The so-called “Great Disappointment” of 1844, surrounding William Miller’s errant predictions of Christ’s return, was indeed partly responsible for Charles Taze Russell beginning his own search of the Bible for clues on the timing of the “last days” and Jesus’s return. But 1844 was never part of Watch Tower theology.
Russell was aware of the calculations behind Miller’s prediction, and in 1876 he met Nelson Barbour, a former Millerite. Barbour had by then made some necessary adjustments to his own theory: he had initially calculated that the second advent would take place in 1873, when the earth would be consumed by fire. When nothing took place, he decided it would be 1874. When nothing eventuated that year either, he and his colleagues concluded that the Second Coming, referred to in the Greek scriptures as parousia, was a “presence” and therefore had already occurred, with Christ returning … invisibly.
In 1877 Barbour and Russell co-wrote a book, Three Worlds and the Harvest of This World, in which they laid out a timetable in which:
Jesus had returned in 1874;
The deceased “saints” had been resurrected to heaven in 1875;
The “harvest” of remaining anointed “saints” would take place in 1878, when they would undergo a rapture, being raised to heaven;
The Jews would be restored to Palestine in 1881; and
The final end of God’s “day of wrath” would be in 1914, with nominal Christianity “utterly destroyed as a system".
Armageddon, he wrote, would take place in the 40 years from 1874 to 1914 — the “time of trouble such as never was since there was a nation” — with the events of 1914 to be the climax of Armageddon. Those dates were all confirmed, he wrote, by measurements within the Great Pyramid of Giza, “God’s stone witness and prophet”.
In early 1915 Russell, reluctant to admit that still nothing had happened, wrote that what had taken place in 1914 was that the Gentile Times had ended … invisibly. The full establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, he said, would take place later in 1915. In 1916, realising he had been completely wrong about Armageddon, Russell wrote that the war in Europe marked the start of it. Christendom, he said, would now be destroyed in 1918.
Russell died in October 1916. In 1917 the Watch Tower Society published The Finished Mystery, which predicted the destruction of the churches of Christendom and the deaths of “church members by the millions” in 1918. It also predicted the destruction of all human governments in 1920.
In 1922, new Watch Tower president JF Rutherford — as part of a process of discarding many of Russell’s teachings and calculations after he had sacked the majority of the Watch Tower directors and seized control of the publications — declared that the establishment of God’s kingdom over earth, which had previously been expected to result in the destruction of human governments and a “new rule of righteousness”, had also actually taken place in 1914 … invisibly. In 1925 he changed the date of Christ’s enthronement as king in heaven from 1878 to 1914. And in 1933 he wrote that the “last days” had also begun in 1914.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have clung to the 1914 date, and Rutherford’s theology surrounding it, ever since.
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02 Apr '24 12:55
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