The article continued, “Rather than provide a rule for measuring time, the term ‘generation’ as used by Jesus refers principally to contemporary people of a certain historical period, with their identifying characteristics.” 1 issue, The Watchtower described the doctrine of 1914 as speculation rather than definitive teaching: “Jehovah’s people have at times speculated about the time when the ‘great tribulation’ would break out, even tying this to calculations of what is the lifetime of a generation since 1914,” the magazine said. “We had been told for years that this is what we were doing,” said Weissman. Instead, the magazine said, the heavenly Jesus will judge the good and the bad at some time in the future. 15 issue of The Watchtower, which presented “an adjusted understanding” of the long-held teaching about the “sheep and goats.” Since then, the group’s door-to-door missionaries said they were doing Christ’s work by identifying the sheep-believers destined for everlasting life-and the unsaved, or goats.Įventually, Witness leaders said the final and cataclysmic “great tribulation” of Armageddon would occur before the generation living in 1914 passed away, citing as evidence the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew (24:34) and other biblical passages.īut the shift to downplay that year’s significance was signaled in the Oct. Jehovah’s Witnesses, a sect formed in the 1870s and eventually incorporated as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, maintained for much of their early history that 1914 would mark the end of the old world, and Christ would return then.Īfter 1914 came and went, the sect announced that Christ had indeed “returned” by being enthroned in heaven and appointing the Witnesses as his earthly representatives. “But as the decades passed it began to include anyone born in that year.” “Initially, it was taught that ‘this generation’ started with people who were old enough to understand the events of 1914 ,” Franz said. “This is a monumental change after all this time,” Franz said. “They’ve been insisting on this as a definite truth for more than 40 years,” said Franz, who left the Witnesses in 1980 in what he called “a crisis in conscience. Johnson downplayed the change, saying the 1914 timetable “has not been a cardinal doctrine of faith.” However, that was disputed by Ray Franz of suburban Atlanta, a former Witness who was on the sect’s governing board from 1971 to 1980. “Nobody has raised any questions to me,” Breneman said. Likewise, Harley Breneman of Reseda, a circuit overseer for 21 Kingdom Halls in the western San Fernando Valley, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, said that he expects no problems. Jehovah’s Witnesses “are interested why and how this was determined,” Johnson said, “but there is no falling away that I know of, and we don’t expect to see that.” He also denied that Witness leadership was under the pressure of an aging generation to adjust its teachings. “It doesn’t change our belief that we are living in the time of the end,” Johnson said.
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