I began to type a rant about this whole article yesterday (still unfinished), but it's too long and off at a tangent to post in this thread. To be shorter and sweeter instead:
Firstly, any thinking Christian would (should?) be offended by by the article's underlying theme and message, namely that the holy spirit is responsible for leading 'God's organization' into erroneous teaching on countless occasions, that it/he has directed the organization forward, backward and round in circles in matters of doctrine. If that really is the case, the holy spirit and the Almighty either haven't a clue or are playing about, and obviously this isn't in line with the Bible's portrayal of how the holy spirit works.
Secondly, I don't see any significant change in the 'generation' teaching here. I do see a 'clarification' (*cough*) or 'expansion' on what was written in 2008. The concept was already elastic and indefinite when they said:
"As a class, these anointed ones make up the modern-day 'generation' of contemporaries that will not pass away 'until all these things occur.'This suggests that some who are Christ's anointed brothers will still be alive on earth when the foretold great tribulation begins." w.08, 2/15, p.24.
They've just spelled it out more by, as others have noted, nonsensically making 'generation' even more elastic in scope, rendering it essentially meaningless! LOL!
And the other crazy thing is, haven't the anointed as a class existed since 33 CE? And haven't they overlapped with the lives of other anointed ones through the centuries, through 1914 and through to the 21st century??? Why not go the whole hog and say the 'generation that will not pass away until all these things occur' is the generation of the anointed as a class from the 1st century onward until the end? After all, a couple of paragraphs earlier in the same 2008 article they said:
"Jesus said that it was his disciples, soon to be anointed with holy spirit, who should be able to draw certain conclusions when they saw 'all these things' occur. So Jesus must have been referring to his disciples when he made the statement: 'This generation will by no means pass away until all these things occur.'"
Thirdly, I find it interesting that the contrast between 'new light' and 'old light' on this 'generation' issue is limited to the 2008 and 1995 understandings. It's like the 45+ year long teaching about the 'generation that saw the sign in 1914' that wouldn't pass away (which according to the article must have been another of the holy spirit's misdirections) is only a distant memory, almost as if it never happened!
