Dan,
One of the most vital questions in the Gospels is, “What think you of Christ? Whose son is he?” (Matthew 22:42). Christians have ever replied to that with the unhesitating proclamation of faith, “The Son of the Living God.” But not so with Jehovah’s witnesses.
Witnesses agree that Christ existed before He was born into this world, but say that He was himself only a creature - the first creature made by God and used as an instrument for the creation of all else. C.T. Russell tells us that he was “Michael the Archangel”! When, millenniums after his creation, this creature became man, his nature was completely changed from angelic and spiritual to material and human. “In obedience to God, he gave up his spiritual being and was born of Mary as a wholly human being.” Apparently that was the end of Michael the Archangel, a fact St. John unfortunately forgot when writing his Apocalypse, for he has Michael still existing side by side with the Christ into whom Russell declared him to have been transformed!
But, let us go on. When Christ died on the Cross, according to Witnesses, he was merely a man, and his death was the end of him; completely and absolutely the end. But a “spirit-being” emerged from the tomb, to be come “a” god, not “the” God; which apparently was better that being Michael the Archangel who had existed in the first place.
This doctrine that Christ was three consecutive and independent beings, Michael the Archangel, the man Jesus, and the semi-divine king of the new world, is certainly not Christian doctrine, whatever else it may be. Most intelligent people will rightly estimate it as fantastic nonsense.
And what becomes of the basic fact in the Christian religion - the resurrection of Christ? “If Christ be not risen,” says St. Paul, “then your faith is in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:17). The Jehovah’s Witnesses deny that he is risen. “The man Christ,” you say, “is dead forever.” “The Person who died,” Russell tells us, “remained dead, and he will never be seen again in his human nature.” What became of his body? Russell says no one knows. He suggests that possibly it was dissolved into gases, OR supernaturally removed by God to be preserved until He chooses to produced it as a grand memorial or trophy of Christ’s work. But it will be only a material corpse.
But we are told not to worry. If Christ is not risen in the long accepted Christian sense of the word, he was raised a “spirit being,” receiving immortality and divinity as a gift from God. It is all very baffling. If the “person who died remained dead,” who was the person receiving immortality and divinity? If God created a new being to enjoy those privileges, then that new being wasn’t Christ but somebody else! Yet Russel goes on to say that Christ, despite his remaining dead, returned to his disciples after the resurrection in separate “body-appearnces” specially created for each occasion!
At the ascension Russell tells us that Jesus, no longer human was exalted as a “sprit-being” to the divine nature; and that he remains an invisible spirit, having no longer any connection with our human nature. But if “the person who died remained dead,” Jesus is not merely no longer human - he is no longer in existence! Russell may have been able to think in such queer ways; but had no right to pretend that he was giving his followers anything like the genuine New Testament doctrine.
