What do Jehovah's Witnesses believe?

Other Beliefs & ReligionsIn theological review

The short answer

Jehovah's Witnesses share a great deal of Christian vocabulary and moral teaching, and differ at the centre. They teach that Jesus is a created being, God's first work, who was the archangel Michael before his earthly life, and that the Holy Spirit is God's impersonal active force rather than a person. The historic church, by contrast, confesses Jesus as God of God in the Nicene Creed, and it is on his identity that the two faiths divide.

The fuller answer

Stated in their own terms, Jehovah's Witnesses teach that Jehovah alone is Almighty God, and that there is no Trinity. Jesus, on their account, is God's first creation, who existed in heaven as Michael the archangel before his earthly life, became a man, died, and was raised as a spirit; he is a god, but not Almighty God. The Holy Spirit is not a person on their reading, but God's active force. They use their own translation, the New World Translation, and they hold that the wicked are annihilated rather than punished forever, with the great majority of the saved living forever on a renewed earth.

The contrasts with historic Christianity are not small, and they meet at the same verses. John's Gospel opens by calling the Word God, not a god, and says the Word became flesh. Paul says that in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells bodily, which is difficult language for a created archangel. And Peter treats lying to the Holy Spirit as lying to God, which an impersonal force cannot be lied to at all. The creeds of the whole church, from the Nicene onward, were framed against the first of these claims in its ancient form: the Son is of one substance with the Father, begotten, not made.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:1 (BSB)

For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form.

Colossians 2:9 (BSB)

Did it not belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? How could you conceive such a deed in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God!

Acts 5:4 (BSB)

If a Witness calls at your door, the kindest and most useful ground is exactly there: not arguments about dates or organisations, but the identity of Jesus in the opening of John's Gospel, read slowly, in any standard translation. It is the question their whole system is built to answer differently, and it is the question on which everything else in this section turns.

Sources

Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
The Nicene Creed (AD 325, enlarged 381)

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Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?In one sense yes, and in the decisive sense no: both faiths worship the one Creator, the God of Abraham, and reject every idol, but Christianity's whole claim is that this God has made himself known in his Son, and Islam denies that Jesus is God's Son or that he was crucified. John states the test plainly: whoever denies the Son does not have the Father. The God is one, but the knowledge of him is not the same.Is Jesus God?Yes. The New Testament calls Jesus God in plain words, shows him doing what only God does, and records him receiving the worship that belongs to God alone. That is why the church at Nicaea confessed him as very God of very God, of one substance with the Father, and why Chalcedon confessed him as truly God and truly man in one person.What is the Trinity?The Trinity is the Christian confession that there is one God, and that this one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons, each fully God, equal in power and glory. The word itself is not in the Bible. The reality is taught everywhere in it, and the church forged the word to protect what the Bible says from being flattened in either direction.Who is the Holy Spirit?The Holy Spirit is God himself, the third person of the Trinity, not a force, a feeling, or God's power in the abstract. He is there at creation, hovering over the waters. He speaks, teaches, and can be lied to, and when Peter confronts Ananias he says the lie told to the Holy Spirit was a lie told to God.