Answering the Watchtower

Only the Father, whom they call by the name Jehovah, is God in the full sense. The Son is God’s first and greatest creation — the one being Jehovah made directly, who then served as the agent through whom everything else was made. Before his earthly life this Son was, they teach, the archangel Michael; he became the man Jesus, died, and was raised as a spirit creature. The Holy Spirit is not a person at all but God’s impersonal “active force.”

Honest limit: Historically this is a form of Arianism — the view, named for the fourth-century Alexandrian presbyter Arius, that the Son is the highest of creatures but a creature nonetheless, so that, in the slogan the Council of Nicaea condemned in 325, “there was when he was not.” Witnesses do not embrace the label, and there are differences in detail; but the structural claim is the same one Athanasius and the Nicene fathers contested. Against it the historic church confesses that the Son is homoousios — of the same nature as the Father — coequal, coeternal, and consubstantial: one God in three persons.

The flagship is the New World Translation’s rendering of John 1:1: “the Word was a god.” The reasoning is grammatical, not arbitrary. In the third clause of John 1:1, the Greek word theos (“God”) lacks the definite article, whereas the second clause — “the Word was with God” — has it (ton theon). Greek can use the article to mark definiteness; so, the argument runs, the anarthrous theos in clause three should be read indefinitely, “a god,” preserving the distinction between the Father (ho theos) and the Word, who is divine in a lesser, derived sense.

Honest limit: The absence of the article is a real feature of the text, and it is doing real work. The article-less theos does safeguard a distinction — the Word is not the person of the Father. A Witness who insists that clause three cannot mean “the Word is identical to the Father” is correct, and historic orthodoxy agrees: that error has its own ancient name, modalism.

The second pillar is Colossians 1:15, which calls Christ “the firstborn of all creation.” On the plain reading, the firstborn of a group belongs to that group: the firstborn of the flock is a sheep, the firstborn of Egypt is an Egyptian. So the firstborn of all creation is the first and chief created thing — exactly the Watchtower’s Christ. Revelation 3:14 is read as confirmation: Jesus is “the beginning of the creation by God” (NWT), where the Greek archē is taken to mean that he is the first thing God brought into being. Proverbs 8, where personified Wisdom says “the LORD created me as the beginning of his ways” (8:22, in the Greek Septuagint), is read as a portrait of the pre-incarnate Christ, and so as further evidence that the Son was created.

Honest limit: Colossians 1:15 looks, at first glance, like the Watchtower’s strongest verse, and its plain-sense force should be granted: “firstborn of X” can mean the first member of the group X. But Greek prōtotokos, like the Hebrew bekhor behind it, carries a second and very common meaning — preeminence, the rank and inheritance rights of the firstborn heir — and which sense is in play is settled by context, not by the bare phrase.

Third comes Jesus’s own statement in John 14:28: “the Father is greater than I.” To this the Witness adds the whole texture of Jesus’s dependence — he prays, he obeys, he is sent, he confesses he does not know the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), he calls the Father “my God” (John 20:17). Finally there is the identification of Jesus with Michael the archangel, inferred from 1 Thessalonians 4:16 (the Lord descends “with an archangel’s voice”) and Revelation 12:7 (Michael leads the armies of heaven, as the returning Christ does). Knit together, these strands yield the Watchtower’s picture: an exalted, pre-existent, mighty Son who is nonetheless Jehovah’s creature and servant, not Jehovah himself. It is this picture — not a caricature of it — that a good answer must engage.

The problem is the inference from “no article” to “therefore indefinite, therefore ‘a god.’” That inference does not hold in Greek. The decisive work was done by Philip B. Harner, in a 1973 article in the Journal of Biblical Literature. Harner examined anarthrous predicate nouns that precede the verb — exactly the construction in John 1:1c — and argued that their primary force is usually qualitative: they describe the nature of the subject rather than identifying or counting it. On his analysis the clause means that “the logos… had the nature of theos,” and he judged the qualitative force here “so prominent that the noun cannot be regarded as definite.” Daniel B. Wallace, in the standard intermediate grammar, reaches the same verdict: in John 1:1c theos is neither definite nor indefinite but qualitative — the Word possesses the full nature of deity that the Father possesses, while remaining personally distinct from him.

This is why “a god” is the one reading the construction will not bear. An indefinite “a god” makes the Word one divine being among a possible plurality — polytheism — from the pen of an author whose entire framework is Jewish monotheism. The qualitative reading, which affirms the Word’s full deity, is the settled judgment of the standard reference grammars, and even were one to retreat to a purely qualitative paraphrase — “the Word was fully divine in nature” — the created-angel Christology has already lost. One who shares the very nature of God is not a creature.

Honest limit: Colwell’s rule does not run in reverse. The 1933 study by Ernest Cadman Colwell is often invoked here — he observed that definite predicate nouns preceding the verb usually lack the article — but it is essential not to overstate it, as some apologists have. Colwell’s rule describes what happens to nouns already known to be definite; it does not run in reverse to prove that an anarthrous pre-verbal noun must be definite. Leaning on Colwell to prove “the Word was the God” is a genuine overreach, and an attentive Witness will catch it.

Be precise here, because the popular version of this point is wrong and a trained Witness will say so: John 1:6, 1:12 and 1:13 are anarthrous genitives, not preverbal predicate nominatives, so they are not the identical construction. What is true, and enough, is that the NWT renders article-less theos as ‘God’ at 1:6, 1:12 and 1:13, and reaches for ‘a god’ only at 1:1c. That is not a grammatical rule applied consistently; it is a rendering chosen where doctrine requires it. At 1:18 the NWT prints ‘the only-begotten god,’ lower case — say so before the Witness does. The Greek text the NWT translates prints monogenēs theos — theos again without the article, though not in the construction of 1:1c — and the NWT renders it “the only-begotten god,” lower case, in the same verse in which it has just printed “God” of the Father, where the Greek is equally without the article.

Honest limit: Witnesses rightly reply that context, not a mechanical rule, governs each verse; grant it. So this point decides no single verse; its force is that ‘a god’ is theology-driven rather than rule-driven. What rules it out is John’s monotheism and verse 3. The weight of the case is carried by the monotheistic context of John 1:1 — saturated in creation and one-God language — which is what rules “a god” out.

Greek prōtotokos, like the Hebrew bekhor behind it, carries a second and very common meaning — preeminence, the rank and inheritance rights of the firstborn heir — and which sense is in play is settled by context, not by the bare phrase. In Psalm 89:27 God says of David — who was the youngest, the last-born, of Jesse’s sons — “I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” Here “firstborn” cannot mean “born first”; it means supreme in rank. Likewise Israel, a nation that did not exist at the dawn of creation, is called God’s “firstborn” (Exodus 4:22). The word is a title of status.

Paul answers it himself in the next breath, and this is where the Watchtower reading breaks. Colossians 1:16–17 gives the reason for the title, opening with “for” (Greek hoti): “for by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth… all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” The firstborn is the one through whom, and for whom, all created things exist — and a being for whom all things were made, and who holds all things together, is on the Creator’s side of the line, not among the things created.

The tell: To make Christ a creature while keeping “all things were created through him” coherent, the New World Translation inserts the word “other” in verses 16–20 — “all other things” — so that Christ creates everything except himself. But “other” (Greek alla) is not in the Greek text at those points, as the Watchtower’s own Kingdom Interlinear shows in its word-for-word column. The inserted word is the tell: the unaltered text places Christ outside the category of created things, and a word had to be added to put him back in.

Revelation 3:14 calls Christ “the beginning of God’s creation” (Greek hē archē tēs ktiseōs tou theou). The Watchtower reads archē as “the first created thing.” But archē ordinarily means “origin, source, ruler, first cause” — it is the root of English words like “architect” and “monarch.” Most translators and lexicographers take it actively here: Christ is the source or origin of creation, its active beginning, not its first item. This fits the rest of Revelation, where the same Christ is “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13) — and “the first and the last” is a title Isaiah reserves for Yahweh alone (Isaiah 44:6). One does not call a creature the Alpha.

Honest limit: Proverbs 8 is subtler, and here the honest answer is to resist over-reading in either direction. The Hebrew verb in 8:22 (qanah) is disputed and is often rendered “possessed” or “acquired” rather than “created.” More important, Proverbs 8 is a poem personifying an attribute of God — his wisdom in ordering the world — and most modern interpreters, across the theological spectrum, doubt that it was intended as a literal description of a pre-incarnate person at all. The New Testament nowhere cites Proverbs 8:22 to teach that the Son was created; that move is the reader’s, not the text’s.

The identification of Jesus with Michael is an inference, and the inference is weaker than it first appears. That the Lord descends “with the voice of an archangel” (1 Thessalonians 4:16) no more makes him an archangel than his descending in the same verse “with the sound of the trumpet of God” makes him a trumpet; the preposition signals accompaniment, not identity. In Jude 9, the archangel Michael, disputing with the devil over the body of Moses, “did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you’” — Michael cannot rebuke Satan on his own authority; he must appeal to the Lord. Jesus, by contrast, rebukes Satan directly and on his own word (Matthew 4:10; Mark 8:33). Above all, the entire first chapter of Hebrews is a sustained argument that the Son is categorically higher than the angels: “to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son’?” (Hebrews 1:5), and — quoting a text of worship — “Let all God’s angels worship him” (Hebrews 1:6). A chapter written to prove the Son is not an angel is difficult to reconcile with the claim that he is the chief one.

Honest limit: Revelation 12 shows Michael leading heaven’s armies, but so do many texts show angelic commanders; leadership in battle does not establish that two figures are one.

This opens onto the deepest problem for the whole Watchtower system: worship. In Revelation 22:8–9 the apostle John falls down to worship an angel and is sharply refused: “You must not do that!… Worship God.” Faithful angels do not accept worship. Yet the risen Jesus accepts exactly that from Thomas, who says to him, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28) — a confession Jesus blesses rather than corrects, and which the New World Translation leaves unaltered.

The New Testament writers keep taking Old Testament texts about Yahweh and applying them to Jesus. The sharpest case is Isaiah 45:23, where Yahweh himself swears, “to me every knee shall bow.” The New Testament reaches for it twice — quoted directly in Romans 14:11, and echoed and applied to Jesus in Philippians 2:10–11 (“at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord”). In Romans 14:11 the New World Translation prints “Jehovah”; in Philippians it renders Kyrios “Lord.” The honor Isaiah reserves for Yahweh alone is the very thing being paid in both places; the rule simply ensures the name can never be printed where that honor is paid to Christ. The same hymn says God gave Jesus “the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9), the name at which every knee bows — which in Isaiah is the name of Yahweh. So the Watchtower’s own handling of the divine name points the other way: the apostles were content to take the name and the honors that Isaiah reserves for Yahweh and give them to Christ.

Honest limit: The Watchtower will answer that its rule is text-critical, not theological: it restores “Jehovah” only where Kyrios stands for the divine name in an Old Testament citation, and in Philippians 2:11 Kyrios is the confession’s own title for Jesus, not a quotation of Isaiah’s divine name. Grant the rule — and notice what it guarantees. A criterion that always shields the Son from the divine name is not a neutral one.