chesterton, von balthasar, jehovah's witnesses and the shape of the stauros

It seems to me that Jehovah's Witnesses lose much in insisting that Christ died on a single upright beam rather than a cross.

The confusion is understandable, since the Greek word that most Bibles render as "cross" (stauros) has as its original meaning "stake" or "beam." But of course, stauros does not always mean "stake" just as the Latin crux does not always mean "cross." The position of the JWs ignores the witness of the early Christian writers, including Justin Martyr, who attest to the two-beam shape of the stauros. Justin sees the cross prefigured by Moses holding out his hands during the battle with Amalek, as does the author of the Epistle of Barnabas. There is also the Alexamenos graffito, which mockingly depicts the crucifixion by portraying Christ as a donkey on a tau cross (a cross shaped like an uppercase "T"). Clearly the earliest Christians and other witnesses understood stauros to mean "cross" in the New Testament.

G.K. Chesterton wrote about the cross as a symbol of reason, health, and eternity in his spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy:

"The Christian . . . puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health. As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds."

The cross provides not only a more perfect symbol of eternity than a circle, but it also, as Chesterton hints above, provides the means of redemption precisely because of its paradox - the "collision" and "contradiction" inherent in a vertical and a horizontal line intersecting at a single point. Hans Urs von Balthasar also points out this feature of the symbolism of the cross in Mysterium Paschale. He writes, "The point where all the dimensions of the world intersect is also the point of indifference between all contraries, and so the point of redemption."

I wonder if, in lacking the symbolism of the cross as the means of the reconciliation between God and man, Jehovah's Witnesses also lack something in their theology. It may be better to say that their lack of the symbol of the cross evidences a deficiency in their theology.

In historic Christian theology, Christ is able to reconcile God and man precisely because he is a paradox in the same way that the cross is a paradox. He can be the eternal High Priest precisely because he is at once God and Man. The cross is the perfect symbol of this contradiction: it has a vertical beam that, like the column of fire that accompanied the Israelites out of Egypt, represents the power of God and His coming down from heaven in order to save His people; the horizontal beam represents Christ's humanity, and thus humanity itself.

But Jehovah's Witnesses deny one part of this paradox, perhaps the most important part. In JW theology, Jesus, like his fellow humans, is a created being. As such, there is no saving "contradiction," no "collision" between God and creature in the person of Christ, and thus no real atonement (which is literally "at one -ment," the making of two different things one).

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Addendum 

Another passage from the early church of relevance comes from Cyril of Jerusalem's Catecheses:

"God has opened wide his arms on the Cross in order to span the limits of the earth's orb."