christian@geneva.rutgers.edu (09/22/89)
I believe my first attempt at this got lost because our disk was full. I apologize if anybody gets this twice. I read through 12 postings involving JW's several times, trying to decide what to do about them. I am afraid that I overdosed on >'s. I have finally decided to post only a fairly small selection. My normal criteria (which I should probably repost, since we've got a lot of new members) ask for postings that make sense on their own. Usenet generates a lot of discussions where postings consist primarily of material quoted from previous postings, and where you must make a serious effort at unscrambling it all in order to see what anyone is saying. In this group I'm encouraging contributions that are a bit more coherent. I'd like you to think about what is being said enough that you can making a posting that stands on its own. It is fine to quote a few lines from another posting, or to refer to someone else's view, of course. What I decided to do was to forward the postings via email to the people who were directly involved in the discussion, but to pass only a few postings that seemed to make some sense on their own. I'm hoping that out of the email discussions we can get some postings that will be of more general interest. This degree of selectivity is fairly unusual -- I normally pass most postings. But the situation also seems to be fairly unusual: 70Kbytes of discussion that is relatively hard for third parties to follow. The three that I plan to post are from John King. His are obviously from the JW perspective. Although the critiques from the other side didn't seem to have anything that I thought would be interesting to the group as a whole, there are some issues from them that came up enough that I want to note them. - there was a good deal of mystification about JW ideas on Christ's body after the resurrection. It seems clear that the JW believe they disagree with main-stream Christianity. Several people are unclear in what way they disagree. It is unclear whether they are thinking of a "spiritual body", as in I Cor 15:44, a temporary physical body that is materialized whenever he needs to be visible, or something else. It is also unclear whether they see his status as being different before and after the ascension or not. - there was also some mystification about the association between being born again and dying. Some messages seemed to say that the passages in John talking about being born again refer to something that happens to us only after death. Some people find it hard to believe that this is really what the JW's mean. I think it would be useful to present accounts of these ideas that are intended to be coherent presentations, rather than responses to attacks. I at least would find it much easier to figure out what is being said when I get it in one piece rather than seeing hints that come out in passing in various responses. I personally would be particularly interested in hearing a coherent description of JW Christology. As I'm sure everyone knows, it is a challenge to theology to do justice both to the understanding that Christ was fully human and various suggestions in the NT that he is something more. The Arian attempt in effect produced a concept that was halfway between God and human. Although the JW approach seems to have some similarities to this, I get the vague impression that JW's may not be saying quite the same thing. If I had to summarize the impression I've gotten from the dialog so far, I'd say that they start from a concept that is fully human, and refuse implications that he is something more where the NT evidence is ambiguous enough to bear this interpretation. The one place where it's hard to deny that the NT says Christ is more than a normal human is where it talks about preexistence. And JW's seem not to try to deny that. I'm still not sure that I've got things right, and I'm particularly not sure I know how they reconcile being a real human being with existing before the world and being involved in its creation. (This is of course also an issue for the "orthodox" position. For us it is handled by the doctrine of Incarnation, which says that Christ has two distinct natures, each with their own properties. The discussion so far has been mostly about the Trinity, but I assume the JW's also reject the two-nature concept of the Incarnation. If not, then the solution is fairly straightforward.)