Jehovah's Witnesses

The New World Society

Marley Cole

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429670312
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Soziologie

This book, first published in 1956, is the first authoritative, comprehensive account of the worldwide activities of Jehovah's Witnesses. It traces their origins and development, and a special section covers the founding, organization and development of the movement in Great Britain.

Orthodoxy in Reverse—‘These men that have upset the inhabited earth are present here also,’ said the Jews, when Paul and Silas came to Thessalonica.

ACTS 17:6.

CHAPTER ONE

 

Orthodoxy in Reverse

MANY people—Church leaders especially—say that something has got to be done about religion, that conventional religion has lost its savour. ‘Religion in our time has little “kick” in it,’ declared Dr. Robert J. McCracken of New York’s Riverside Church.

Everybody agrees that the Witnesses of Jehovah are doing something about religion. It would be impossible to produce a more revolutionary religion, even if the sum total of all the tenets of Christendom were turned precisely upside down. It is as if the Witnesses had hit upon the formula that religion as we know it has got everything in reverse. To arrive at true worship (one could almost accuse them of reasoning), means adopting the opposite to what you hear in church.

For this reason Jehovah’s witnesses find themselves in a peculiar position: while on the one hand, Church leaders declare unequivocally that something must be done about modern religion (preachers are admitting that Communism, for example, is beating Christendom ‘at her own game of evangelizing the world’), on the other hand, nobody could do more towards revolutionizing Christianity than Jehovah’s witnesses have done during the past eighty years or so.

One may therefore ask : Are Jehovah’s witnesses the kind of antidote that modern religion has been needing? Are they the landmark on the horizon towards or away from which orthodoxy should hasten?

Thriving on Universal Opposition

Latin-American Catholics label them an ‘off-brand Protestant sect.’ Protestants on the island of Cyprus announce on street corners that they have no connection with Jehovah’s witnesses. The Orthodox Church in Greece brands them a ‘Jewish sect.’ The Jews remonstrate to the Government. Pakistan Moslems abhor them as ‘Christians.’ Quebec Canadians prosecute them as seditionists. Americans mob them as Communists. Communists murder them as spies for American imperialism.

Jehovah’s witnesses quote a statement by Dr. W. L. Pet-tingill, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Broadway and 79th Street, New York. ‘The weakness of the Church today,’ he declared, ‘is largely the result of the absence of persecution and suffering.’

Lack of persecution and suffering may be, as Dr. Pettingiii says, the weakness of modern orthodoxy. Does that imply that abundance of persecution and suffering has something to do with the strength of Jehovah’s witnesses?

Church membership in the United States has, on paper, increased by sixty per cent during the past quarter-century. During the same period Jehovah’s witnesses multiplied by two thousand per cent.

During the pangs of world-wide depression, the second total war, and the wildfire spread of Communism among one-third of the earth’s people the Witnesses multiplied internationally by more than fifteen hundred per cent. For several years during that time they preached their good news underground in seventy out of eighty-two countries.

I do not believe the Louisville Courier Journal was exaggerating in 1950 when it characterized Jehovah’s witnesses as ‘the fastest-growing religion in the world.’

The Appeal of the Nonconformists

A precise definition of Jehovah’s witnesses is not easy. It is a religion whose members do their own preaching; a religious group that spends more on field preaching than it does on building churches. It is a religion with no paid clergy—no class distinctions of clergy and laity. Everybody, young and old, male and female, is enrolled in strenuous, regular ministerial education which turns out one thousand ministers—not members, but ministers—a week and organizes one new congregation somewhere in the world every day in the year.

Think of half a million preachers—the largest single body of united preachers in the world—whose pulpits, in more than one hundred and fifty countries, are the doorsteps, living-rooms, pavements, shop counters, business desks, vacant sites, parks, stadiums and civic auditoriums of the inhabited earth.

When you walk into a Kingdom Hall congregation of one hundred Witnesses, you won’t be looking at one minister preaching to ninety-nine lay members. You will be looking at one hundred preachers, Bible evangelists, Bible educators. Some may be only nine years old, some may be ninety; but they know how to thumb a Bible, and the Bible is their textbook.

Just as the message the Witnesses preach cannot be presented in any orthodox form or fashion, neither will it support any orthodox system nor supreme councils. No money drives or collection plates. No crusades to save an ‘irreformable and doomed world,’ and no attempt to ‘put God into business’ or ‘God into politics’ or ‘God into religion,’ as religious systems now stand.

Jehovah’s witnesses believe that this whole world system of things, held together by its three main components of commerce, politics and religion, is declining fast. They urge and beckon you towards a New World System of Things.

This New World Society is no nebulous dream to them. It is not coming tomorrow—it is here today. It is to them the surest reality on earth today. Tomorrow, if Armageddon struck all worldly systems from the planet as completely as the Flood washed out ‘the world that then was’ there would still remain the New World Society intact, a going concern. They believe this. That is how real it is to them. And it does exist.

In 1949, George R. Stewart published a book called Earth Abides. In it he described an imaginary plague that reduced the population of our planet to a few straggling survivors. These few banded together, here and there, and started rehabilitating the world as best they could. By the time the second generation was established they found themselves divided into fearful, jealous little families and clans. The story of nationalism, wars, misery, and confusion started all over again.

Jehovah’s witnesses anticipate an early annihilation of all the earth’s population except the New World Society of perhaps a few million. But in the post-Armageddon New World they envisage no confusion, disunity, divisions, or wars. The millennial reign of Christ will hold sway over the earth. In fact, a preliminary reign, the ‘day of Jehovah’s judgment,’ has already started here ‘amid its enemies.’ Its aim is to draw together out of the world’s tribulation a ‘great crowd’ from all races and tribes and tongues.

The unity, purpose, devotion, and irrepressible growth of Jehovah’s witnesses proves well enough that this, to them, is the paramount fact of the universe. They are literally preparing now for life in the New World.

Their World-wide Mission— ‘And this good news of the kingdom wilt be preached in all the inhabited earth for the purpose of a witness to all the nations, and then the accomplished end will come’

MATTHEW 24: 14. New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures.

CHAPTER TWO

Their World-Wide Mission

JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES have volunteered to carry out what to them is a divinely inspired mission to deliver a special message to all the inhabited earth. To that end they are organized and trained.

This peculiar good news that the Witnesses have for all earthly residents is of Kingdom Here. ‘Do you ever pray the Lord’s Prayer?’ the Witnesses ask.

‘You mean the one we learn at school?’ you inquire.

‘That’s it,’ they reply. ‘You know how it goes—”Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth....” ‘ and so on.

‘Of course,’ you say, nodding.

‘Jehovah’s witnesses are not looking for the Kingdom to come in the future. We consider it as having started here on earth already.’

‘Since when?’ you demand, startled.

‘Since nineteen-fourteen.’

‘But how,’ you insist, ‘do you get such an idea?’

They open their Bibles to show you prophecies such as Matthew, chapter twenty-four. ‘Here, for example, is Jesus’ famous world’s-end prophecy,’ they point out. ‘It reads like a blueprint of the things that have happened since nineteen-fourteen.’

‘Why nineteen-fourteen?’

‘Notice that the disciples inquired of Jesus what would be the sign of His presence in Kingdom power, and of the end of the old world “system of things”.’

‘Yes?’

‘The sign is composed of many separate events all coming within one generation. For example, the time of the end, or consummation period, would be marked by the outbreak of world wars. There would be world food shortages, disease, pestilences, earthquakes, distress of nations, global perplexities. All these, once they had started, would go on growing worse till the final end, Armageddon.’

‘And it started in nineteen-fourteen?’

‘Even The New York Times,’ they reply, ‘remarked that nineteen-thirteen was the last normal year in human history.’ And they point out that World War II was worse than World War I, and that World War III will be an even greater disaster.

‘You mean then,’ you argue, ‘that God is bringing increasing sorrows upon the world to make it aware of His Kingdom’s establishment?’

‘No,’ they reply quickly. ‘God is not responsible for this world distress. The Devil is. This is his world, the Bible says. Other Bible prophecies, such as Revelation, chapter twelve, show that the Devil knows he has reached the end of his wicked rule. He is now enraged. He is bent on ruining all future prospects of life on earth. He is determined to blind people to the only hope, the Kingdom.’

The work of Jehovah’s witnesses, then, counteracts Satan’s mad drive to plunge the world into violent chaos. That work gives people hope for life in a new world, under the heavenly Kingdom. Those choosing the Kingdom will survive the decisive fight at Armageddon, where Jehovah’s forces under Christ will achieve a crushing victory over Satan and his world, visible and invisible. The survivors will receive their reward either in heavenly glory, or here on earth in a paradise of everlasting life.

The preaching of this good news of the Kingdom constitutes one of the more important aspects of the great composite signs that humanity has reached the ‘consummation of this system of things.’ Matthew 24: 14. in The New World Translation, reads :

‘And this good news of the kingdom will be preached in all the inhabited earth for the purpose of a witness to all the nations, and then the accomplished end will come.’

Fulfilling that prophetic command is another law of ‘new world living’ translated into literal action from the pages of the Bible by Jehovah’s witnesses.

‘But to give all the inhabited earth official notice that God’s kingdom has entered upon the earthly scene,’ you observe, ‘is a world-size job.’

The Witnesses reply: ‘We are a world-wide organization. We think, speak and act in terms of a world movement. We have accepted a world-wide mission.’

‘How can you accomplish it?’

‘By a world-wide Bible educational programme.’

Education is their weapon and their religion is intellectual, not emotional. In countries such as Mexico, and the Latin-American republics, and throughout Africa, their Kingdom Hall religious centres are also secular educational centres. There Witness ministers serve as school instructors. Tens of thousands of African adults have learned to read and write in these Kingdom Halls of Jehovah’s witnesses.

For their global mission, assemblies like the 1953 world rally serve to furnish, among other things, more educational ammunition. At that convention newly published works included : a brand-new translation of the Bible (the first eight books of the Hebrew Scriptures), a 416-page Bible handbook, a 384-page Bible-study book called New Heavens and a New Earth, and seventy other new publications in twenty-eight languages.

Public sessions were held in twenty-one languages, including English, and a deaf-mute section was able to follow all the English sessions through interprete...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Orthodoxy in Reverse
• Chapter Two. Their World-Wide Mission
• Chapter Three. Across Nineteen Centuries
• Chapter Four. Charles T. Russell—Prophet of the Millennium
• Chapter Five. J. F. Rutherford— ‘The Kingdom Is Here!’
• Chapter Six. Defending and Legally Establishing the Good Mews
• Chapter Seven. A Nation without a Country
• Chapter Eight. Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Bible
• Chapter Nine. Doctrines of the New World
• Appendix