God's Kingdom and the Divine Name
As taught in the Jehovah's Witness tradition
How Jehovah's Witnesses center worship on the name Jehovah and a literal coming Kingdom.
Jehovah's Witnesses are a religious community that traces its modern organisation to the Bible Student movement gathered around Charles Taze Russell in Pennsylvania in the 1870s and 1880s, and that took the distinctive name "Jehovah's Witnesses" in 1931 under Russell's successor Joseph Franklin Rutherford. From its centre at the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, the movement is known publicly for its house-to-house and street ministry, its magazines The Watchtower and Awake!, its refusal of military service and of blood transfusions, and its expectation of a coming earthly paradise. Beneath that public profile lies a tightly integrated theology in which two themes are central and mutually reinforcing: the vindication of God's name, Jehovah, and the establishment of God's Kingdom as a real heavenly government that will soon rule the earth.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain why Jehovah's Witnesses treat the divine name Jehovah, drawn from Exodus 3:15 and Psalm 83:18, as central to true worship, and describe how the New World Translation restores the name including in the New Testament.
- Describe the Witness teaching that God's Kingdom is a literal heavenly government, inaugurated invisibly in 1914, that will destroy human rule at Armageddon and restore a paradise earth, and trace this from Daniel 2:44 and Matthew 6:10.
- State the Witness denial of the Trinity - that Jehovah the Father alone is Almighty God, that the Son is God's first created being (identified with the Word and the archangel Michael), and that the Holy Spirit is an impersonal active force - and identify the precise point where this diverges from the Nicene confession.
- Summarise how the four anchor passages (Matthew 6:9-10; Psalm 83:18; Daniel 2:44; Exodus 3:15) are read together to unite the themes of the divine name and the Kingdom, and give the mainstream Christian reading paired with each.
- Identify the tradition's primary sources and authorities - Charles Taze Russell and the founding of The Watchtower, J. F. Rutherford and the 1931 name, the New World Translation, and the Governing Body as the 'faithful and discreet slave' - and the role of each.
- State fairly and without flattening where the Witness position differs from historic creedal Christianity on the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the personhood of the Spirit, the cross, the soul, and hell, and explain the principled basis each side gives for its view.
Scripture
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