The Catholic Church is not one brand of Christianity among many. She is the Church Christ founded on Peter, the Church that wrote, collected, and preached the New Testament before there was any such thing as a Protestant. What later generations called “deconstruction” was not a recovery of the Gospel. It was a long subtraction. Each new movement kept a little less of what the apostles actually handed on, and then congratulated itself for being more biblical than the Church that gave the world the Bible in the first place.
- The Catholic Church (1st–15th centuries). From Pentecost onward there was one visible Church: bishops in succession from the apostles, Scripture read inside Tradition, seven sacraments, and a creed that named Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one God. In 1054 the East and West divided over papal authority and the Filioque. The West remained the Latin Church. Late medieval critics such as Wycliffe and Hus attacked abuses and papal power, but they were still arguing inside Catholic Christendom, not founding a new religion.
- The Protestant Reformation (1517 onward). Luther’s 95 Theses (1517) were a protest against indulgences that became a new principle: sola scriptura and sola fide. The result was not one reformed Church. It was Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican churches within a generation, then Anabaptists who rejected infant baptism and the state church. Authority moved from bishop and Tradition to private reading of the Bible. Once that door is open, it never shuts.
- Further Protestant splintering (16th–18th centuries). Puritans, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists peeled off from Anglican and Reformed stock. Each group claimed to restore “New Testament Christianity.” Each discarded more of the old deposit: the Mass reduced to a memorial, holy orders flattened, liturgy stripped, the visible Church treated as optional. America became the laboratory. With no established Church, every new reading could plant a congregation.
- American Restorationism and Adventism (19th century). The Second Great Awakening produced the Stone–Campbell Restoration Movement, which tried to abolish creeds and “restore” the primitive church by starting over. William Miller, a Baptist, calculated Christ’s return for 1843–1844. When October 22, 1844 passed with no Advent, the “Great Disappointment” shattered the movement. Some became Seventh-day Adventists. Others stayed in loose Second Advent circles. They kept the habit of date-setting and began discarding the immortal soul, hellfire and, soon enough, the Trinity itself.
- Bible Students to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Charles Taze Russell was raised Presbyterian and Congregational. In 1870, after hearing Adventist preacher Jonas Wendell, he joined an Adventist-influenced Bible study in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. From George Storrs, George Stetson, and Nelson Barbour he took Millerite chronology, annihilationism, soul-sleep, and anti-Trinitarian conclusions. With Barbour he taught that Christ’s presence began invisibly in 1874 and that the “Gentile Times” would end in 1914. In 1879 he launched Zion’s Watch Tower. In 1884 the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society was incorporated. Followers were “Bible Students,” not yet Jehovah’s Witnesses.
- Rutherford finishes the break. Russell died in 1916. Joseph F. Rutherford seized the Society, centralized authority, dropped most remaining Protestant habits, and drove door-to-door work. In 1931 his faction took the name “Jehovah’s Witnesses” to separate from other Bible Students. What remained was a tightly controlled, non-Trinitarian organization that denies the deity of Christ as the Church has always confessed it, treats the Holy Spirit as a force, and reads the last two thousand years of Christianity as a great apostasy that only their society corrected.
That is the chain. Catholic unity gave way to Protestant sola scriptura. Sola scriptura gave way to endless new readings. Those readings, in nineteenth-century America, gave way to “restore the original church” movements. Adventist date-setting and the rejection of hell, the soul, and finally the Trinity gave way to Russell’s Bible Students. Rutherford’s Watch Tower finished the job.
Every step claimed to recover the Bible. Every step threw away more of what the first Christians actually believed and practiced. If you want the original, you do not start in Pittsburgh in 1870, and you do not start in Wittenberg in 1517. You start in Jerusalem, with the apostles, and you remain with the Church that never left them. Protestantism is a family of subtractions. Jehovah’s Witnesses are simply the subtraction taken all the way to the floor.
Shane Schaetzel is an author of Catholic books and he is an Evangelical convert to the Catholic Church. His articles have been featured on LifeSiteNews, The Remnant Newspaper, Forward in Christ, and Catholic Online. You can read Shane’s books at ShaneSchaetzel.Com
