Jehovah's Witnesses

Question: 

I am a Ukrainian Orthodox and very proud of my religion.  I found your e-mail through one of the Orthodox web sites.  I had a couple of questions concerning Jehovah's Witnesses.  Would it be possible for you to tell me what you know about Jehovah's Witnesses and if their religion really is a real religion.  I am quite confused because someone whom I love very much is a witness and just want to know what you think of them.  Please let me know

Very Rev. Ihor Kutash kutash@unicorne.org 

I have had contacts with the Jehovah's Witness confession (I think that is a good word - they are certainly a religion, denomination, religious community, etc. but the word "confession" seems to imply a group that accepts/professes/confesses a particular faith perspective) since childhood.

My mother got her Bible (Ukrainian) from her and so did my sister (English) - this was before the appearance of the New World translation which JW's (may I be forgiven the abbreviation) have  preferred for decades now.

I was once able to have a true dialogue with two of them (former Orthodox) for quite some time. I say "true" because generally their approach seems to be to convince rather than to share. My approach may have been somewhat similar at the time. At any rate they did not use the generally practiced tactic of changing topics when a challenge became too close for comfort. Suffice it to say that ultimately a wonderfully sophisticated Circuit Servant (their equivalent of bishop I would say) came to our discussion and wowed us all. They were confirmed in their conviction of the rightness of the Jehovah's Witness perspective and I was taken down a few notches.

From the perspective of Orthodox Christianity - which I find more and more appealing and reasonable as time goes by (it is also the perspective I was raised with - but I have and do continue to question its rightness) - there are many things in which they are sadly mistaken. The one most obvious is the position that was dealt with by the First Ecumenical Council in  325 A.D., i. e. that Jesus is the foremost of those created by God and not God the Son incarnate. This is not a small matter. It is in fact crucial to the Christian faith. That is why it is doubtful whether JW's could truly be considered Christians although they certainly spring from this source.

One could properly call them an Abrahamic faith - together with Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Mormons and of course the many truly Christian confessions (i.e. those that profess this crucial Christian testimony - that Jesus is both God and Man and that God is One in Three Persons - the Trinity).

An even more basic problem - shared with a good many Protestants - is the idea that the true community of Christ, the Church, somehow disappeared for centuries until it was re-constituted by the founder(s) of their particular confession. This is very like a blasphemy - to say that God would  simply allow His Church to vanish until someone appeared to re-create it. The Bible never says that the Abrahamic community (those in covenant with God through Abraham) vanished even though many, or even most, of the members of that community were unfaithful and went after other gods (watering down the Abrahamic covenant). Most Christians view the Church as the new Abrahamic community - the New Israel. The Orthodox, the Catholics, the Anglicans and a good many Protestants believe that the Church never disappeared or faded into oblivion until someone came along to make it reappear.

We Orthodox see ourselves as that Church. Our traditions, which JW's (along with many Protestants) view as paganism, are expressions of the perspectives and insights of God's people throughout the ages. Orthodoxy, frequently called God's best-kept secret, is a treasury of light and truth of which you as Ukrainian Orthodox are an inheritor.

It is not unusual for love to bring us into challenging areas of life. It seems to do that quite often. But remember that real love, agape-love, which is what can grow as we strive to work with the challenges of eros-love (not to be confused with simple biological phenomena), truly wants the best for the beloved - and that includes being true to one's own perspective. This does not mean stubborn rigidity. Love can be compared to a dance - it takes two or more partners (I would say three - God, the Other and I) to dance. Otherwise it is a puppet-show rather than a dance. God does not control, He nudges and woos. So must it be with those who are called to love.

Ukrainian Orthodoxy