There's a funny story that's circulated among engineering types about a young VP at Arco. He saw an inordinate amount of 'Boiler operators' on the payroll and noticed that they made an inordinate amount of money. He decided that he would save the company a bunch of money by out-sourcing the building maintenance. Boiler operators are in charge of heating equipment. Right?
Wrong. The 'Boiler operators' as it turns out, were the technicians operating the miles and miles of equipment which cracks the petroleum molecule. And he fired them all.
Shutting down a refinery is not like flipping a switch. Letting all the technicians go en masse left the equipment unattended. The refinery ended up needing months of repairs and losses ran into the millions.
I've observed JW's up close for many years and a recurring observation is that they as a group make the same fundamental mistake as the Arco VP in this story did.
To assume that you've found a mistake that has eluded every single person that has looked at the exact same information before you is a big jump. I'm not saying it is never, ever justified; I'm saying that this is a leap that you don't casually make.
The most natural and normal questions would be, "How did other people miss this?" and "What exactly were they thinking?" and "Is there anything I might not be grasping here?" Anything less would be in implicit assumption of everyone else's stupidity (As opposed to your own alleged intelligence.)
The 'mistakes' JW's have found with orthodox Christianity are things that theologians have wrestled with for centuries. Without saying who is right and who is wrong here, JW's don't seem to grasp that fact or even give lip-service to the mountains of extant literature on any given topic. The assumption seems to be that everyone else who has looked at the issues was either stupid or blind and are therefore beneath noticing.
Even worse, we've reached a point in the evolution of the JW faith where the current crop of leaders don't even seem to grasp the precepts, methodology and arguments of their predecessors. (As Roger Crompton and others have observed.)
Perfect example: Despite whatever else might be said about Fredrick Franz, he did not seem to approach Biblical interpretation entirely as an ad hoc affair. There was actually a method to his madness and those familiar with his writings know that he employed typology as an interpretational method. --"Types," "Antitypes" and "Archetypes" should be familiar terms.
Typology is a way to make prophetic dialogue like the Olivet Discourse directly relevant to the modern reader without rendering it irrelevant to the immediate audience two thousand years ago. Primary fulfillments serve as a type for larger Secondary fulfillments. The interpreter therefore needs to be careful not to break the pattern between type and antitype, because doing so yanks the rug out from under the whole idea that the prophecy is still relevant at all.
The current leaders and policy makers in the JW faith have held onto the idea that Jesus' comment about the 'generation' (Matthew 24:34) is relevant beyond that which the immediate audience witnessed, but like the executive at Arco who didn't grasp the significance of the term, 'Boiler operator' they don't seem to grasp how their predecessors got to that point in the first place.
