning Him a place among the Pleiades, at one point in their history!), and operating within the constraints of space and time. Even when the Pleiades myth was abandoned, the underlying error remained: God is described as being “in heaven,” as an “individual” who cannot be everywhere at once, and who must, if He wishes to act or communicate, send messengers across the cosmos, subject to travel time. This is not the transcendent, omnipresent God of Christianity, but a cosmic king or demiurge—a pagan deity with superhuman powers, yet fundamentally one of “the things that are,” a being among beings.

  This error is compounded by the Witnesses’ materialistic account of creation. Rather than holding to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—that God creates the world out of nothing, simply by His will—they posit that Jehovah utilized a portion of His “dynamic energy reserves” to produce the universe. This would mean that God is not absolutely infinite, but is limited by the quantity of His “energy.” This is the cosmology of myth and science fiction, not Christian metaphysics.

  III. The Watchtower God Is Not Immutable, Eternal, or Omniscient

  The Witnesses further ascribe temporality and mutability to God. Jehovah is not “eternal” in the classical sense (outside of time), but is simply “everlasting”—subject to temporal sequence, able to “learn” new things, to be surprised, to change His mind, and even to forget or erase things from His memory. Their god can choose not to know certain things, and only exercises his foreknowledge “selectively,” supposedly to allow human freedom. But this, again, is to make God finite and contingent—one being among others, subject to time, change, and ignorance.

  The metaphysical consequences of this are fatal to any claim of true divinity. A being who is spatial, temporal, mutable, and contingent is not the necessary foundation of all that exists, but is rather a product of the universe. Such a “god” cannot be the Creator in any meaningful sense, since he is as dependent on space, time, and causal relations as are all creatures. As Thomists have always argued, the necessary being—the true God—must be utterly transcendent, without potentiality, uncaused, simple (without composition or division), and infinite in all perfections.

  IV. The True Christian Doctrine: God as Pure Act, Spirit, and Necessary Being

  Classical theism, and especially Thomistic philosophy, insists that God is not a being among beings, nor even the “highest” being in the universe. He is Being itself—ipsum esse subsistens—in whom essence and existence are identical. God is not “a spirit” in the sense of a subtle substance, nor an “energy” among other energies, but Spirit in the sense of absolute actuality, subsisting independently, and completely transcending the created order.

  God’s infinity is not a matter of extension, but of perfection—He is unlimited because He is pure act, without any unrealized potential. His omnipresence is not a spatial diffusion, but the metaphysical fact that all things exist only by participation in His sustaining act of being. His omniscience is not a process of “learning” or “receiving updates” from angels, but is the eternal, simultaneous vision of all things, past, present, and future, in Himself.

  The doctrine of divine simplicity means that God is not composed of parts (as the Witnesses imagine, with a “body” and “mind” and “energy”), nor of attributes “added on” to a substance. All that is in God is God; His knowledge, power, will, and presence are one and the same reality.

  V. The Destructive Consequences of a Diminished God

  The Watchtower’s conception of God is thus not merely defective, but idolatrous. It reduces the Creator to a cosmic superman, “spiritual” only in the sense of being “energetic” or “invisible,” but still subject to the limitations of created reality. This is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—nor the God of Jesus Christ and the apostles—but the shadow of a god, unworthy of worship or ultimate trust.

  Moreover, as many critics have observed (see Magnani, The Heavenly Weatherman), such a god cannot even sustain the Witnesses’ own theology. If God can “choose not to know,” or can make mistakes, or needs to rely on messengers for information, then His promises are no longer absolutely trustworthy, and His providence becomes little more than educated guesswork. The entire structure of revelation, prophecy, and salvation collapses into uncertainty and subjectivity. It is no wonder that this doctrine breeds anxiety, legalism, and an obsession with performance among Jehovah’s Witnesses; their “Jehovah” is not the loving Father who knows and orders all things for the good of those who love Him, but a distant and unpredictable power.

  VI. Conclusion: Thomist Theism or Pagan Animism?

  In conclusion, the Watchtower’s theology must be rejected as a form of philosophical and theological regression. By collapsing “spirit” into “energy,” and God into a powerful being located within the universe, they have abandoned the biblical and classical doctrine of God for a mixture of pagan myth and modern rationalist fantasy. The true God is not an “energy-being,” nor is He a cosmic weather forecaster, nor a superhuman on a distant throne. He is the one, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient Spirit—the necessary foundation of all reality, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).

  To the modern mind, shaped by materialist assumptions and science fiction tropes, the distinction may seem subtle, but it is in truth the difference between true monotheism and sophisticated idolatry. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, unless God is pure act, infinite, eternal, and simple, He is not God at all, but a creature—subject to the very limitations He is supposed to transcend.

  The classical Christian vision of God alone does justice to the divine transcendence and immanence, the mystery of creation, and the hope of salvation. All lesser conceptions—such as that of the Watchtower—must be left behind as inadequate for the human heart, mind, and soul.