The Question Is Not Whether Jehovah’s Witnesses Talk About Jesus
Jehovah’s Witnesses speak constantly about Jesus. They distribute Bibles, preach from house to house, commemorate his death, call him the Son of God, and explicitly identify themselves as Christians. Any fair account should begin there. Their official literature describes Jesus as Savior, Messiah, Lord, and the one through whom salvation is made possible.
The question, therefore, is not whether Jehovah’s Witnesses use Christian language.
It is who they believe Jesus actually is.
That distinction also helps us avoid an unnecessary semantic argument. Scholars of religion commonly classify Jehovah’s Witnesses as a Christian-derived restorationist or new religious movement because the movement arose from Christian soil, uses the Bible, and understands itself as a restoration of primitive Christianity.
From a Nicene Christian perspective, however, the classification is different. Orthodox, Catholic, and the historic mainstream of Protestant Christianity confess one triune God and Jesus Christ as the eternal, uncreated Son. Jehovah’s Witnesses explicitly reject that confession.
That is where the real disagreement begins.
Jesus as Michael the Archangel
Jehovah’s Witnesses do not merely compare Jesus with Michael. Their official literature identifies Michael as another name for Jesus in his heavenly existence. Jesus existed as Michael before becoming human and, following his earthly life, again exists as the exalted heavenly Michael.
They also teach that the Son had a beginning: he was God’s first creation, through whom God subsequently brought the rest of creation into existence.
This is irreconcilable with the confession formulated at Nicaea in AD 325 and expanded at Constantinople in 381:
Jesus Christ is “begotten, not made,” and “of one essence with the Father.”
That language was not chosen because fourth-century bishops enjoyed philosophical complication. It was chosen because the Church believed that Scripture required a distinction between the Son who creates and everything that is created.
John begins his Gospel:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
He immediately adds:
“All things came into being through Him, and without Him not one thing came into being.”
—John 1:1–3
Paul similarly writes that “all things” in heaven and earth were created through Christ and for Christ and that “He is before all things” (Colossians 1:16–17).
Hebrews is particularly difficult to reconcile with the identification of Christ as an angel. Its opening chapter repeatedly distinguishes the Son from the angelic order:
“For to which of the angels did He ever say, ‘You are My Son’?”
—Hebrews 1:5
The expected answer is none.
The argument continues by commanding the angels to render homage to the Son, calling the Son’s throne everlasting, and applying to him language from Psalm 102 concerning the Lord who founded the earth and whose years never end (Hebrews 1:6–12).
Jehovah’s Witnesses have responses to these passages. They commonly appeal to Colossians 1:15, where Christ is called “the firstborn of all creation,” Revelation 3:14, where he is called “the beginning of the creation by God,” and texts connecting Christ’s return with an archangel’s voice. Those passages deserve serious exegesis.
But “firstborn” in biblical usage need not mean “first thing created.” It can designate supremacy and inheritance, as when David is called God’s “firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth” in Psalm 89:27. Colossians itself explains Christ’s preeminence by saying that all things were created through him and for him.
The cumulative New Testament portrait is considerably larger than that of the highest creature in heaven.
The Holy Spirit: Person or Force?
The disagreement extends to the Holy Spirit.
Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the Trinity and describe the Holy Spirit not as a distinct divine Person but as God’s “active force”—the power through which Jehovah accomplishes his purposes.
Historic Christianity certainly agrees that the Spirit manifests God’s power. The question is whether Scripture speaks of him as nothing more than an impersonal force.
The New Testament attributes remarkably personal actions to the Spirit. He speaks and gives commands (Acts 13:2); teaches and reminds Christ’s disciples (John 14:26); intercedes (Romans 8:26); can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30); distributes gifts “as He wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11); and appoints overseers in the Church (Acts 20:28).
At Christ’s baptism, moreover, the Son is in the Jordan, the Spirit descends, and the Father speaks from heaven (Matthew 3:16–17). Christian Trinitarian doctrine arose from the need to hold such biblical data together without collapsing Father, Son, and Spirit into one Person or multiplying God into three gods.
The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed therefore confesses the Spirit as “the Lord, the giver of life,” worshiped and glorified together with the Father and the Son.
Jehovah’s Witness theology stands deliberately outside that confession.
What Was Raised From the Tomb?
The resurrection exposes another substantial difference.
Jehovah’s Witnesses affirm emphatically that Jesus rose from the dead. But they do not mean by this what historic Christianity means by the bodily resurrection of Christ.
Their official literature teaches that Jesus was “made alive in the spirit” and did not resume the same flesh-and-blood human body that had been crucified. His post-resurrection appearances are explained as occasions on which the risen spirit Jesus materialized human bodies so that his disciples could see him.
That distinction should not be obscured. Jehovah’s Witnesses do believe in a real resurrection; they reject the claim that the crucified human body itself was raised and glorified.
The Gospel narratives, however, repeatedly stress continuity between the Jesus who died and the Jesus who rose.
When the disciples fear that they are seeing a spirit, Christ answers:
“Touch Me and see; for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
—Luke 24:39
Thomas is invited to examine the wounds of crucifixion (John 20:24–29). Jesus had earlier spoken of destroying “this temple” and raising it in three days, and John explicitly explains that he meant “the temple of His body” (John 2:19–21).
Paul likewise places the resurrection at the heart of the apostolic gospel in 1 Corinthians 15. The body that is raised is transformed, glorified, incorruptible, and Spirit-filled—but resurrection is transformation, not the permanent abandonment of human embodiment.
This matters profoundly in Orthodox theology. Christ did not assume humanity temporarily and then discard it. The eternal Word became flesh. The humanity he assumed from the Virgin Mary is healed, glorified, and carried into everlasting life.
So Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian?
The answer depends upon the category being used.
As a matter of religious history and sociology, Jehovah’s Witnesses are reasonably described as a Christian restorationist movement. They arose within a Christian environment, organize their entire religious life around the Bible, and sincerely claim to follow Jesus.
As a matter of historic Nicene Christian theology, however, the answer is considerably sharper.
Jehovah’s Witnesses deny doctrines that the ancient Church regarded as belonging to the identity of the Christian God himself:
- the eternal and uncreated deity of the Son;
- the personal divinity of the Holy Spirit;
- the Trinity;
- and the resurrection of Christ in the glorified humanity that was crucified.
Calling their theology non-Nicene is therefore not an insult. It is a straightforward historical description.
Calling its Christology heretical is likewise a theological judgment about doctrines, not a judgment about the intelligence, sincerity, or moral character of individual Jehovah’s Witnesses.
One may admire a Witness’s devotion, discipline, moral seriousness, or zeal for Scripture while still saying plainly that the Christ being described is not the Christ confessed at Nicaea.
Reflection
Christian apologetics fails whenever winning a classification dispute becomes more important than Christ himself.
The Jehovah’s Witness standing at the door is not an enemy to be humiliated. He or she is a person for whom Christ died, often sincerely attempting to honor God according to what they have been taught. That calls for patience as well as clarity.
But love does not require us to make the identity of Jesus negotiable.
The Christian hope rests upon something far greater than an angel sent by God. The one who entered our humanity is the eternal Word through whom creation itself came to be. The hands pierced on Golgotha are the hands of the incarnate Son. The humanity laid in the tomb was not discarded but raised, transfigured, and brought into glory.
The Church therefore worships Christ without hesitation.
Not as Michael elevated above his fellow angels.
Not as the first and greatest creature.
But as the one through whom every creature received its being: Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made.
To know who Christ is is not theological trivia.
It is to know the One in whom our salvation rests.
Sources
Primary and confessional sources
- The Holy Bible: John 1:1–3; John 2:19–21; John 20:24–29; Colossians 1:15–17; Hebrews 1:1–13; Luke 24:36–43; 1 Corinthians 15.
- The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (AD 325/381).
- Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, “Who Is Michael the Archangel?” Official Jehovah’s Witness publication.
- Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, “Do Jehovah’s Witnesses Believe in Jesus?”
- Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, “What Is the Holy Spirit?”
- Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, “After Jesus’ Resurrection, Was His Body Flesh or Spirit?”
Academic background
- George D. Chryssides, Jehovah’s Witnesses: Continuity and Change (Routledge, 2016).
- Andrew Holden, Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious Movement (Routledge, 2002).
- Zoe Knox, “Writing Witness History: The Historiography of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania,” Journal of Religious History 35 (2011).