I was sitting in a Kingdom Hall in Manchester on a Tuesday evening when the pastor, they call him an “elder”, said something that haunted me for months afterward. We were discussing the nature of Christ, and I’d asked a straightforward question: “So you believe Jesus is God?”
He paused. Looked at me directly. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: what did Jesus say about himself? And what did the early church actually teach, before the councils changed everything?”
That moment crystallized something I’d been circling around for years: the question “Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian?” isn’t actually a question about Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s a question about what we mean by “Christian” itself. And that question, seemingly simple, opens onto a chasm of historical contradiction, institutional power, and fundamentally incompatible claims about religious authority that Christianity has never genuinely resolved.
The standard answer is categorical: “No, Jehovah’s Witnesses are not Christian. They deny the divinity of Christ and the Trinity, which are essential Christian doctrines.” But I discovered, through months of deep engagement with Jehovah’s Witness theology, comparative Christian history, and conversations with scholars and practitioners across traditions, that this answer assumes something that isn’t actually defensible, that there exists a stable, historically-grounded definition of “Christian” that can be applied objectively to any group claiming the name.
There doesn’t. And understanding why is more important than settling the question itself.
Let me start with the fracture itself.
I spent time examining five different criteria by which someone might be considered “Christian”:
Criterion 1: Belief in Jesus as divine (specifically, as God incarnate or the second person of the Trinity). This excludes Jehovah’s Witnesses, who view Christ as the Son of God but not God himself. It also excludes Arian Christianity, which dominated the 4th century and saw Jesus as divine but subordinate to the Father. It would have excluded significant portions of the early Church, depending on whose writings we trust.
Criterion 2: Adherence to the councils of Nicaea (325 CE) and subsequent ecumenical councils that defined orthodox doctrine. This excludes Jehovah’s Witnesses completely. It also excludes any Christian denomination that explicitly rejects these councils’ authority, and there are more than you’d think, including some Orthodox communities and radical Reformation traditions. It also creates a strange historical artifact: the councils happened after the founding of Christianity. So this criterion is essentially “Christian means accepting later institutional decisions about what Christianity means.”
Criterion 3: Acceptance of the biblical canon as defined by the ecumenical church (typically the 66-book Protestant canon or the 73-book Catholic canon). Jehovah’s Witnesses use their own translation of the Bible and emphasize certain passages over others, but they don’t reject the biblical books themselves. This is where the exclusion becomes murky.
Criterion 4: Personal faith in Christ as savior and the belief that salvation comes through him. Jehovah’s Witnesses genuinely, earnestly believe this. They believe salvation comes exclusively through Jesus Christ. This criterion would include them. Yet it would also include many groups that mainstream Christianity rejected as heretical centuries ago.
Criterion 5: Participation in the practices of the historical Christian church, baptism, communion, communal worship centered on Christ, reliance on Scripture. Jehovah’s Witnesses do all of this. They baptize. They have a communal meal (though they call it something different and practice it differently). They worship communally and center their entire existence around Christ and Scripture.
Here’s the fundamental problem: Jehovah’s Witnesses meet some of these criteria and fail others. And there’s no historical or theological reason to say that one set of criteria is more legitimate than another. The criteria themselves are contested across Christian history.
To understand why the question “Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian?” is malformed, we need to trace how “Christian” as a category has been repeatedly, radically redefined by those holding institutional power.
The early church didn’t call itself “Christian.” The term arose first as a designation applied by outsiders, people in Antioch noticing this group called themselves followers of Christ (Chrestus). Only gradually did the self-designation stick.
In the earliest decades, there was no agreement on what believing in Christ entailed. Paul’s letters address multiple communities with vastly different understandings of Jesus’s role, the relationship between Jewish law and Christian faith, and what salvation meant. Some believed Christ was preexistent divine. Others seemed to view him primarily as an exalted human. Some emphasized his death as cosmic transaction. Others emphasized his teaching. Some believed in a literal physical resurrection. Others seemed to work with more metaphorical frameworks.
What existed in the 1st century was not a unified “Christianity.” It was competing Christianities, clusters of believers with shared focus on Jesus but radically different christologies, different authorities, different understandings of what the faith required.
I encountered a history book in the British Library that listed first-century Christian variations:
All of these called themselves Christian. All centered their faith on Jesus Christ. But ask any of them “Is Jesus God?” and you’d get radically different answers depending on what that question even meant in their theological vocabulary.
The crystallization began with Constantine and the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.
This is crucial: Christianity didn’t become unified around a doctrine because the doctrine was self-evidently true. Christianity became unified around a doctrine because Constantine wanted religious stability, the council voted on which interpretation to enforce, and the winning side had political power behind it.
The Arian controversy, the dispute about whether Christ was divine but created or eternally divine and uncreated, wasn’t settled by theological argument. It was settled by Constantine deciding that this disagreement was destabilizing the empire and convening a council to produce a binding decision. The council voted. Arius’s position was declared anathema (accursed). And suddenly, a metaphysical debate became a matter of institutional orthodoxy.
Here’s what matters: the majority of bishops actually voted with Arius or near-Arius positions initially. Constantine’s political pressure moved the vote toward the Trinity position. The “winning” christology wasn’t the most defensible. It was the one aligned with political power.
For the next three centuries, Arian Christianity actually dominated in many regions. Goths, Vandals, and other Germanic peoples converted to Arian Christianity. To call yourself “Christian” in Visigothic Spain in the 5th century meant something different than calling yourself “Christian” in Byzantine Constantinople, because the institutional authorities, the official doctrine, and the interpretation of Scripture were different.
One of these “Christianities” would eventually win. Nicene Christianity, backed by Constantine and the Byzantine empire, ultimately overwhelmed Arian Christianity through institutional pressure and political consolidation. But that victory was historical, not metaphysical. Arianism wasn’t defeated by theological argument. It was defeated by the Nicene church outlawing it, burning its books, and using political power to enforce conformity.
This is the first major fracture in what “Christian” means: it’s a term applied by institutional authority to those who accept institutional authority’s definition of correct doctrine. But that authority was itself established historically, through political process, not through some universal principle.
The second major instability concerns Scripture itself.
Most people assume that “the Bible” is a stable, historically-determined collection of texts that Christians have always used. This assumption is completely wrong.
In the 1st century, there was no “New Testament.” There were letters from Paul, gospels circulating in various communities, and other texts. These texts weren’t uniformly accepted everywhere. In some communities, the Gospel of Mark was considered authoritative. In others, Thomas. In others, a collection of Jesus’s sayings. There was no binding agreement on which texts were authoritative and which were spurious.
Over centuries, through processes that combined theological argument, political decision, and institutional consolidation, a canon emerged. But it emerged through conflict, not consensus. And different Christian communities accepted different canons.
The Catholic Church settled on a canon of 73 books (including Deuterocanonical texts like Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, and others). The Protestant Reformation rejected 7 of these, settling on 66 books. Orthodox Christianity includes additional texts. Coptic Christianity includes still others. Ethiopian Christianity has yet another canon.
Which canon is “the real Bible”? The question has no answer outside institutional authority. There is no theological principle that determines which texts belong and which don’t. The decision was made by councils, synods, and institutional bodies. Different institutions made different decisions.
Now, here’s what matters for Jehovah’s Witnesses: they use the 66-book Protestant canon. This was also the canon chosen by Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, a movement that mainstream Christianity also resisted as heretical at first. So Jehovah’s Witnesses are using the same biblical canon as most Protestant denominations.
But Jehovah’s Witnesses translate and interpret that canon differently. They have a translation, the New World Translation, that makes specific interpretive choices. For instance, in John 1:1, where most translations read “the Word was God,” the NWT reads “the Word was a god.” Small difference. Massive theological implication.
Here’s the deeper issue: all biblical translations make interpretive choices. The King James Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, each one reflects theological choices about what the original Greek or Hebrew means. There is no “pure” translation that escapes interpretation.
Yet mainstream Christianity treats the Trinity, a doctrine that appears nowhere explicitly in Scripture and that Jehovah’s Witnesses reject, as essential to Christianity, while treating the Jehovah’s Witness translation choices as disqualifying.
Why? Because the institutional authorities who won the historical power struggles declared the Trinity essential and the NWT translation unorthodox.
The core disagreement is christological. So let me examine that directly.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe:
Mainstream Christianity (in its Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant forms) believes:
Now: what does Scripture actually say about this?
The honest answer is: Scripture does not explicitly teach the Trinity. The word “Trinity” does not appear in the Bible. The phrase “three in one” does not appear. The doctrine was systematized by theologians after the biblical texts were written, largely in the 3rd and 4th centuries, and then ratified by church councils.
When you read Paul’s epistles, when you read the Gospels, when you read Revelation, you’ll find passages that seem to support both positions:
Passages supporting Jehovah’s Witness Christology:
Passages supporting Trinitarian Christology:
Both sides can build scriptural cases. But neither side can build a definitive scriptural case, because Scripture itself doesn’t address the question with the precision that later theology demanded.
So what happened? The church councils resolved the ambiguity through institutional decision. They said: the Trinity is the correct interpretation. Any other interpretation is heresy. And because they had institutional power, their interpretation won.
But this reveals something crucial: the christological claim that separates “Christian” from “non-Christian” (in the mainstream view) is not a biblical claim. It’s an institutional claim. It’s a decision made by councils, ratified by institutional authorities, and enforced through exclusion.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, using Scripture as their authority, have chosen a different christology. They’re not being un-biblical. They’re being differently biblical. They’re making interpretive choices that Scripture itself permits.
This is why the question “Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian?” breaks down. It assumes that “Christian” has a stable meaning grounded in Scripture or early church practice. But it doesn’t. “Christian” means whatever the institutional authorities with power say it means, at any given historical moment. And Jehovah’s Witnesses simply made different institutional decisions, different choices about authority, different choices about interpretation, than the councils that eventually consolidated power.
This brings us to the real fracture: authority. Who gets to decide what “Christian” means?
In the early church, authority was distributed, it was Scripture, it was tradition, it was the consensus of bishops, it was the teachings of apostles and their successors. But it was never perfectly clear how these authorities related to each other when they conflicted.
The Catholic Church developed a doctrine of papal authority: the Pope, as successor to Peter, has ultimate interpretive authority. Scripture is important, but it’s read through the lens of church tradition and papal interpretation.
The Protestant Reformation rejected papal authority and elevated biblical authority: Scripture alone is the final arbiter. But this created an immediate problem: different people read Scripture differently. So authority actually became fragmented into competing claims about correct biblical interpretation.
Jehovah’s Witnesses occupy a third position: they accept Scripture as authoritative but also recognize an interpretive community (the Watch Tower Society, their institutional leadership) as the reliable interpreter of Scripture. This is not unique to them. Every Christian denomination does this, they all have some combination of Scripture, tradition, and institutional guidance that together constitute their authority structure.
What’s different about Jehovah’s Witnesses is their honesty about it. They explicitly say: the Watch Tower Society, through its publications, is the reliable guide to biblical interpretation. This is actually more transparent than many mainstream churches, which claim to follow “Scripture alone” while in practice following their own institutional interpretations.
Here’s what I mean: a Catholic reading John 6 (“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man”) will interpret this through the lens of church tradition as supporting the doctrine of transubstantiation. A Protestant reading the same verse will reject transubstantiation as unbiblical. Both are reading Scripture. Both are filtered through institutional authority. The Catholic just admits the role of tradition more explicitly.
Similarly, a Jehovah’s Witness reading Colossians 1:15 will interpret “firstborn of all creation” as supporting Christ’s createdness. A Trinitarian reading the same verse will interpret it as metaphorical or affirming pre-eminence rather than creatureliness. Both are making interpretive choices. The Jehovah’s Witness is just following an institutional guide explicitly.
The question of authority, who decides what Scripture means, is never settled in Christianity. Different traditions answer it differently. And Jehovah’s Witnesses have simply answered it in a way that differs from the councils that eventually consolidated institutional power.
Let me map this more explicitly. I’ll create a matrix of what different Christian traditions require to count someone as “Christian”:
Catholicism requires:
Protestantism requires:
Orthodoxy requires:
Jehovah’s Witnesses require:
Pentecostalism requires:
Now: which of these definitions is “correct”? On what basis could we say that Trinitarian belief is essential while Spirit empowerment is optional? On what basis is Christ-as-created disqualifying while disagreements about the sacraments are tolerable?
The answer is: there is no objective basis. Different traditions have made different decisions about which beliefs are essential and which are peripheral. And there’s no historically-grounded principle for determining which decisions are correct.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have made the decision that Christ-as-created-but-divine is essential to biblical fidelity, while the Trinity is a corruption of pure Christianity. This decision is no less defensible than the councils’ decision that Christ-as-uncreated is essential.
Now, there’s a legitimate complication here, and I encountered it directly in my conversations with Witnesses: the relationship between biblical authority and institutional authority within Jehovah’s Witnesses is complex.
Jehovah’s Witnesses claim to follow Scripture. But they also follow the Watch Tower Society’s interpretations quite closely. To the point where, if the Watch Tower Society changes an interpretation, most Witnesses change with it.
I asked an elder about this: “What if you read the Bible and come to a conclusion that differs from Watch Tower teaching?”
His response was careful: “The Watch Tower Society is led by the Holy Spirit. It’s the faithful and discreet slave. So if you come to a different conclusion, you should trust the organization’s guidance.”
This is actually not unique to Jehovah’s Witnesses, every religious community does something similar. Catholics might read Scripture and come to a conclusion that differs from papal teaching; the instruction is to trust the magisterium. Protestants might read Scripture and come to a conclusion that differs from their pastor’s teaching; the instruction is often to trust the pastor’s wisdom or the confessional tradition.
But it does reveal something: no Christian community actually practices unmediated biblical authority. All of them funnel Scripture through institutional interpretation. What differs is how transparent they are about this, and how much flexibility they permit.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are quite strict about organizational alignment. But they’re not unique in requiring this. Many evangelical churches, many fundamentalist communities, many mainline denominations expect substantial alignment with institutional teaching.
The difference is degree, not kind.
So what’s actually being asked when someone asks, “Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian?”
I think the question is really: “Do Jehovah’s Witnesses belong to the historical Christian tradition as it institutionally consolidated?”
And the answer to that is: No, not entirely. They’ve rejected some central decisions made by the councils and the traditions that followed from them. They’ve made alternative choices about christology, about authority, about biblical interpretation.
But the answer to “Are they genuinely following Christ and Scripture in a way that’s doctrinally defensible?” is: Yes, actually. They’re making interpretive choices that Scripture permits. They’re following Christ earnestly. They’re constituting themselves as a religious community oriented entirely around Christ and his salvific work.
The first answer treats “Christian” as a category determined by historical institutional decisions. The second treats “Christian” as a category based on substantive commitment to Christ and Scripture.
Both are defensible. But they’re measuring different things.
The real insight here isn’t about Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s about Christianity itself.
The question “Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian?” breaks because “Christian” never had a stable, universal meaning. It’s a term applied to people who believe in and follow Christ, but what that belief entails, what Scripture means, what authority structures are legitimate, these have been repeatedly contested throughout Christian history.
When the councils met at Nicaea, they settled the Trinity question, not because it was biblically decisive, but because they had the power to settle it. When Luther challenged the Pope, he didn’t create Protestantism because his biblical interpretation was more objective than the Catholic Church’s. He created Protestantism because he had enough political support to sustain an alternative authority structure and alternative biblical interpretations.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are simply the most recent instantiation of this pattern: a group that has read Scripture, made interpretive choices, established institutional authority, and created a religious community around those choices. They’re doing exactly what every other Christian denomination has done. They’ve simply made different interpretive choices than the mainstream.
This doesn’t make them right. It also doesn’t make them not-Christian. It makes them differently Christian, part of the vast, contested, historically-contingent project of trying to be faithful to Christ and Scripture while inevitably reading both through particular cultural, institutional, and theological lenses.
The uncomfortable truth: there’s no fact of the matter about whether Jehovah’s Witnesses are “really” Christian. There’s only the historical record of which groups claimed the name, what interpretive choices they made, and which groups had enough institutional power to declare their opponents outside the authentic tradition.
After months of engagement with Jehovah’s Witness theology, comparative Christian history, and conversations with scholars and practitioners across Christian traditions, I’ve come to something like a conclusion.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are historically outside the institutional Christian mainstream. Their christology differs from what the councils declared. Their biblical interpretation differs. Their authority structures differ.
But they are substantively within the Christian project of following Christ and Scripture. They’re making interpretive choices that the Bible permits. They’re engaging sincerely with theological questions that Christianity has never fully resolved.
To call them “not Christian” assumes that institutional decisions made by councils in the 3rd and 4th centuries are somehow more authoritative than Scripture itself, or than the sincere, careful reading of Scripture by people in later centuries who came to different conclusions.
I’m not sure that assumption holds up under scrutiny.
What I’m left with is a lived question rather than a settled answer: If Christianity has never had a stable, historically-grounded definition of what counts as authentic Christian belief, if what we call “orthodoxy” was actually determined by political power and institutional consolidation rather than by biblical necessity or theological clarity, then what does it mean to call someone “Christian” or “non-Christian” at all?
Perhaps the better question isn’t: “Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian?”
Perhaps it’s: “What do we mean by ‘Christian,’ and on what basis are we drawing the boundary where we draw it?”
That’s a question worth sitting with, rather than answering.
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