Pondering upon the shifting sands of Watchtower interpretation down the years, it is worthwhile to consider just one example of one scripture. We could look at many scriptures and establish ongoing shift, but here we will look at the ongoing shift of understanding relevant to the scripture at Revelation 16 v 3 as an example:
“And the second poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became blood as of a dead man, and every living soul died, even the things that were in the sea”….
In the book THE FINISHED MYSTERY (1917) this second bowls outpouring signified the release of Pastor Russells 2 nd volume of Studies in the Scriptures. “The Time is at Hand”. The fact that this previously held interpretation has been completely abandoned is well known among those who research their Watchtower history, yet in fact, the understanding of this scripture continues to shift even into our own day, as I will demonstrate.
Now it is most interesting that, by the year 1930, when the book “Light” was written, the Watchtower organization had established HOW and WHEN these bowls were poured out with the greatest of precision. The notion of 7 Conventions and 7 resolutions (the interpretation still held today) is fully established in the “Light” book.
However, down the years, the understanding of WHO these bowls of wrath were poured upon has been subject to much reinterpretation:
LIGHT. (1930) page 23,24 / “ The beginning of the pouring out of the second bowl dated from August 25 th , 1923, when, at the Los Angeles convention Gods people sent forth the resolution ‘A Warning’….The pouring out of this bowl was ‘into the sea’ and the wicked class that exploits the people of the earth. The clergy who had held themselves forth as Gods representatives…are the wicked ones of the sea that stir up the filth and mud thereof”…
There is no absolute specification in the book as to who this “class” is that “exploits the people”, though the book "Light" in connection with all these bowls, generally talks about BIG BUSINESS and CORRUPT POLITICIANS. And of Course, Wicked Clergymen of “Christendom”. By the year 1963 the understanding of what the outpouring of this bowl signifies has changed radically:
BABYLON THE GREAT HAS FALLEN (1963) page 534 / …” The restless, unsettled, revolutionary elements and the militaristic elements, symbolized by the sea, also come under a divine plague”..…”Revolution occurred in Russia in 1917 and the ungodly Bolsheviks or Communists came to power. They imposed a radically different political scheme on Russia. They believed in world revolution by violent means and by crafty subversiveness. Ever since then they have endeavored to keep the world in an unsettled state”
No longer is “Big Business” the target of the second bowl. Now the book goes on for some 6 pages and is focused upon COMMUNISM. One would certainly interpret that the 2 nd bowls outpouring was directly upon Revolutionary Soviet Communism specifically.
BABYLON (1963) page 540 /…”from God's standpoint. All the radicals, revolutionaries and the pushers for world domination by ungodly Communism were judicially viewed as dead by Jehovah and his witnesses. Radicalism's program of human government, as against God's heavenly kingdom, came forth from the "dead" and held forth no hope of life”
Of course, it is worth keeping in mind that in the early 1960s when this book was written there was a lot of paranoia about Russian Communism, especially after the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ in 1962. By the year 1988, however, when the next book interpreting Revelation was published, the focus of the 2nd bowls outpouring had shifted from Russian Communism (which was a much depleted power) to something more vague and insubstantial. As the book “REVELATION. ITS GRAND CLIMAX AT HAND” (1988) shows . Page 223:
“ This bowl is directed against ‘the sea’, the seething, rebellious mass of humanity alienated from Jehovah…In Jehovahs eyes this ‘sea’ is like blood, unfit for creatures to live in…..By reason of community responsibility, mankind is guilty of gross shedding of innocent blood”
And that is all the book says about the second bowl. Actually, the ‘bowls’ of Revelation 16, in recent years, have become secondary to the ‘trumpets’ of Revelation 8. The book does say, on page 220, that :
“ the targets of the first 4 bowls correspond to those of the first 4 trumpet blasts”.
Now about this second ‘trumpet’ (which apparently is the same thing as the second ‘bowl’) the book says, on page 135:
“The question of Government became a burning issue among mankind, especially in the lands of Christendom. In Italy, Mussolini introduced Fascism. Germany embraced Hitlers Nazism, while other countries tried different forms of Socialism….in Russia, the Bolshevik revolution produced the first Communist state.
So the malais caused by the second bowls outpouring is now much more sweeping than it has been previously. Indeed, page 136 shows that the interpretation involves all forms of experiment in social organization and ALL ATTEMPT AT HUMAN GOVERNMENT :
“ In Greece an experiment in military dictatorship failed…In Kampuchea an excursion into fundamentalist communism resulted in a reported 2 million deaths….Ongoing struggles over government are reported in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands
One can see the trend has been away from specifics towards generalization, a trend one would expect to continue as more time passes. As the passage of time demonstrates the Watchtower to be in error in its interpretations those interpretations will become more intangible. We have seen this recently with the ‘generation’ becoming, no longer, a literal generation but a figurative ‘generation’ of a specific mindset. The Watchtower will unquestionably continue to water down and spiritualize its interpretations of scripture until they are so intangible and general that they are impossible to disconfirm.