The Passing of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince

Prince Roger Nelson, also simply known as Prince (or formerly, depending on the weirdness of his own declaration) is dead.

He passed away on Thursday amid speculation that drugs were involved.  Initially, it was reported that he was suffering from flu symptoms.  Time will eventually tell.

Many are beside themselves over his passing, including many Christians, and with all the emotion comes a torrent of nonsense that range from him being “the greatest pop icon of our time” to him being a “Conservative Christian.”

Without getting too involved in whether or not he was the greatest entertainer, I will simply remind everyone of Michael Jackson and move on to the Conservative Christian comment.

Prince was not a Conservative Christian, much less a Christian at all.

Aside from his eccentricities on stage, with all the gaudy costumes and sexual erotica in his music, what he believed about God, Jesus, and salvation were clearly beyond the pale of biblical orthodoxy.

You see, Prince started out in life as a Seventh Day Adventist and then converted to being a follower of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society or the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Seventh Day Adventism is predicated on the false prophecies of William Miller back in the mid-nineteenth century.

Although Miller later admitted that his calculations announcing the Second Coming of Jesus were in error, Seventh Day Adventist founder Ellen G. White took Miller’s dates (1843 and 1844) and revamped them, thereby declaring them correct, except in a more spiritual way.

Seventh Day Adventists beliefs, therefore, are not only grounded in false prophecy, but also demonstrate a schizophrenic explanation of basic Christian beliefs, where on the one hand they read and sound Evangelical, while on the other hand they are denied or distorted to accommodate the twisted ideas—e.g. Investigative Judgment, Satan as the Scapegoat, and the necessity of Saturday worship to avoid being associated with the anti-Christ, et al—of Ms. White and company.

Prince left that all behind in 2001 to become a Jehovah’s Witness at the invitation of one of his band members.

Unfortunately for Prince, jumping from Seventh Day Adventism into the Russellism—after Charles Taze Russell, the founding father of the Dawn Bible Students, who would become the Jehovah’s Witnesses when successor to Russell, J. F. Rutherford changed their name in 1931—was tantamount to jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Prince went from believing in a quasi-evangelical message undergirded by false prophecy to an anti-evangelical message equally undergirded by false prophecy.

Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, which means they reject the biblical teaching about God the Father.

Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the deity of Jesus and equate him with the rest of creation, which is a repeat of the ancient heresy known as Arianism.

Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the biblical teaching on unmerited grace to secure one’s salvation, which is why many JWs work feverishly to be among one of the 144,000 to enter heaven one day, while the remainder are left convinced that “Paradise Earth” will be their final abode.

Clearly, both Seventh Day Adventism and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society are cults of Christianity.

Prince, in other words, did not have a clue what “Conservative Christian” meant, because neither SDA nor the WBTS are Christian.

So, even though many are saddened by his passing, the real tragedy is—if he truly held to what he later subscribed to as a Jehovah’s Witness—the moment he closed his eyes in death in that elevator in Minneapolis on Thursday, April 21, 2016, he awoke in a place that the JWs also deny exists—namely hell.

And no amount of eulogizing, spiritualizing, or rationalizing will change that, whether he was the greatest music artist of our time or not.