Wither The Watchtower
Unfolding Crisis for Jehovah's Witnesses-
By David A. Reed
Summary
Newly installed Watchtower president Milton
G. Henschel, 73, has inherited two major problems from his predecessor,
Frederick W. Franz. When Franz died on December 22, 1992 at age 99 he
left in power a Governing Body mostly in their 80s and 90s, who, in
turn, are dying off without eligible successors. Franz also left in
place an official dating system that pointed Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs)
to 1975 as the time Christ's millennial rule should have begun. Turning
from these dead ends will require a major revision of JW beliefs. With
new doctrine and new leadership up for grabs, Jehovah's Witnesses face
the potential of severe internal upheaval.
Although it put him in charge of a corporation
with real estate holdings in New York City alone valued at $186 million,1
and comparable properties elsewhere, the appointment of Milton G. Henschel
as president of the Watch Tower2 Bible and Tract Society made few headlines.
Even the Jehovah's Witness (JW) sect's principal magazine, The Watchtower,
confined its mention of the new leader to a single sentence at the end
of former president Frederick W. Franz's two-page obituary: "On December
30, 1992, Brother Milton G. Henschel was chosen as the Society's fifth
president, to succeed Brother Franz."3 But the switch in leadership
is of immense significance to Witnesses, as it portends convulsive changes
for the 11.5-million-strong4 sect - namely, doctrinal reversals and
organizational restructuring on a magnitude not seen since the shakeup
which followed the death of Watchtower founder Charles Taze Russell
in 1916.
CHARLES TAZE RUSSELL
Russell, born in Pittsburgh in 1852 and raised
a Presbyterian, was 16 years old and a member of the Congregational
church when he came under the influence of Advent Christian Church preacher
Jonas Wendell in 1868. Nearly a generation had passed since the "Great
Disappointment" of 1844 when Christ failed to return as predicted by
Baptist lay preacher William Miller, and the successors of the Millerite
movement had regrouped and regained respectability as Second Adventists
(a family of denominations including the Seventh-Day Adventists and
such Sunday-sabbath observing groups as the Advent Christian Church
and the Life and Advent Union). Now certain Adventists were pointing
forward to another date, 1874, with the same expectations. But that
year, too, came and went without the promised Second Advent.
Russell was still sharing fellowship with
disappointed Adventists in 1876 when he learned that a small Adventist
magazine, Herald of the Morning, was affirming that Christ did indeed
return in the autumn of 1874 - only invisibly - and that believers would
be raptured three-and-one-half years later in the spring of 1878. With
money from his successful men's clothing store, Russell at age 24 provided
financial backing for the struggling magazine. In return, publisher
and editor Nelson H. Barbour of Rochester, New York, appointed him an
assistant editor.
When the expected Rapture failed to occur,
Barbour came up with "new light" on this and other doctrines. Russell,
however, began opposing Barbour. In the summer of 1879 he made a formal
break, using his nearly three years of experience with Herald of the
Morning - and a borrowed copy of Barbour's mailing list - to start his
own magazine, Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence.
Russell quickly repudiated the "Adventist"
label and fashioned a distinct denomination of his own. Followers referred
to themselves as "Bible Students" and named their organization the International
Bible Students Association (IBSA), but outsiders called them "Russellites."
The Watch Tower and Russell's books retained
much of Barbour's eschatological chronology, focusing on 1874 as the
beginning of Christ's invisible "presence," and predicting other end-times
events by calculating from that date. He also incorporated measurements
of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh in his chronological calculations. Calling
it "God's Stone Witness and Prophet, the Great Pyramid in Egypt," he
figured a year for each inch of measurement in various internal passageways,
and used these numbers to predict that believers would be raptured in
1910 and that the world would end in 1914.5
In 1882 Russell began leading Watch Tower
readers away from orthodox theology. After Trinitarian assistant editor
John Paton broke with Russell and ceased to be listed on the masthead,
Russell openly rejected the doctrine of the Trinity as "totally unscriptural."6
The Bible Students viewed Russell himself
as the "faithful and wise servant" of Matthew 24:45 and as "the Laodicean
Messenger," God's seventh and final spokesman to the Christian church.
But he lived to see the failure of various dates he had predicted for
the Rapture, and finally died on October 31, 1916, more than two years
after the world was supposed to have ended. Followers buried Russell
beneath a headstone identifying him as "the Laodicean Messenger," and
erected next to his grave a massive stone pyramid emblazoned with the
cross and crown symbol he was fond of, and also with the name "Watch
Tower Bible and Tract Society." (The pyramid still stands off Cemetery
Lane in Ross, a northern Pittsburgh suburb, where it serves as a tourist
attraction.)
JOSEPH FRANKLIN RUTHERFORD
According to instructions Russell left behind,
his successor to the presidency would share power with the Watch Tower
corporation's board of directors, whom Russell had appointed "for life."
But former vice president Joseph Franklin ("Judge") Rutherford noted
that the formality of re-electing the directors at an annual meeting
of the corporation had been omitted, and he used this technically to
unseat the majority of the Watch Tower directors without calling a membership
vote. He even had a subordinate summon the police into the Society's
Brooklyn headquarters offices to break up their board meeting and evict
them from the premises.7
After securing the headquarters complex and
the sect's corporate entities, Rutherford turned his attention to the
rest of the organization. By gradually replacing locally elected elders
with his own appointees, he managed to transform a loose collection
of semiautonomous, democratically run congregations into a tight-knit
organizational machine controlled from his office. Some local congregations
broke away, forming such Russellite splinter groups as the Chicago Bible
Students, the Dawn Bible Students, and the Laymen's Home Missionary
Movement, all of which continue to this day. But most Bible Students
remained under his control, and Rutherford renamed them "Jehovah's Witnesses"
in 1931 to distinguish them from these other groups.
Meanwhile, he shifted the sect's emphasis
from individual character development to public witnessing work. By
1927 door-to-door literature distribution had become an essential activity
required of all members.8 The literature consisted primarily of attacks
against government, Prohibition, "big business," and the Roman Catholic
church. Rutherford also forged a huge radio network and took to the
airwaves, exploiting populist and anti-Catholic sentiments to draw thousands
of additional converts. His vitriolic attacks blaring from the loudspeakers
of sound cars also drew down upon the Witnesses mob violence and government
persecution in many parts of the world.
Rutherford largely avoided end-times prophecies
after the failure of his prediction that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would
be resurrected in 1925.9 In fact, referring to that prophetic failure
he later admitted, "I made an ass of myself."10
NATHAN HOMER KNORR
Vice President Nathan Homer Knorr inherited
the presidency upon Rutherford's death in 1942. Doctrinal matters, however,
were left largely in the hands of Frederick W. Franz, who joined the
sect under Russell and had been serving at the Brooklyn headquarters
since 1920. Lacking the personal magnetism and charisma of Russell and
Rutherford, Knorr focused followers' devotion on the organization rather
than on himself.
A superb administrator, he initiated training
programs to transform members into effective recruiters. Instead of
carrying a portable phonograph from house to house and playing recordings
of "Judge" Rutherford's lectures, the average Jehovah's Witness began
receiving instruction on how to give persuasive sermons at people's
doorsteps.
Meanwhile Fred Franz worked to restore faith
in the sect's eschatological teachings. His revised chronology moved
Christ's invisible return from 1874 to 1914.11 And, during the 1960s,
the Society's publications began pointing to the year 1975 as the likely
time for Armageddon and the end of the world.12
Knorr's training programs for proselytizing,
plus Franz's apocalyptic projections for 1975, combined to produce rapid
growth in membership, pushing meeting attendance at JW Kingdom Halls
from around 100,000 in 1941 to just under 5 million in 1975.
During the 1970s changes took place at Watchtower
headquarters in regard to presidential power. First, it became accepted
in theory that the Christian church (which Jehovah's Witnesses see their
organization as encompassing) should not be under one-man rule, but
rather should be governed by a body similar to the twelve apostles.
The seven-member board of directors of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract
Society of Pennsylvania had previously been portrayed as fulfilling
this role. But in 1971 an expanded Governing Body was created with a
total of eleven members, including the seven directors.
This new Governing Body was displayed as further
evidence of the sect's being the one true church, but in actuality Knorr
continued to rule Jehovah's Witnesses much as Russell and Rutherford
had done before him. This changed, however, in 1975 when Governing Body
members began insisting on exercising the powers granted to them in
theory that had never really been theirs in practice. Over the objections
of Fred Franz the body he had been instrumental in creating actually
began governing, so that when Knorr passed away in 1977 Franz inherited
an emasculated presidency.
FREDRICK W. FRANZ
Franz also inherited an organization troubled
by discontent over the obvious failure of his prophecies of the world's
end in the autumn of 1975. Even at the Brooklyn headquarters little
groups meeting privately for Bible study were beginning to question
not only the 1914-based chronology that produced the 1975 deadline,
but also the related teaching that the "heavenly calling" of the bride
of Christ (identified as the "144,000" of Revelation 14) ended in 1935,
with new converts after that date consigned to an earthly paradise for
their eternal reward.
The hitherto fast-growing sect actually began
losing members for the first time in decades, as people who had expected
Armageddon in 1975 became disillusioned. When membership loss grew into
the hundreds of thousands13 - a figure somewhat masked by new conversions
- President Franz and the conservative majority in the Governing Body
took action. In the spring of 1980 they initiated a crackdown on dissidents,
breaking up the independent Bible study groups at headquarters, and
forming "judicial committees" to have those seen as ringleaders put
on trial for "disloyalty" and "apostasy."
By the time this purge culminated in the forced
resignation and subsequent excommunication of the president's nephew
and fellow Governing Body member Raymond V. Franz (a development Time
magazine found worthy of a full-page article),14 a siege mentality took
hold on the worldwide organization. Witnesses who left were denounced
as disloyal and were ordered "shunned," with former friends forbidden
to say as much as "a simple 'Hello'" to them.15 And those who remained
were commanded to "avoid independent thinking...questioning the counsel
that is provided by God's visible organization."16 Thus, although Frederick
W. Franz served as the sect's chief theologian for some 50 years - from
the start of Knorr's presidency in 1942 until his own death last year,
he eventually found himself resorting to a mini-Inquisition to keep
his doctrines in force.
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