Please help - What did CT Russell mean by "prime movers"?

by Fernando 4 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • Fernando
    Fernando

    Just came accross this quote again today, and still am struggling to understand what the bold sentence means.

    Much appreciated if someone could please explain.

    "The endeavor to compel all men to think alike on all subjects, culminated in the great apostasy and the development of the great papal system, and thereby the gospel, the one faith that Paul and the other apostles set forth, was lost - buried under the mass of uninspired decrees of popes and councils. The unity of the early church, based upon the simple gospel and bound only by love, gave place to the bondage of the church of Rome ... Each new reform movement (like Protestantism) has made the failure of attempting to make a creed just large enough for its prime movers ." --WT, Sep. 1893, p. 1572

  • blondie
    blondie

    Prime movers = people like Luther, Calvin, Joseph Smith, Mary Ellen White, anyone that started a religious group with a creed that fit their own new beliefs.

    At that time, Russell was anti-organization expecting the anointed to go to heaven shortly (by 1914, only 21 years away). They never expected to stay on earth for 138 years forming an organization with 7 million individuals.

    Add: Like George Storrs was considered a prime mover of the Adventist group a friend of CTR but never a Bible Student.

  • snowbird
    snowbird

    Blondie!!!

    ...buried under the mass of uninspired decrees of popes and councils. The unity of the early church, based upon the simple gospel and bound only by love ...

    I wonder what he would think of the present-day WT organization?

  • blondie
    blondie

    Probably what Bible Student groups think of the WTS. They aren't organized, basically small groups.

    Ten or so years ago when I left, I did investigate many religions and walked away seeing the same flaws. Then I realized I did not need a group. As time has gone by, I question the validity of the OT doctrines and how different they are from the NT ones. I don't understand God allowing polygamy until the Christian era (and truthfully, until 1947 in the WTS).

    He (Herbert McCabe) became editor of the journal New Blackfriars in 1965 but was removed in 1967 following a now-famous editorial in that journal in which he criticised the theologian Charles Davis for leaving the Church. Davis left the Catholic Church publicly, denouncing it as corrupt. McCabe countered that of course the Church was corrupt but that this was no reason to leave it.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_McCabe

    Ray Franz saw a lot of his situation in Charles Davis's.

    http://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/questofconscience.html

    http://www.commentarypress.net/cpn-essays/English/AD719468-561A-4A26-BC06-EC8FC9A3FFDB.html

    Here Ray Franz quotes Charles Davis and applies his comments about the Catholic Church to Ray's experience with the WTS:

    Charles Davis was for many years a priest and prominent theologian (and editor of the British journal The Clergy Review) in the largest of the institutions that developed, the Roman Catholic Church. Explaining the reason for his decision to withdraw from his lifelong affiliation with that institution in the late 1960s, he wrote in his book A Question of Conscience: I remain a Christian, but I have come to see that the Church as it exists and works at present is an obstacle in the lives of the committed Christians I know and admire. It is not the source of the values they cherish and promote. On the contrary, they live and work in constant tension and opposition to it. Many can remain Roman Catholics only because they live their Christian lives on the fringe of the institutional Church and largely ignore it. I respect their position. In the present confused period people will work out their Christian commitment in different ways. But their solution was not open to me; in my position I was too involved. I had to ask bluntly whether I still believed in the Roman Catholic Church as an institution. I found that the answer was no. [Underlining ours]

  • Fernando
    Fernando

    Thank you Blondie! Much appreciated. Now it makes a lot more sense to me.

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