JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES
By C. LEOPOLD CLARKE
“RUSELLISM,” called formerly “Millennial Dawn”
but now better known as the “International Bible Students’ Association,”
is probably as cunning and vigorous a heresy as has been launched in modern times. Dr.
Haldeman of
Its main teaching, as contained in its seven bulky volumes of Studies, undermines the foundations of
Godly fear, and torpedoes the mission of the Gospel, by shifting the scene of human
probation from the present age to the Millennial period, when
every man is to have a second chance to save himself by his own obedience,
and will be resurrected to that end.
Thus:- “Men, not God, have limited to the Gospel age
the chance or opportunity of attaining life. God tells us that the Gospel age is
merely selecting the Church through whom, during a succeeding age all others
shall be brought to an accurate knowledge of the Truth, and granted full
opportunity to secure everlasting
Life under the new Covenant” (Vol. 1, p. 131).
The World-Redemptive value is entirely eliminated from the death of Christ.
The truth of Substitution is destroyed by the idea of further probation
and human effort. Every man is said
to die for Adam’s sin in this dispensation, in the next for his own. But it is literal physical dying that is
meant, which he calls ‘extinction of being.’ The scene is wholly temporal. But Christ declared that He came “to give His life a
Ransom for many.” “The essential
thing was extinction of being to ransom
Adam from extinguished existence,” is his comment on
Christ’s death. Russell
knows nothing either of spiritual death or spiritual life.
There is no tincture [i.e., ‘solution of medicinal
substance’] in his writings of any
conception of a racial spiritual death as the result of Adam’s
transgressions or of racial spiritual Redemption by the Second Adam. He knows nothing of ‘Death in trespasses and sins’ apparently. The
significance of the Atonement is thus relentlessly erased – “Suffering played no part in the Ransom,”
he declares. The sacrifice of Christ only places men in a position equal to Adam
un-fallen and provides no ‘saving grace’
for anyone. But let the system
speak again:- “The Ransom for all given by the
man Jesus Christ does not give or guarantee
Eternal Life or blessing to any man, but it does guarantee to every man
another opportunity or trial for Life Everlasting” (Studies, Vol. 1, p. 150).
So that the “Ransom” is only a temporal and material thing -
not fulfilling the meaning of a Spiritual Redemption; not the meeting of
man’s debt of sin by vicarious suffering.
It leaves men still to save themselves - if ‘save’ can be applied to a state that is no
more than “a physical life lived on this earth
and sustained by eating food.” (Harp of God, p. 320). Russell says:- “It was an earthly
home, human life, and attendant blessings that Adam lost, and these are the blessings God promised shall be restored
to man ... All mankind may receive again through faith in Christ and
obedience to His requirements not a spiritual, but a glorious perfect human
nature” (Studies, Vol.
1, pp. 177‑180). Thus
On the death of Pastor Russell, who with his wife, was
responsible for the writing of Seven
Volumes of so-called “Studies in
the Scriptures”; the mantle fell upon a person known as “Judge
Rutherford,” who set to work to endeavour to repair the lost
prestige of the Russellite cause, owing to the failure of Russell’s
confident predictions concerning the end of the age. This he did in a booklet called: “Millions now living will never die,”
and in lectures on the same subject.
To the same man is due the authorship of a small volume known as “The Harp of God,” in which the
revelation of God is supposed to be represented by the ten strings.
This work is a veritable
compendium of false doctrines, and is of especial importance as it purports to supply the
reasonings of the system, and is calculated to impose upon the uninstructed and
unwary. In this book the Person of
Christ is one of the chief subjects of treatment, the whole being to show, what
Arius
sought to establish, that He was a created Being, instead of the Creator of all
things, as John declares in his gospel:- “All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything
made that was made. In Him was Life and the Life was the light
of men” (John 1: 4). The latter part of this text is avoided,
but in the same place, where John says
“and the
Word was God,” Russell
adds the indefinite article “a” and
teaches that it means “A mighty One”;
“one who speaks and acts for Jehovah,”
thus suggesting a plurality of Gods.
On page 99 it is said:- “Some have earnestly believed that Jesus was God Himself, but such a conclusion is not warranted by
the scriptures.”
Yet Jesus said “I and My Father are
one,” and “He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father.” On page
101 it says again:- “Some
insist that Jesus when on earth was both God and man in completeness. This theory is wrong, however.” Is it wrong? Does it not say “In whom dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily”
(Col. 2: 9.) “Theotees,” meaning
the essential Deity, replaces other words for Divinity?
Russell declares that “had Jesus
been merely an incarnated being, it would not have been necessary for Him to be
born as a babe” (page 103). “Incarnation”
is of course authorized in the text, “The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us,”
but it is no case of a ‘spirit being inhabiting
a body of flesh,’ but of God redeeming man by assuming man’s estate.
This doctrine is not recognized in this book. Russell
rises no higher than spiritistic conceptions of
materialisation. In place of
this truth of the descent of God in Christ, a theory of the crudest character
is advanced touching the Person of Christ.
Thus we are told that “Our Lord before He
left His glory to become a man, was in ‘a form of God’ (as
though the form of God was multiple and various) a spiritual form, a spirit being, but
since to be a ransom for mankind He had to be a man ... it was necessary that His nature be
changed. Thus we see that in Jesus
there was no mixture of natures, but that twice He experienced a change of
nature; first, from spiritual to human, afterward, from human to the highest
form of spiritual nature, the Divine, and in each case the one was given up for
the other” (Plan of the Ages,
pp. 177‑1080). Again it is
said:- “If
Christ had the Divine nature when on earth He could not possibly have died
... While
on earth He was a man, only a man,
perfect indeed, but a man with nothing
superhuman or supernatural about Him.”
It must be noted, further, that the teaching concerning
Christ’s resurrection is
deliberately falsified in the Harp of
God. In that volume it is
affirmed (p. 165) that “Jesus was born on the
Divine plane to the Divine nature at His resurrection.” It is further plainly said that “He was put to death in the flesh and was resurrected a
Divine Being” - thereby denying to Him, not only Deity, which is an idea repugnant both to
Russell and
The teaching of Russellism on the
future things - the second coming of Christ and the judgment of the wicked - is
in line with what has gone before. It is obvious that any second coming of a
Christ who was not resurrected except in some inexplicable spirit sense, must
be a first rate dilemma for these heretical teachers. So He
is supposed to have returned spiritually in 1874 and to have been ordering events on the Earth since then. Christ therefore is not coming, but has already come (p. 212), the reason being
given why no one has seen Him, that He is “no longer human but Divine” and that He has “a glorious body which no man hath seen, nor can look upon
and live” (page 219).
Yet it is written that “every eye shall see Him,” and His
coming in glory is continually stressed in the New
Testament, in circumstances which it would seem impossible for the subtilty
even of this heresy to evade.
The Millennium is a
period of “Judgment-Trial” for all
who have lived once without knowing God. Thus on the text,
“They that have done good unto the
resurrection of Life and they that have done evil unto the resurrection
of damnation,” Russell
says:- “A precious promise for the world of a
coming Judgment-Trial for life everlasting is by a mistranslation turned into a
fearful imprecation. The text
should read: ‘Will come forth unto raising up to perfection by judgments,
stripes, disciplines’!”(Plan of the Ages, Vol. 1, p. 147).
Christ said in His commission to His
servants:- “He that
believeth and is baptized shall be saved, he
that believeth not shall be damned.” Writing to the Church, Peter says in his first Epistle, chap. 4 : 18, “And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the
ungodly and sinner appear”?
What hope of a ‘second chance’
appears in such saying as that?
There is nothing in the Bible which teaches such view of the meaning of
Redemption, which is an invention to blind the eyes of men to the
urgency of the present probation and
the invitation of Christ. So far
are these teachers from understanding the true position of man in the sight of
God that it is taught that sinners who turn to God are “a part of the great Sacrifice of God’s beloved Son,
Jesus” (Harp of God, pp.
194‑5): instead of which the Scripture constantly insists that the believer
is redeemed by that sacrifice of Christ “as of a lamb without spot and
without blemish.” How
then can he be a part of the sacrifice?
The pretensions of Russell in the 7th volume, for which he is
expressly held responsible by the Editors in the introduction, can only be
described as blasphemous. Recording
the events of Revelation,
chap. 10, and the descent of the Angel, it says (10-8) “And cried
with a loud voice” - “Pastor
Russell was the voice used.”
“And when he had cried,” “with the first cry, Food for Thinking Christians, 1,400,000 copies given away free.”
“Seven Thunders” -
“SevenVolumes of Studies in the Scriptures.” “And when
the Seven Thunders had uttered their voices, I” - “Pastor Russell as a
representative of the John class” (! !) (pp. 167, 168).
Further on where it says, “And write them
not,” the interpretation offered is that, - “36
years elapsed from the publication of Food
for Thinking Christians to this Volume VII”!!
‑The Fundamentalist.
See “THE GODHEAD OF JESUS.”