On the divine Name, the New World Translation, and the One through whom all things were made

There is a piece of literature that circulates among Jehovah’s Witnesses, defending their Bible — the New World Translation — and one of its proudest boasts is this: where other translations have buried the personal name of God under the title “the Lord,” the New World Translation restores it. It restores the Name. And the people who hold that conviction are not careless about it. Many of them could tell you that the Name stands in the Hebrew Scriptures roughly seven thousand times. They guard it. They would sooner suffer than dishonor it.

I want to begin there, and I want to begin honestly. That instinct is right. It is good. In an age that has largely forgotten that God has a name at all, the Witness kneels down over it. We do not start this conversation by correcting people who love the Name of God too much, because there is no such thing as loving it too much. So before a single word of argument, let it be said plainly: if you are one of those who have reverenced the Name with that seriousness, you have understood something a great many comfortable Christians never trouble themselves to feel.

The question this article asks is not whether the Name matters. It does. The question is where the Name was always going — and whether, in guarding the doorway, you have been standing in it without walking through.

A reading we should grant

Let me take the strongest text the Witness reaches for, and grant him his reading of it on its own terms.

The text is Philippians 2. Paul writes that God “highly exalted” Jesus and “bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9–11).

Read those verses by themselves, and the Witness has a fair point — a better one than many Christians admit. God exalted Jesus. God gave him the name. So the honor is received, granted, handed over from a greater to a lesser. And the whole confession ends “to the glory of God the Father,” pointing back past Jesus to Someone above him. On that reading, Jesus is the exalted Messiah, Jehovah’s appointed agent, who receives honor without being Jehovah. And Scripture really does allow God’s chosen servants to receive honor: Joseph was bowed down to by his brothers; the kings of Israel were given authority and homage; angels carry the very name of God in their titles. So the question is not whether this “delegated agency” reading is possible. On Philippians 2 alone, it is.

The question is how far that reading can travel before it meets a passage it cannot carry. So let us follow it and watch carefully where it stops.

The half of the hymn that gets skipped

It handles Philippians 2:9–11. It begins to strain a few lines earlier — at the verses the argument usually skips.

Paul does not open the hymn at the exaltation. He opens it higher up, with One who “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6–7). The Witness translation renders that sixth verse to deny that Jesus ever possessed or sought equality with God at all — and I will be honest with you about something the confident apologist on either side tends to hide: the Greek of that verse is genuinely contested. The keyword, often translated “grasped,” can mean either a prize one reaches out to seize (a status not yet possessed) or a possession one clutches and exploits for advantage (a status already held). Scholars argue this both ways. I am not going to pretend it is settled.

But notice the shape of the hymn. It moves downward before it moves upward: from “the form of God,” down through self-emptying, down through the form of a servant, down to death on a cross — and only then up to exaltation. That descent makes far more sense as the story of One who already stood high and let go than as the story of a creature who was promoted for good behavior. If the shape is right, then the exaltation in verse nine is not a creature receiving a new rank. It is a glory being restored and made public.

That is one weight on the scale. It is not proof. Set it down and reach for a heavier one.

“My glory I will not give to another”.

Philippians 2 is not free-floating poetry. Its climax — “every knee should bow… every tongue confess” — is drawn straight out of the prophet Isaiah, and the chapter it comes from is the most fiercely monotheistic passage in the Hebrew Scriptures. There, God says: “To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear” (Isaiah 45:23). And the same God, in the same prophet, says something the Witness and the Catholic both believe with all their hearts — twice over, for emphasis:

“I am the LORD, that is my name; my glory I give to no other” (Isaiah 42:8).

“My glory I will not give to another” (Isaiah 48:11).

Now lay that over what Paul actually does. He takes the homage that Isaiah reserves for the LORD alone — universal, every knee, every tongue — and he directs it to Jesus. And he says the result glorifies the Father.

Watch what the delegated-agency reading must now do to survive. It must hold that a mere creature is receiving the very acknowledgment Isaiah says God will give to no one else — in the book where God swears, twice, that He shares that glory with no other — and that this somehow adds to the Father’s glory rather than stealing it. Is that impossible to assert? No. A determined reader can assert it. But look how the seams are straining. The reading now has to keep insisting on a separation that Isaiah’s own words press against, and it has to make the worship of “another” into the glorification of the One who refuses to share His glory with another. That is not a comfortable place for a reading to live.

This is also, quietly, where the Catechism speaks. It observes that when the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek — the very Bible the apostles read and quoted — the unspeakable Name was rendered by the Greek word for “Lord,” Kyrios. And then it notes what the first Christians did with that word: “The New Testament uses this full sense of the title ‘Lord’ both for the Father and — what is new — for Jesus, who is thereby recognized as God himself” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 446). The earliest believers — Jews who knew exactly how dangerous it was to misuse the word that stood in for the Name — took it and gave it to Jesus. “Out of respect for the holiness of God,” the Catechism says elsewhere, the Name was replaced by the title Lord; “it is under this title that the divinity of Jesus will be acclaimed: ‘Jesus is Lord'” (CCC 209). The people most careful in all the world about the Name handed it to him.

The glory he had before the world

A trained Witness has an answer ready, and it is worth meeting at its strongest. He will say: even pre-existence does not make Jesus God. Jesus speaks, in the Gospel of John, of “the glory which I had with thee before the world was made” (John 17:5) — but a created spirit, the first and highest of God’s works, could be said to hold glory at God’s side before creation. And in that very same prayer, Jesus calls the Father “the only true God” (John 17:3).

I want to grant the first half of that, frankly: John 17:5 by itself does not settle the question. A creature of surpassing glory, made before the world, is a coherent thing to imagine, and the verse alone does not rule it out. So I will not lean my whole weight on it.

The second half, though — “the only true God” — does not carry the freight the Witness hopes. The Son who prays to the Father is genuinely distinct from the Father as a person; no Catholic has ever said otherwise. Distinction of persons is not difference of being. The Father is the only true God, and the Son is not thereby shut out of that one Godhead — for the same evangelist who records this prayer will write, at the end of his first letter, of Jesus that “this is the true God and eternal life” (1 John 5:20, where the nearest antecedent is the Son). What John 17:5 does establish — and this matters — is that whatever Jesus is, his story does not begin in time. The glory was there before the world.

But pre-existence is not the cliff the agency reading falls off. For that, we have to leave homage and pre-existence behind, and go to creation itself.

Through him all things were made.

Here is where the road runs out.

A creature can be honored. A creature can be exalted, given authority, or made to receive homage. There is one thing a creature cannot be, by definition: the one through whom everything that exists came to be. He would have to make himself.

And that is precisely what the New Testament says of the Son.

“All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3). Not most things. Not the lower things. Without him, nothing that was made was made — which leaves him on the far side of the line from everything created.

“In him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… all things were created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:16). Thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities — the whole invisible hierarchy a Witness might place Jesus within is here placed under him, as things made through him.

And then the sharpest of all. The Letter to the Hebrews opens by setting the Son above the angels, and to prove it, the author quotes the Old Testament. He introduces the quotation with five plain words — “But of the Son he says” (Hebrews 1:8) — and then he takes a psalm that was spoken to Jehovah, the Maker of heaven and earth, and applies it directly to the Son:

“Thou, Lord, didst found the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of thy hands; they will perish, but thou remainest… but thou art the same, and thy years will never end” (Hebrews 1:10–12, quoting Psalm 102:25–27).

Read it slowly, and feel where it lands. The One who laid the foundation of the earth. The One whose hands made the heavens. The One who remains when the heavens wear out like a garment — who outlasts the very creation he made, the unmistakable mark of the uncreated. And the inspired author says, “This is said of the Son.”

The reading that absorbed Philippians 2 cannot absorb this. You can construe “every knee shall bow” as homage to an exalted agent. You cannot construe “you laid the foundation of the earth, and you remain when it perishes” as anything a creature could be. The model breaks here, and it breaks completely.

The weight of it all together

Let me be clear about the kind of argument this is, because honesty about that is part of the argument.

No single verse in this article forces a committed reader to abandon the delegated-agency model against his will. A determined defender can take Philippians 2 alone and read it his way; he can take John 17:5 alone and read it his way. That is how it always is with a coherent system of belief — no one is argued out of an entire way of seeing by one proof text, because the system reaches out and re-interprets each text as it arrives.

But step back and look at the whole. The agency reading survives Philippians 2:9–11. It strains at the kenosis a few verses up. It strains harder against Isaiah’s twice-sworn refusal to give His glory to another. And it breaks outright at the creation texts, where the Son is named the Maker of all things and the One who outlasts them. That is not one brick thrown at a wall. It is the cumulative weight of the whole New Testament leaning in one direction — and the direction it leans is unmistakable. The Son is not “another” who receives the glory God will not share. He stands within the one divine identity, so that the honor paid to him is glory to the Father, exactly as Philippians says, and not glory stolen from him.

If you have loved the Name

Picture, for a moment, the Witness who has done what few Christians ever do. He has guarded the divine Name. He has memorized where it stands. He has resolved that he would die before he would dishonor it.

One morning, he reads Isaiah 48:11: “My glory I will not give to another.” Another day, in the Letter to the Hebrews, he reads that the Son laid the foundation of the earth and remains when the heavens perish. He sets the two passages down side by side, and he turns them, and he tries them at every angle a careful man can find — and there is no arrangement in which a mere creature both makes all things and receives the glory that God gives to no one else. The verses will not stop touching. And slowly it dawns on him that his whole life’s reverence for the Name was never the obstacle to seeing this. It was the doorway he had been standing in.

If you have honored the Name with that kind of seriousness, you can see this more clearly than people who never cared at all. The honor you have always wanted to give was never going to stop at a title, and it was never going to land on a creature. It was going to its rightful place. It was going to the One through whom all things were made — to a face.

The Name was always going somewhere. And the deepest way anyone has ever honored it is the confession the first Christians could not stop making, the confession Paul says glorifies the Father himself: Jesus Christ is Lord.

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A question to carry: If all created things were made through the Son, and he remains when the heavens themselves wear out — where does the line between Creator and creature fall, and on which side of it is he?

Sub tutela Dei.

• Apologetics
• Christology
• Jehovah's Witnesses