Triumphant Kingdom (1957)
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TRIUMPHANT KINGDOM Also by MARLEY COLE:
JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES: The New World Society TRIUMPHANT KINGDOM
by MARLEY COLE
CRITERION BOOKS
NEW YORK Copyright © 1957 by Marley Cole Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 57-8262
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Preface
"JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES is the fastest-growing religious movement in the world," wrote Marcus Bach in The Christian Century for February 13, 1957. "In fifteen years it has tripled its membership."
He explained the effectiveness of this phenomenal group: "Every Witness is a minister. Every minister is a house-tohouse visitor. Every visitor is a trained servant. I dare say that no other religious movement has each state, each country, each city, each block, and each street . . . as thoroughly graphed as has Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Jehovah's Witnesses are not a threat, but a challenge, calling once more upon the traditional church to—witness!"
What gives Jehovah's Witnesses their dynamism, their determination to witness to God's power? Theirs is the faith and practice of universal Christianity in its pure, original form. When Jesus first established his teachings, they were considered unorthodox, at odds with the world and its prevailing beliefs; but they fulfilled the longings and appealed to the age-old needs of the people. In the same way, Jehovah's Witnesses meet with much opposition from the established churches and from secular governments. Nevertheless, Jehovah's modern Witnesses may be found in nearly every country of the world, proclaiming the truth of their beliefs in more than 100 languages.
Modern Jehovah's Witnesses wield the same spiritual weapons that were in the hands of the apostles.
They profess an absolute faith in the coming of God's Kingdom over Earth, as promised in the Scriptures—a Kingdom of peace and unity, of everlasting life and eternal fellowship, that is already manifesting its reality in their New World society in this generation.
Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe that they will have earned their place in the New World society unless they have zealously dedicated themselves to carrying out what is named in Matthew 22:37 as the first commandment: "You must love Jehovah your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind." It is this performance that sends them throughout the world to glorify God's name. No one, they believe, can call himself a Christian who does not daily preach the good news.
For this purpose, each Theocratically trained Witness of Jehovah is an accredited, unpaid minister. Though he may do secular work, his chief vocation is the spreading of the truth. Jehovah's Witnesses have established Bible Training Schools or ministerial seminaries, called Kingdom Halls, where the faithful are schooled free of charge to share in a public ministry whose standards are rising yearly. A training school in the United States prepares Witnesses for missionary work all over the world. Voluntary pioneers devote their free time to proselyte in regions where no word of their mission has yet penetrated. To the Witnesses, Christianity is a progressive religion. By proclaiming the arrival of Jehovah's Kingdom, they seek a road to maturity and world peace that will reach into the millenium of perfection.
With this faith, the Witness of Jehovah is a person who has inner peace. I want, in the following chapters, to convey to some extent the extraordinary results produced by this conviction, which allows Jehovah's Witnesses to withstand persecution and legal battles while living a life in which they fully believe.
MARLEY COLE CONTENTS
Preface
Preface 5
PART ONE : NEWS OF A NEW WORLD
TO COME
1: Has Christianity Failed? 11
2: Good News 21
3: The Voice of Discipline 33
4: A Preaching Fellowship 43
PART TWO : MINISTERS ALL
5: The Kingdom Hall 55
6: Theocratic Ministry School 71
7: Who Ministers, Who Administers? 82
PART THREE : THE BIRTH OF A
CONGREGATION
8: Each One Help One 95
9: Living Theocratically 112
PART FOUR : FINDING THE LOST SHEEP
10: A Special Kind of Pioneer 123
11: A Worldwide Ministry 142 CONTENTS
PART FIVE : A PERMANENT UNITED NATIONS
12: Students Who Love to Learn 153
13: A School Unlike Any Other 175
PART SIX : A THREATENED FAITH
14: Two Global Warnings 199
15: Faith Goes Underground 209
PART SEVEN : EVERLASTING PEACE
16: The Real Peace of Mind 225
Appendix I 246
Appendix II 251 PART ONE
NEWS OF A NEW WORLD TO COME
Preach the word, be at it urgently in favorable season, in troublesome season.
Has Christianity Failed?
ON A SPRING DAY in 1956 the world was suffering from a bad case of jitters. It was one of those times when it seemed as if the news were all black. People in half the world shook their heads over bleak headlines. The American dollar nose-dived on the Paris stock exchange. The peace of mind and the fortune of millions hung in the balance. All this because a lump of muscle the size of your fist got fouled up inside one man's chest. It made sense: the muscle happened to be the heart of the President of the United States.
This was the second time within nine months that the President had gone to the hospital. Happily after 113 suspenseful minutes of surgery the world could be assured. This time it was not a heart attack. Just an intestinal obstruction. The President soon was able to grin ruefully, "What a bellyache!"
Presidential elections were in the offing. The future looked befogged.
Would Mr. Eisenhower be able to run for a second term? His personal popularity was tremendous; it cut across party lines. If there was such a thing as the indispensable man, a lot of people felt, Mr. Eisenhower was it.
Aggravating the international picture, Egypt and Israel were on the verge of a war that threatened to embroil the world. Communist satellites Poland and Hungary growled with revolt. In America, Catholic Action was lauding Cardinal Mindzsenty as the symbol of the struggle for freedom in Hungary. They hoped to see him head a new liberated Hungarian government. Other Americans, while wishing Hungary all the freedom in the world, looked upon the Cardinal as the symbol of a thousand-year-old clerical totalitarianism from which Communism had "liberated" Hungary in 1949. Why, many asked, did either evil have to exist? Why totalitarianism in any form—in the name of God, or in defiance of God?
It was a period when the ecclesiastical heavens were undergoing a soul searching and a shaking. An American church worker returned from Europe to announce that in West Germany only about five per cent of the people were going to church. A conclave of East and West German Protestants was preparing to meet. Soon the world would overhear one churchman telling the conclave that Communism was the child, not of Pagandom, but of Christendom. The masses were following Karl Marx in "throwing off enslavement" from age-old Christendom's false, fraudulent religion of exploitation. (Her doctrine of the "divine right of kings" now discredited, what was Christendom to do with her vestigial teaching that God ordains worldly governments—did Germans have God to thank for the fantastic governments that had ruined her and the rest of the world twice in this generation?).
If this were not enough, a smalltown pastor would bring up the question whether Christians should submit to or resist Communist judicial injustice. Evangelical official Dr. Guenther Jacob replied that, according to diehard church doctrine, civil authority Communist included—"is established to carry out God's will," and that there was nothing to do but submit.
World Communism, as usual, lay at the root of everyone's headaches. Twenty years earlier it had been Nazism. Former United States President Herbert Hoover was still contending that America should have stayed out of World War II and let Hitler and Stalin knock each other out. As it was, he maintained, the world could thank America for rescuing World Communism. The 175 million people living under Communist rule at the end of World War II had more than quadrupled to 800 million during the next ten years. One out of every three persons, one out of every five acres of land, had been claimed by Communism. From 1945 to 1955 Communism gained domination over half a billion people—as many people as Christendom claimed after almost two thousand years. What was this frightful plague welling within the bosom of Christendom? Americans were spending 35 billion dollars a year for defense against—exactly what? People ran to their churches frantically, demanding a faith to live by, a faith strong enough to repel the Red Religion engulfing Christendom and the world.
Where was the needed faith? Was it Orthodox Catholicism? If so, why had Communism sprung into power in Russia, the heart of Orthodoxy? Why had the Orthodox Church become the servile lackey of Communism?
Was the needed invincible faith Roman Catholicism? If so, why had Communism succeeded in carving out a satellite empire from the predominantly Roman Catholic countries of Europe?
Worse still, why had Communism found its second happiest hunting ground in Italy, the heart of Catholicism's domain? If an Italian Pope and an Italian hierarchy could not wield the Church's most formidable weapon, excommunication, to keep one out of three Italian Catholics from voting Communist, what power could they wield against worldwide Communism? Take from Communism her Orthodox and Roman Catholic heartland and what would she have left?
So people wondered. If not openly, still they wondered. Many wondered if the faith to conquer all things was to be found in Protestantism. If so, which among the hundreds of Protestant schismatic sects was the right one? People who scratched a little beneath the surface had been dismayed ever since 1949 when American Methodist emissary Dr. Garland E. Hopkins reported on his tour of Communist satellites Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria, and East Germany. "The fact so frequently overlooked in Western countries is that Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, and Reformed churches as well as Jewish synagogues are each still supported by the state in one or more of the Communist countries," reported Dr. Hopkins, uneasily. "There is no real separation of church and state in most of the European countries. Rather, the churches have been, or are in process of being, integrated into the program of the state." Church people in America, to whom the news struck home, looked at each other in horror. "What is our church doing in the pay of Communism?" they demanded. Joseph C. Harsch in The Christian Science Monitor intimated that the European churches thought more of their belly than they did of their God. "None of the big church institutions Has Christianity Failed?
could maintain itself in the style to which it has been accustomed if it had to depend on private contributions. The big churches do not support themselves. Their cathedrals are maintained by the state. In varying degrees and by varying systems their schools, hospitals, and educational systems are all state subsidized." Did it not amount to spiritual prostitution with God's avowed enemy, Communism? "Of course," Mr. Harsch added, "it does mean ultimate compromise, for no state ever subsidizes an unfriendly organization indefinitely." In short, Communism would use the churches, any churches, as long as they gratified its purposes; but at any time their usefulness was over, Communism would cast them off like worn-out harlots. Americans who saw the significance of it asked each other: "If the European example is anything to go by, how can we expect our churches to provide us with the faith we need to combat Communism?"
Good news? By the middle of June, 1956, Americans were trying to cheer themselves with the National Council of Churches' announcement that finally one hundred million Americans were church members. In Colonial days (that produced Washington, Jeffersons, and the men who formulated the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States) only five per cent of the population belonged to churches. In 1890 the percentage was 22.5; in 1944 it was 52.5, and now it has become a big, fat 60 per cent.
But while the news was still warm in their mouths it curdled sourly when the killjoys pointed out that the more people went to church, the higher the crime rate mounted every time church membership rose eight per cent, crime rose 62 per cent. Prisons reported that the percentage of criminal inmates who professed some religion was higher than the percentage of people outside who professed some religion.
In a series on "youth crimes," the New York Times came out with the shocking news that while on week days youth-gang members woke up about noon, on Sundays it was different. "They rise much earlier than usual on Sundays, for the 10 a.m. mass."
F. B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover warned that the United States was invaded internally by an army of five million criminals. Crime was costing 400 times as much as education. As far back as 1954, said Director of Federal Prisons James C. Bennett, federal penitentiaries were crowded 25 per cent beyond normal capacity. In the face of all this, Scripps-Howard newspaper columnist Mrs. Walter Ferguson threw up her hands.
"I am in a state of confusion," she sighed. "First off, I read that the greatest religious revival ever seen is now on in the U.S. Religion is becoming a part of everyday life, they say, and is no longer a cloistered mystery.
"We believe it when we look at all the new churches being built. The air is clamorous with the voices of evangelists exhorting the world to turn from its evil ways and be saved. Newspapers carry many columns written by ministers and priests. Few things these days are more popular than the opinions of those who deal with religious subjects. The country has turned to serious thoughts. And what is more serious than the soul's welfare?
"Just as I fall into this placid 'All's-well-with-theworld' mood, here comes J. Edgar Hoover saying our crime rate is a national disgrace. And this isn't the worst. The most terrifying implication is that we, the American people, are not concerned with these facts.
They fail to stir us. We seem to have lost our desire to battle with crime. Why bother when your car and TV set are working all right? The confusing thing is that in the same year, in the same country, church interest and crime statistics should both be at an all-time high.
"When religion has truly become a part of everyday life, we can expect its influence to wipe out our 'national disgrace.'"
An army of Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as swarms of small fundamentalist sects, were warning that the moral breakdown was positive indication that the world had reached its foretold "last days." "But know this," quoted the Witnesses on millions of doorsteps, "that in the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers . . . of money, self-assuming, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, without gratitude, with no loving-kindness, having no natural affection, not open to any agreement, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, without love of goodness, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up with selfesteem, lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God, having a form of godly devotion but proving false to its power . . . always learning and yet never able to come to an accurate knowledge of truth" (2 Timothy 3:1-7 NW).
Staid old cults and denominations cupped a hand over their brow and peered at a murky tomorrow but could discern no Bible Armageddon impending. In our day to take the Bible too literally is unsophisticated. Church is a place where people come to be lulled, not alarmed. Nevertheless it was high time the "established" creeds rediscovered a "Bible theology" and acknowledged that what they were founded upon was not "early Christian church teachings" but "ecclesiastical traditions," warned Episcopalian theologian Walter C.
Klein. "If we reject ecclesiastical tradition we shall have to fall back upon learning, intelligence, intuition, conscience and the like."
Baptist John S. Wimbish reasoned that the Communist Manifesto was proving a more powerful doctrine in the lives of men than the Bible because the church had coiled itself about the Bible and died there, submerging its meaning out of sight. "The church has become so precise it is prissy; so nice it is nauseating. If we are to snatch the banner from the hands of the Communists, we must be willing to soil our hands with noble toil. This is an excellent time to shake the dust of lethargy from our feet and emulate Jesus by manifesting a genuine interest in our fellow man." But how was the church to shed its "dead orthodoxy"? About all that Dr. Wimbish could say on that was that "Methodism needs another John Wesley; Congregationalism needs another Dwight Moody; Presbyterianism needs another John Knox, and we Baptists need another Roger Williams!"
When it came to extricating the churches from their dilemma over the Negro, an even greater prophet was needed. During the Civil War, American Protestantism split right down the Mason and Dixon line. Southerners had called God down on their side in support of the myth of the black curse—the fable that God consigned black people to a position of subhumanity and perpetual slavery, never fit to belong in the same lily-white society with Caucasians. In 1956, after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation, the race problem became the most explosive domestic issue in the land. Historically the churches had followed their political sides into splitting. Now they must follow the judicial order to integrate—for conscience's sake at least. It was humiliating.
Many churches were found to be following old unworkable systems. "It is with deep humility that we face the situation existing today and confess that as Christian leaders we have not done what we should have in preparing our people for this hour," Presbyterian moderator Dr. L. McDowell Richards lamented. Southern Protestantism, he declared, was up against its "most difficult" crisis since the "dark days" of the Civil War.
This was only local, national gloom. The world gloom was darker. The tragedy of the world was that "worldwide Christianity has failed to win the working classes," as a Methodist leader moaned. "There is no more serious development in worldwide Christianity than its failure to win the working-class masses," said Dr. Alan Walker.
But was it Christianity that had failed? Or was it the failure of its custodians? Had the clergy failed to preserve it and instill its principles and hopes in the breasts of the derelict masses? Who was to blame?
Some clergymen blamed the people. By the middle of June, 1956, people were still rushing to book counters to buy The Power of Positive Thinking. They devoured paragraphs and pages seeking some "peace-of-mind" formula that would really work. The clergy scolded them for trying to use God as "one of a number of resources to enable us to get what we want and enjoy life as we would." Some people, declared Episcopalian Dean James A. Pike, were trying to use God "to help them sleep better, to calm their anxieties, and to make them more attractive and successful." National Council of Churches president Dr. Eugene C. Blake said it was becoming fashionable to "make an instrument of God" by using religion for selfish ends such as job security, health, and peace of mind. "Everybody seems to be interested in religion.
But many people with new religious interest are attempting to turn that interest into magic—to use God for their own purposes rather than to serve God and find His purposes."
We have a world full of atrophied morals and hungerbitten religion, declared Lutheran Glen A. Pierson, because the rank-and-file believers do not hold their faith seriously enough to preach it, much less to live it seven days a week. "Our conception of the priesthood is that every man is a priest with the privilege of direct access to God. That also means he has the responsibility to propagate the faith. But we Protestants today are prone to say 'Get a preacher. Let him do the work.'"
If Protestants were falling down on the job, Catholics were even more sluggish. People were still talking about the Catholic Digest survey that showed that 59 per cent of all Protestants tried to win converts, and 43 per cent were succeeding. But only 28 out of 100 Catholics tried, and only 17 succeeded.
Good News
ONE GROUP OF PEOPLE took their religion seriously enough to go out 100 per cent (65 per cent of them regularly every month) to share with their neighbors what to them was the only good news in the world. In April, 1956, when the United States population reached 167,440,000, this group consisted of 185,010 doorstep preachers—a national peak. Their activities all over the world were in the news. The Polish uprising did not quite smother out the reports coming from that country that the Communist government was reviewing and dropping charges of "American espionage" against long-imprisoned Witnesses and freeing them—at the same time that the Polish clergy warned the public not to listen to the news that the liberated Witnesses would be bringing to their doorsteps.
What news? Whatever the Witnesses had to tell the Poles, it was the same news, without variation, in all countries. In 160 lands their voices were heard, heralding the same refrain.
Against the background of the jittery, confused and calloused mood of the people their message sounded. It announced here and now a live and pulsing hope for life in a new world—here, now, and for this generation.
What is it like to lay aside your share of the world's troubles and go out and knock on strange doors and offer comfort to your neighbor with the news that gave you hope? How many people are the Witnesses reaching?
On the basis of a cross-section count, it is conservative to estimate that an average of ten houses a week are called upon by each Witness. That means 1,850,000 homes, or about four million people, a week. That is 96 million homes every year. By their direct personal approach Jehovah's Witnesses are reaching more than the equivalent of the national population within each twelve months.
Worldwide the Witnesses are active in more than 160 countries. They speak their good news in identical terms in more than 100 languages. By 1957 as many as 640 thousand were calling from house to house. At the same ratio of ten calls a week each, about 330 million homes were contacted in a year. There are not that many homes in all of North and South America and Europe combined.
Never in any age did a group of people concentrate so single-heartedly on the job of getting their message across to the world. These figures must be a revelation to the heads of churches. "There is no hope of some 300 thousand pastors in America reaching the 70 million who are outside our churches," a pastor complained recently, in a plea for the "laymen" to get out and preach. (The 1956 Yearbook of American Churches lists 213 thousand clergymen in active charge of local churches.) If 185 thousand Witnesses reach 165 million people within a year, why should the pastor despair that the 300 thousand preachers he speaks of will never reach a mere 70 million people?
To be sure, it cannot be done unless the clergy revolutionize their present routine. Modern clergymen are overburdened, and cracking up under their duties, working from thirteen to eighteen hours a day. But is their modern regimen an improvement over the direct person-to-person method of ministry that Jesus Himself inaugurated? After 1,600 questionnaires and ten thousand pages of evidence, Dr. Samuel W. Blizzard, Professor of Social Science at New York's Union Seminary, came up with the finding that American clergymen, although the best-educated in American history, have been robbed of their ministry to the degree that they are no longer primarily preachers at all. The preacher is no longer a character stepping out of the Bible, infused with the Word and the Will of his Lord. Today he is "director of human relations," employing a social rather than a scriptural code. He must play five other roles that leave little time for preaching—"the roles of pastor, counselor, organizer, administrator and promoter . . . ," Dr. Blizzard found. Orthodox clergy have no time to knock on doors.
But the Witnesses of Jehovah, where their number is one Witness to one thousand population, successfully reach the total population, although 97 out of 100 Witnesses do their preaching in their spare time.
Why is this resuscitation of Bible-type Christianity noteworthy? What intelligible contribution can it make to our fantastically fast-paced, mixed-up, nuclear-age civilization?
The churches have tried everything else, and nothing else has worked. Nothing else has produced a people united, despite national and international boundaries, as the firstcentury Christians were.
Nothing else has brought people to the startling awareness that a faith worth having is worth propagating. Nothing else has given people a faith to live for—even to die for, to consume them, fire them, preserve them immune to the world, carry them away with their convictions to the extent that they cannot endure it, like Jeremiah, unless they preach it. The churches are realizing that they have exchanged quality for quantity, that something must be done, that Bible faith and practices cannot be improved on in any age, that while they may not like the doctrines of Jehovah's Witnesses they are going to have to adopt Witness methods. In countries like America, alert church leaders see the handwriting on the wall and are crying out in alarm. In other countries, such as Russia and East Germany, history has overtaken the churches and they must grapple unprepared for their lives, learning too late that religion can only survive in times of persecution by the ministry of its so-called "laymen."
Every believer a preacher, a house-to-house missionary, was the identifying mark of the first-century ministry. That was why Christianity made spectacular progress during apostolic days. Four hundred years ago conscientious priests sparked the Protestant revolution to restore the priesthood to the people. Their revolt was against an unscriptural evil: a highly segregated priestcraft, a hierarchical church structure that had become a secular power. They sought to wrest the ministry from the cathedral and restore it to the flock. But Protestantism never achieved its shining goal. The ministry of the people foundered. The "laity" never became integrated with the clergy. The rank and file sought not the kingdom first. And now, as Protestantism looks into the mirror of the contemporary scene, she sees staring back at her the image of that from which she revolted, her own brand of priestcraft.
That is why the Witnesses of Jehovah stand out in sharp perspective. It is reassuring to know that what once was in the time of Christ and the apostles can be again; that the goal of the Wycliffes and the Luthers is not unattainable. During the past 80-odd years this group has gradually, laboriously rescued the Christian ministry from the pulpit and planted it in the hearts and minds and mouths of the rank and file, and restored the pristine ideal of a "preaching fellowship."
What do these people say at the doorsteps of the nations? Why do they call on you? What do they seek?
Something fires them more than the "callers" from the church around the corner who come to your house now and then to invite you to church next Sunday. They call to do more than invite you to sign a "decision-for-Christ" pledge on a piece of cardboard, while leaving your mind blank and your heart bearing no imprint.
A young man named Arden Peters is an example of the 185 thousand peripatetic Witnesses of Jehovah who, by 1956, were busy morning, afternoon, and evening, throughout every city and town and practically every village and countryside in the United States. Calling on all, passing up none, they accepted the total population as the "field" from which their flocks were gathered. Naturally they were running into every conceivable kind of reaction.
Peters had learned to expect rebuffs and retorts from harassed housewifes and nerve-shattered husbands. He rang the bell of one of the "new" homes on his list, the residence of a man we shall call Carson Brown. The door opened a crack, and a suspicious voice inquired, "Yes?"
Holding Mr. Brown's gaze, Peters began. "Good evening, Mr. Brown. My name is Peters. I won't take but a few moments. I am calling at the request of a worldwide society of Christian educators. About six hundred thousand of our ministers are making a worldwide survey. We are trying to find out what people are thinking in all parts of the earth about a very timely question. Would you be so kind as to tell me what you think the answer is?"
"The answer," Mr. Brown responded, "to what question?"
The Witnesses try within the first few seconds not only to attract the householder's concentration, but to make him feel they have his best interests in mind.
"The question, Are we living in a marked generation? That is, marked by Bible prophecy?"
"Oh, I wouldn't know." Mr. Brown hurriedly shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Do you believe that we are living at the end of what the Bible describes as the rule of Satan?"
"I didn't know that Satan was ruling."
"Would you say that this is God's world? Or is God's world the New World to come? As we call from house to house we find that millions of people are asking that question. They can understand why God might love a new world of righteousness enough to give His Son for its ransomer and king. But they cannot understand why God would love and deal with a wicked old world like ours, when the Bible says that He hates every form of wickedness and is positively going to destroy this old world and its god, Satan."
"I never thought much about it," Mr. Brown shrugged vaguely. "One way or another."
"Do you read the Bible very much?"
"Not very often."
"It is from the Bible that we learn that God has promised to replace an old world with a righteous New World under the Kingdom of Christ. The question is, When? Is this the generation that will see the Kingdom triumph?"
Mr. Brown glanced impatiently over his shoulder at his neglected television program.
Arden Peters tried again. "Mr. Brown, have you ever prayed the Lord's prayer, 'Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?' "
"I guess I have."
"Then you can see how that prayer shows us that the Bible is a book of prophecy—history written in advance."
"It is?"
"Yes. The Kingdom must come. Or else the prayer will never be fulfilled. We know that God says, 'My word shall not return unto me void. I have purposed it, I will bring it to pass.' Many people believe that we have reached the time in history for its appearance.
"The worldwide society of Jehovah's Witnesses which I represent has devoted some eighty years to the study of Christ's second presence and the end of the world. We have consulted all known Bible research, and have even produced a new Bible translation to find a closer meaning of the original revelation. The more we study, the more we are convinced that the time has come in human affairs for the greatest change of all time. The time for the coming of the New World for which God gave His Son to be King. Isn't that good news for us today?"
Carson Brown fingered his chin and peered at his caller.
Arden Peters drew out his Bible. "The beginning of a new way of life is foretold to start here, in the midst of a world that is ready to perish.
Already in our time there is a New World society of people on the earth. They are living temporarily in the midst of a hostile world. Within this generation, yours and mine, they will see the old pass out, just as Noah and his family lived through a world-destroying flood into a cleansed earth.
"People have predicted the end of the world many times, but before it was always a false alarm. Jesus cautioned against these. 'Look out that nobody misleads you,' he warned. He foretold that until the end we would hear of wars, and rumors of war, and that many people would think wars were a sign of Armageddon. But it would take more than wars, Jesus said, to mark the time of the end. He described a host of events that must all combine, for the first time in history. This combination of things would compose the sign, marking the last generation of the old world. 'This generation will by no means pass away until all these things occur.' Don't you wonder what 'all these things' are?"
Arden Peters held his New World Translation Bible so that Carson Brown might follow his finger down the verses of Matthew, chapter 24. "You see, the last generation would be identified by different kinds of war—total wars; world mobilization; nation rising against nation; the world splitting apart into warring kingdoms. See how it reads there in the seventh verse? Now when did that happen for the first time in history?"
Carson Brown looked puzzled.
"It happened first in 1914," Peters continued. "That's why men call it World War One—it was a different war. One Harvard University professor has shown that there has been many, many times more havoc wrought by war since 1914 than during all the previous wars combined for two thousand years.
"And in combination with world wars, Jesus has told us that there will be earthquakes and food shortages in one place after another. These are a beginning of pangs of distress. Do you realize that, following the first and second world wars, more people have suffered from famine than were affected by the four major famines of the Middle Ages? Right now fully one half the people on earth are crtically hungry. Millions are dying of starvation.
"The accounts of the apostles Mark and Luke both include this world's-end prophecy of Jesus. Luke adds that the last generation would be marked by pestilences. Think how true that has been: the Spanish influenza following the first world war took twenty million lives. Nothing like the plague or typhus or leprosy reaped such a harvest with a single attack during the Middle Ages.
"And 'There will be great earthquakes.' Up until 1914, for as long as men kept records only about 4,700 lives were lost each year by earthquakes. Why is it that since 1914 more than 24 thousand lives are taken each year by earthquakes? The most noticeable thing is that the tempo of major earthquakes is stepping up."
Peters summed it up by telling Mr. Brown that ours is a marked generation in that no other generation ever suffered all this combination of "pangs of distress," and that even the newspapers mention 1913 as the last "normal" year. He did not have time to point out more than just a few of the dozens of component happenings that went to make up the "sign." From Luke, chapter 21, he pointed out that the last generation would be disillusioned by a predominance of false religions and that there would be a total moral breakdown.
Men would become "faint out of fear and expectation of the things coming upon the inhabited earth," such as nuclear and radioactive weapons and the race for military supremacy.
Peters went on. "Within this generation, apostate Christendom is undergoing a violent, fatal, internal revolution. Her own religious spokesmen admit that the churches have kept the masses spiritually impoverished for centuries. Now the masses are turning to radical ideologies such as Godless Communism. A survey of college students shows that intelligent young people are highly skeptical of religion, here in a world that has seen two world wars, Communism, and the hydrogen bomb. It has been the so-called Christian nations, not the pagans, that have brought these things upon us. Do you wonder that the younger generation is skeptical? And, according to Jesus, we can expect only that things will grow worse and worse for the world, until Armageddon puts an end to it all."
If nothing else, he now had Carson Brown disturbed. "I thought you said this was good news," frowned Mr. Brown. "I don't see anything good about this. Why is God bringing all these woes on man?"
"God is not bringing these woes, Mr. Brown. This is the Devil's vicious work. Satan knows that his time is short. He is trying to drive his own world insane with him. He does not want it to wake up to the meaning of the times. His policy is rule or ruin. He wants none to escape. Jesus foretold the only thing that would counteract the demoralizing work of Satan when He said, 'This good news of the kingdom will be preached in all the inhabited earth for the purpose of a witness to all the nations, and then the accomplished end will come.' That is the good news for this generation that we Witnesses of Jehovah bring.
In our global survey we are making a check to see how many people have heard it, and how many believe it. The long-awaited Kingdom is really here. It has been operating in the midst of its enemies since World War One. Millions are learning about the Kingdom's establishment. Do you realize, Mr. Brown, what this means?"
Mr. Brown stared back.
"It means that millions now living will never die. Never in history has a generation faced our prospects. Think of living through Armageddon, right on the earth, and finding life in a paradise!"
Peters slipped his Bible back inside his briefcase. He drew out a yellow-covered book. Carson Brown protested. "But I don't know what this is all about."
Arden Peters agreed. "It is a big subject. That is why you need practical help. You need this Bible aid." He displayed the front of the volume, You May Survive Armageddon Into God's New World. "I'd like to leave this with you. After you have studied it for a few days I will call again. Perhaps by that time you will have some opinion on the question I asked you—is this the generation marked by Bible prophecy? You see, if Jesus' prophecy that the Kingdom must be announced among all nations is fulfilled, then Christians must see to it that every one has an opportunity to answer this question intelligibly, pro or con. This book will help you make your decision."
Carson Brown shook his head. "I don't want to buy a book."
"I don't want to sell you a book. If you wish to contribute fifty cents to help pay for the paper and ink, the contribution will be accepted. But this is Bible sermon material. No one is charging you for that, there is no commercial motive involved at all.
As you can see, this is a big book. It contains 378 pages. It is a double-indexed, hard-bound edition, containing a research study of 42 cases in Bible history showing how in times past Jehovah brought a judgment upon a world or a system of things. There was, for example, the flood in Noah's day. Jesus cited the days of Noah as foreshadowing the day of His second coming. So you see, this is a very valuable book. If I were selling it I would ask three or four dollars for it. But the book has no purchase price. It contains Bible sermons."
Then it came—the voice from the house. "Carson! Who are you talking to?"
"I'm coming, Rachel!"
Arden Peters was undeterred. "Don't you want to understand the meaning of the times?"
"I told you—" Carson started to close the door. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Then read the book and find out."
"Good night," Carson Brown apologized. With a firmness to which he was not accustomed, he closed the door.
The Voice of Discipline
WHEN PETERS WALKED AWAY he was not discouraged. He remembered the words of Jesus: "When you are entering into the house, greet the household; and if the house is deserving, let the peace you wish it come upon it; but if it is not deserving, let the peace from you return to you."
Aside from the individual peculiarities of each call, twenty-five-year-old "Arden Peters" demonstrates what it is like for the average rank-and-file Christian to go out and share his religion with the community. Quiet and unspectacular as the method may be, its results are amazing. What achieves results is the intensity, the tenacity of this personal evangelism, the drive of its mission, the conviction welling out of the individual's dedication and his willingness to witness to the Lord.
Jehovah's Witnesses have been referred to by a leading literary magazine as "perhaps the largest of the sects split from the Christian mainstream."
The central theme of their "good news" is the second presence of Christ, the arrival of Jehovah's Kingdom through Christ. They are bent on completing their "world survey." They will concentrate on this "survey" until as many as they can reach of earth's billions will have been put the question: Do you believe it or not?
The Witnesses consider that if they have left but one stimulating thought in the householder's mind they have accomplished a good purpose. Usually the householder has to explain to the rest of the family who was at the door and what it was all about. By leaving one subject—perhaps "The sign of the Kingdom and the End of the World"—in the householder's mind, the Witnesses hope that some kind of recapitulation will be made to the family. That will start Kingdom talk, pro or con. The more cogent the message delivered, the more likely are its chances of being repeated intact and undistorted one or more times. When a Witness calls on ten homes he hopes to start ten families talking about the Kingdom. Ten families could mean up to forty or fifty people. That is why Witness work is more effective than it appears, and why one Witness reaches a greater audience than he sees. He brings religion home to the people in a manner that stirs minds. "Dividing the people like sheep from goats," the Witnesses call it.
The doorstep sermon has a deliberate organization and delivery. It has a definite introduction, a body, a conclusion. The conclusion leads to some literary offer. The literature contains further detailed sermonlike material on the subject. The purpose of the doorstep call is to arouse interest; the purpose of the literature is to feed the interest.
Like all their other efforts, the Witnesses' presentations of the good news reveal a background of intensive schooling and a well-defined purpose.
Since 1943 their Theocratic Ministry school, meeting weekly, has been grooming and polishing composition and delivery.
Doctrinally, they speak in agreement, whether within the same congregation, or within the same country, or worldwide. It is no exaggeration to say that no other religious body in the world today displays such flawless unity in understanding and action. The Witnesses follow the rule: "Now I exhort you, brothers, through the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that you shall all speak in agreement, and that there should not be divisions among you, but that you may be fitly united in the same mind and in the same line of thought. . . . Does the Christ exist divided?" (1 Corinthians 1:10 and 13 NW). It is beyond their comprehension that the churches can exist divided and feeling that their doctrinal confusions are all comparably good, unconfused roads leading to the same heavenly destiny. But if you asked some one for directions to a certain town and he told you to take just any old road, that all roads lead to the same destination, what would you think? Why, the Witnesses ask, when the Bible distinctly says there is but one Lord and one faith, can there be in the United States alone five equally good brands of Catholics, six Adventists, 21 Baptists, 13 Churches of God, 21 Lutherans, 19 Methodists, and 11 Presbyterians? They agree with the Saturday Review comment that "Nothing weighs so heavily on the conscience of Christians today as the realization that a divided church can speak with only scant authority to a divided world."
The Witnesses try to adapt their Kingdom testimony to the individual. They compile notebooks of sermon outlines. They take to themselves the rule, "Always [be] ready to make a defense before every one that demands of you a reason for the hope in you, but doing so together with a mild temper and deep respect" (1 Peter 3:15 NW).
A few years ago, when a Witness got the message out of his system he would go away from the householder feeling, "I really gave him a good witness!"—no matter what the reaction upon the householder. Gradually, Witnesses have grown to appreciate that the real criterion is not the personal exuberance they feel from talking about the Kingdom, but the reaction upon their audience. This awareness grows with each individual as he attains skill in organizing and presenting an appropriate sermon. Witnesses are training themselves to think in "package thoughts," in terms of a complete message, before launching into the presentation proper. With only a few seconds to size up the stranger at the door, and while they are still saying "Hello," they try to decide which sermon outline would best suit the particular individual. This method rules out the mere memorization of a few sermons; it calls for too much flexibility and too rapid a thought correlation for memorized "canned" presentations. What the Witnesses try to remember is the outline, not the content. "The method of preparation of the argument on the spot," counsels their chief ministerial training textbook, Qualified to be Ministers, "is actually a rapid condensation of the same steps that go into the preparation of an extemporaneous talk. One must have a very brief mental outline, which, of necessity, is constructed in the mind very quickly. The basic steps for preparing such mental outlines are as follows: 1) fix the point, 2) think of an argument, 3) have an interesting introduction, 4) state the main point, 5) prove it, 6) illustrate it, and 7) conclude" all this before opening your mouth beyond saying "Good morning, my name is J. W. Witness!" Housewives, ditchdiggers, school children, doctors, farmers, mail carriers, musicians-one and all, they take a deep breath, accept their training discipline, and endeavor to apply it in the spirit of a favorite axiom, "Do your utmost to present yourself approved to God, a workman with nothing to be ashamed of, handling the word of the truth aright" (2 Timothy 2:15 NW).
Should the full outline of Bible texts fail to flick into mind at the door, they know where to turn in a flash. Besides their personal notebooks of sermon outlines, the Witnesses carry special Watchtower Bible Society printings of the King James and American Standard Version Bibles including sermon concordances. The New World Translation Committee's own version of the Christian Greek Scriptures (New Testament) provides in the index a chain of outstanding subjects and characters. A favorite sermon handbook is Make Sure of all Things. Its 70 Bible themes and 267 indexed subjects are ready to produce a sermon of any length and detail at the drop of an inquiry.
Probably the most outstanding trait of Jehovah's Witnesses is their appeal to Scriptural authority for every turn of mind and hand. "Bringing every thought into captivity to make it obedient to the Christ," is one of their favorite Scriptures. To them the Bible, of all books, is as distinct a creation of God as the earth or man. And while, in their view, the earth and all the physical universe fit into the eternal purposes of their Creator, man's civilizations do not. Likewise man's notions of worship, the religions of Christendom, are as foreign to the Bible as man's misrule of the earth is foreign to God's purposes for the earth. The Witnesses believe that the Bible embodies God's will and reveals His identity.
It details a way of life conformable to God's will. Rigid personal and collective discipline can result in producing a distinct Bible people. The Bible can produce a new social creation, a New World society. In proof, the Witnesses quote Philippians 2:13, their New World Translation: "God is the one that, for the sake of his good pleasure, is acting within you in order for you both to will and to act." To them this means that while they retain their own will they dedicate themselves to exercise that will to make it conformable to His will, literally and completely. To most people this might spell insufferable discipline; to the Witnesses it means life and living, an art, a science, a way of conduct in which they love to excel "in order that they may get a firm hold on the real life" (1 Timothy 6:19 NW). A musician lives when he performs, an artist when he paints, an architect when he designs, a chemist when he juggles the elements. Jehovah's Witnesses find in their religious performance a similar zest for living and being.
Young Peters was able to maintain his equilibrium because the Bible commanded him to do so. What counted was not simply obeying the command, but obeying it well. The religious writer Walter F. Reif expressed his admiration for this sort of discipline:
Discipline is a word most denominationalists associate with an antiquated Protestantism. Indeed the older communions have made the modern church the first to think it could survive without a discipline. Having many unpleasant memories of encounters with a disciplinary approach to Christianity, and seeing it as the intolerable rule of man over his neighbor, the established Protestant churches have rejected any form of discipline.
They have so indiscriminately accepted people into membership, so lowered their standards, that their life and community are far too often simply reflections of a non-Christian society.
It is non-ecumenical [dissident] Protestantism that has remembered that Christianity costs, that the way of Jesus is narrow and hard, that the walk of the Christian should be distinguishable from that of the non-Christian.
In the ministry that Arden Peters is pursuing one calls back. The "publisher" (as the doorstep preacher is called) keeps working his "territory" or assignment of blocks until the community comes to know him by name. He is the Kingdom's ambassador to the community, the disciple, the prophet stepping out of the Bible to seek the congregation of the Lord's sheep in his own little part of the field. In the congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses the "Territorial Servant" plays a vital function. It is his goal to see that all the territory assigned to the congregation is apportioned into individual sections of a hundred or so homes for each publisher. The Witnesses feel under a strong obligation to take care of their personal territories, once they have assumed the chore. They try to call on every home on at least four different occasions within a year. This is their assignment from Jehovah. In the accounting of souls they believe God will hold no one else responsible except the individual who has assumed the obligation to "give the witness" to that sharply prescribed little field.
Here and there, in spite of the Carson Browns, some one lends an ear to the "good news." The Witness, in his House-to-House Record, enters a reference to this "interest." He calls back, he talks and studies with the interested individual.
Finally the person or the family is convinced and soundly indoctrinated and joins in "preaching this good news." It may take months, it may take years of persistent calling, regularly, week after week. But this is life and joy to the Witnesses. It is in the maturing of the "sheep" that a Witness tastes the sweet fulfillment of the Bible rule that "There is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving" (Acts 20:35 NW).
Again they point to a Scriptural precedent for the "back call." Jesus himself repeatedly reworked his circuit and revisited homes of people such as his disciple Peter. And Paul: "Now after some days Paul said to Barnabas: 'Above all things, let us return and visit the brothers in every one of the cities in which we published the word of Jehovah to see how they are," reads a citation familiar to the Witnesses (Acts 15:36 NW). The Bible tells us that before starting Paul and Barnabas had disagreed because Barnabas wanted to take Mark along. In a "sharp burst of anger" they separated. But the important thing was that both Paul and Barnabas went "back calling," Barnabas with Mark to Cyprus, Paul with Silas to Syria and Cilicia.
By 1956 Jehovah's modern publishers were spending 86 million hours a year preaching. They were making 27 million back calls, devoting about a third of their time to following up their preliminary visits. Each month more than 337 thousand private Bible study groups were conducted in homes. A lot of work? For each new convert who dedicated himself to Jehovah 1,350 hours were spent in preaching and 425 back calls made. None of the 640 thousand Witnesses received pay for any of this ministerial service. Love for Jehovah and love for the "sheep" is the only incentive that could persuade them to perform all this hard, persevering work.
It may be a hard way but it is a most certain way. Once a proselyte submits to this much indoctrination he seldom strays from the fold. The curious, the mildly interested soon eliminate themselves. The 337 thousand monthly home studies conducted with interested families actually represent a yearly turnover of millions of people. Jehovah's Witnesses do not anticipate a gathering of more than a few of earth's millions before Armageddon. Rather than quantity, their creed of discipline permits only quality.
Philosophically the Witnesses reason that, as long as they are in the old world, even though already "tasting the joy and peace and contentment of the New," they will be plagued like every one else with the woes of the world. Otherwise their ranks would be filled by self-seekers. They fortify themselves by remembering the Master's plea: "I request you not to take them out of the world, but to watch over them because of the wicked one" (John 17:15 NW); and they nourish a hardy hope when they remember that Paul said, "We are pressed in every way, but not cramped beyond movement; we are perplexed, but not absolutely with no way out; we are persecuted, but not left in the lurch; we are thrown down, but not destroyed. However, we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the power beyond what is normal may be God's and not that of ourselves" (2 Corinthians 4:8,9,7 NW). In time of personal trouble, their main concern is that no reproach befall Jehovah's name or organization from their involvements. "Let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or a busybody in other people's matters. For what merit is there in it if, when you are sinning and being struck blows, you endure it?
But if, when you are doing good and you suffer, you endure it, this is a thing agreeable with God" (1 Peter 4:15 and 2:20 NW). Here in the midst of a seemingly incurably crazy world the Witnesses are determined to "not become afraid of what they are afraid of, neither become agitated" (1 Peter 3:14 NW) because "In the world you will have tribulation, but cheer up! I have conquered the world" (John 16:33 NW). The only thing to do, come what may, is "Preach the word, be at it urgently in favorable season, in troublesome season" (2 Timothy 4:2 NW).
A Preaching Fellowship
HIGHER THEOLOGIANS USE the term "eschatology" to classify the kind of doctrine Jehovah's Witnesses teach. The word is a combination of two Greek words, eskatos, meaning "last" or "uttermost," and logia, meaning "a study." In other words, eschatology is a declaration about last things, a body of teachings about final things such as death, resurrection, judgment, the millenium, and so forth.
Walter F. Reif used the term forcefully. "Eschatology," he said, "is another term the sects are compelling the older churches to learn once more. Though few lay people have ever heard of this word or pronounced it, they meet what it signifies quite frequently these days. They speak of eschatology whenever they use the phrase 'the end of the world,' experience it when their neighbor mentions the 'second coming,' are perhaps confused by it when they hear of 'Armageddon,' may worry about it when they're asked 'Are you saved?' " The long-established, eminently respectable Church, noted Mr. Reif, "has made itself poorer by failing to keep the eschatological note of the New Testament before its people.
It has been unable to kindle in its laity the light of a living faith that sees everything in the true dimension and recognizes that, whatever the present or the future may bring, the final victory over sin, evil, and death belongs to Jesus Christ. The eschatology of the sects stands as a protest against a form of Protestantism which is entangled in its own petty schemes and has no sense of any ultimate hope and fulfillment beyond history."
For decadent Protestantism, the vigorous modern-day preaching of eschatology is a needed tonic. World Protestantism is waking up to this. The Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, held at Evanston, Illinois, in 1954, discussed the theme "Christ—the Hope of the World," devoting attention to the question of Christ's second coming.
No group ever stressed the "world's-end" doctrine as do Jehovah's Witnesses. Their ministry is designed to find, within a living generation, the Lord's "sheep" from the four corners of the earth, instruct and condition them to survive Armageddon, and to reconstruct their entire mental outlook to accept the fact that this world is headed for a sure, swift holocaust in our lifetime.
As a rule when theologians discuss the eschatologists, they lump Jehovah's Witnesses together with the Adventists, the Pentecostals, the Holiness and Church of God groups, certain Baptists and other Fundamentalists, calling the lot of them "fringe sects." More discerning scholars distinguish the Witnesses as a separate category. Still there is confusion. One author has classified the Witnesses, along with Christian Scientists and Mormons, as Gnostics, defining Gnostics as those who "have renounced Christianity and substituted or added a further dogmatic."
Jehovah's Witnesses will not have any part of this definition. Christendom with all her dogmatic teachings they have renounced in toto. They cannot understand how Christendom's creeds represent Bible Christianity any more than an American citizen can understand how Soviet Russia claims to provide a democratic climate for its citizens. As for adding any "dogma" to whatever Christendom has to start with, the Witnesses have neither added nor subtracted, to their way of thinking. Rather, they have evolved a complete new theology which no other religion will accept in any measure, except superficially.
Jehovah's Witnesses see themselves as true Protestants in the sense of the original word in its Latin derivatives—those who go forth to witness. They are the leading spokesmen for what an influential religious journal calls "a vast sea of religious discontent," that surges within Christendom more disturbingly than the churches like to admit. The Witnesses represent the voice within Christendom of those who loathe the abominations committed in her realm. Something here tells Christendom that the formula for world problems is not so simple as settling the controversy of Christendom vs. Communism; there would still be the issue of Christendom vs. Christianity.
The churches are studying—more clandestinely than openly—the pioneering work of Jehovah's Witnesses who demonstrate what happens when a church scraps its clergylaity segregation and integrates the congregation into a preaching fellowship. The Witnesses operate on the premise that Christianity is a way of life to be practiced from the top first, that is, making public declaration of one's faith in God first, then translating the meaning of that faith into one's dealings with the family, with the next-door neighbor and the fellow worker, with society in general.
How inane, they feel, to prate about the "dignity of man" until man demonstrates dignity and exercises more conscience than "unreasoning animals born naturally to be caught and destroyed" (2 Peter 2:12 NW). The only thing that can dignify man is for him to live as the image of his Creator, to show forth His four cardinal attributes of love, wisdom, justice and power.
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