In “There May Be Hell to Pay” I argued that Witness opposition to either an eternal or remedial hell as necessarily unjust is untenable given their commitment to the peccability and immortality of the glorified Anointed class. Their own doctrines lead them to affirm the possibility of at least one of these options. (Likely just the former, given their affirmation of irrevocable judgment and the possibility of committing an unforgivable sin.) The only way for them to avoid this is to affirm the impeccability of the Anointed. Will they? I think that is highly unlikely. Can they? Maybe, but not without some revision to their theology.
It is central to Witness theology as it currently stands that man – or any rational creature – has free will, which by their definition, includes the ability to choose to do good or evil. Such an ability is part of what it meant for man to be made in the image of God. In the words of the November 1, 1978 Watchtower, “Man’s ability to choose between right and wrong, between serving the true God Jehovah or serving self and false gods shows him to be a free moral agent, created in the image and likeness of Jehovah God.” If men could only do good, then they would be “robots”. (p. 12) “Robots” is exactly how another, November 15, 1955 Watchtower article describes redeemed mankind if they were unable to sin. (p. 703) Similarly, an article in the August 15, 1971 Watchtower reasons that if men were unable to sin, then they would be “like machines”. The article continues, “Therefore, if the [first] human pair had not had this ability to choose, they would actually have been incomplete, imperfect, according to God’s standards.”
In Witness theology, free will, which is a necessary aspect of man’s being in the image of God and a precondition for genuine love, includes a potential for sin. (Reasoning from the Scriptures, p. 428) Such an ability was inherent in man in his initial perfect state. Accordingly, it is no surprise that Witness literature explicitly affirms the possibility for post-restoration, perfect mankind to sin. They are returning to perfection, which, while it did not include actual sin, did include the potential for it. Given Witness anthropology, if redeemed mankind lacked the ability to sin, they would not be perfect, but would rather lack the image of God.
Even Jesus, who they say “worked for aeons with the Father” prior to coming to earth was still able to sin while upon the earth. When he became man, he was “still a free moral agent” who had “freedom of choice – either to be faithful or unfaithful”. (Insight on the Scriptures Vol. II, pp. 67-68) All this despite the fact that, as they say, his and his father’s mutual love is greater than any other love. “It can rightly be called the oldest and strongest bond of love in the whole universe.” (“Come Be My Follower”, pp. 130-132) If billions of years of perfect virtue, ever-increasing knowledge of God, and the strongest love for God did not absolutely remove the possibility of sin, what, in Witness theology, could a creature gain so as to become impeccable? Evidently, nothing.
Nevertheless, the Witness denial of creaturely impeccability is bizarre. They rightly claim that God, who has absolute freedom, cannot sin. “Jehovah God, however, cannot act contrary to what he is – the holy, all-wise and almighty God.” (January 22, 1977 Awake!, p. 28) Moreover, they seem to affirm that the damned (i.e., those who receive eternal annihilation) are fixed in their evil ways. This last claim appears to be made of King Saul, whose heart, they say, “had gone bad, to the point of no return.” (June 15, 1965 Watchtower, p. 362) Admittedly, I have not found any publication that says that King Saul will not be resurrected. Nevertheless, the claim that the wills of the damned are incapable of repentance is arguably entailed by their claim that some people will be annihilated forever. Why destroy them if they would eventually have come around to faith and repentance? In fact, they explicitly state that wicked persons “may become depraved, incorrigible, irreformable. The Bible compares such a person to a leopard that cannot change its spots. . . . Beyond repentance, the individual commits what the Bible calls “everlasting sin,” for which there is no forgiveness.” (December 1, 2011 Watchtower, p. 24)
So, on the one hand they affirm the potential to sin is a necessary consequence of the genuine freedom that true love requires. And yet, they affirm that at least one person, God, has a will that is only capable of good; and they arguably affirm that some persons may possess wills that are incapable of repentance (i.e., incapable of good). These beliefs provide some theological resources that could be used to reach the conclusion that the redeemed will become impeccable, incapable of sin. However, what is true of God is not invariably true of creatures, both in actuality and in Witness theology. Moreover, it is one thing for those who are annihilated to lose what Witnesses see as an essential element of the image of God, the ability to choose good or evil, and another for the redeemed, who actually attain to perfection, to lose it. In other words, just because God and perhaps the damned have wills whose fundamental dispositions are inalterable does not mean that perfect creatures would.
As things stand, Witnesses explicitly affirm that creatures will always remain peccable, capable of sin. They have some conceptual resources at their disposal to come to the opposite conclusion, though doing so will require altering other doctrines they espouse. For instance, they may have to adopt a view of the will that would hinder their polemics against monergistic accounts of conversion, especially that which is articulated in Reformed theology. It will also require adopting new doctrines, such as one that corresponds to the doctrine of the beatific vision, an idea that is strikingly absent in Witness theology.
At any rate, the continued peccability of creatures is not an incidental feature of their theology as it actually is. And this serves to strengthen the argument I made in “There May Be Hell to Pay”. As long as they affirm the peccability of immortal creatures, Witnesses cannot object to either an eternal, punitive hell or, perhaps, a remedial hell. And this is not a small blow to Witness polemics.
No comments:
Post a Comment