Watchtower-Lite: the dilution of theology?

kid-A

Remember the 90 year old dubs in your hall that would always have some answer at the study full of the weird old Russell-Rutherford era theology? You know, all the different "classes", weird watchtower terminology, "scarlet coloured harlot" , "sounding of the 10 horns" etc etc and you would be sitting there thinking WTF????

Comparing the old school witnesses to the "witness-lite" of today, would you agree that at least that old school theology had some more substantive attempts at theology.....flipping through a recent WT I was struck by the complete FLUFF that filled the pages from start to finish....do you think this dilution of theology is intentional or have they just completely run out of theological steam, as it were?

Lady Lee

If I am correct the lite version has happened since Franz died. It seems that he was the last of the people who came up with "prophetic" ideas. Since then they are just coping the old stuff and making changes to suit their "new light" ideas that are often just regurgitated old light

upside/down

This one old, almost senile brother (with the bow tie) was giving a comment at the Watchtower study...

He said...and Jojoba's gonna kill all the queers....it was HILARIOUS...he didn't think it was funny.

Then he spouted some crap about the earth being 42,000 years old... it was the first time I ever heard that sh*t.

u/d(of the shoulda seen it coming class)

Ingenuous

While I don't agree with many of Russell's assertions, it's clear that his theology was quite systematic. He "stood on the shoulders" of the Adventists before him to get to his own unique theology and he seemed to think quite deeply about the details of what he believed. I've been reviewing his writings and have been able to understand two separate lines of reasoning he uses to establish 1914, a system of "Jubilees" he uses to determine the beginning of the Millennial reign, and an entire system of Gospel parallels to Jewish history. Again, he didn't come up with all of this from scratch, but he managed to put out 6 volumes on it all, at least a few thousand pages - and, from my discussions with modern-day Bible Students, there's still tons of stuff that hadn't been specifically delineated. I've found reviewing Russell's works eye-opening, even if I don't buy into all of it. It's stimulated me to think-out my beliefs and reasoning behind them a lot more.

Rutherford was on a completely different planet, one which eventually became known as today's WTB&TS, so I've got a lot less interest in examining his works in any depth.

TheListener

I had no idea until I started really searching that all the teachings I was raised with her Rutheford's. I always thought we believed the same things Russell did and that is how solid the information was. It's truly amazing to see Rutheford's systematic dismantling of Russell's teachings in the late 20s and early 30s.