Someone also pointed out that the reward given to the F&DS will be all Christ's belongings. This means that the F&DS must continue to be faithful & discreet continuously from 1919 until his return but all the anointed are supposed to recieve the reward of being Kings & Priests. Therefore, their gift is now dependent on a group of 8 men.
Listener....Not just them, the prospective members of the great crowd too, who only have a chance at salvation through their association with the anointed. That is something that really struck me when I was thinking this through last night. It kind of throws things up in the air. When it's the whole anointed, at least you can say there is a sifting, as the Society claims happened in 1918, to purify the remnant and salvation is secure because Christ chooses the organization that remains faithful through that sifting. But now if the promotion occurs at Armageddon, then there is a possibility that it is the wicked slave that is in charge of the house when the master returns. And with the number down to just the 8 on the GB, well, that makes individual imperfection more pronounced. Heck, Ray Franz was on the GB...the GB surely views him as an apostate. Chitty and Greenless were on the GB at the same time. It seems like with such a small number, its much easier for the FD&S to "go bad".
The Society's explanation of the parable is far removed from any realistic reading. It ignores the context and makes reality out of the details of the parable that were meant for illustrating the point about kepping ready.
Bobcat....Absolutely. What has always interested me is that the Society regarded the parable as having past reference to its own organizational history. The new understanding actually is better exegetically in one respect. It makes the Master's rewarding of the faithful servant and/or punishment of the wicked servant correspond to the coming of the Son of Man in judgment (v. 30). That is obviously the point of the parable when you compare it with the other parables in the same discourse, or note the language that is used, or look at other parallels such as Matthew 16:27 ("The Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done"). The new light about the sheep and goats (from one of the parables that parallel the faithful and wise servant parable) in 1995 similarly took something that was supposed to have already been fulfilled, or in the process of being fulfilled, and projected into the future with a fulfillment when the Son of Man comes in judgment. In both cases, the new understanding is more faithful to the text than the old one.
But the rumored new light on the F&DS takes a massive step backward at the same time. The old interpretation correctly understood the absence of the Master as corresponding to the time between Jesus' departure from the earthly sphere to his return to it (his parousia). Now there is nothing that obviously corresponds to the departure of the Master from the household at the time when the servant was given his responsibility. Indeed what the Society construes as the parousia is supposed to now precede the appointment of the servant. It makes no sense. And the whole interpretation is founded on the erroneous idea that the parousia refers to something other than the coming of the Son of Man in judgment.
It's another "generation" type fiasco. They are simply not up to producing new biblical interpretations that make any coherent sense.
slimboyfat....Their prophetic interpretations have always been rather tortured, but yeah. Very difficult to wrap one's mind around.
I suppose one of the problems that the Watchtower leadership has solved with the the first century FDS is the role of women in this supposed group.
moggy lover....I don't think they were really concerned about that, but maybe it could be a side-effect of the alleged new light.
I'd be very interested if you could expland on this, and how it is that you call it a parable, which is what I argued fairly strongly in those early weeks that it was.
Chariklo....The pericope has a parabolic form; it belongs to a specific literary genre. Parables are either similitudes or short narratives that draw analogies between persons or situations (often taken from everyday life), or which exemplify a given person or situation, in order to illustrate a moral, legal, or doctrinal point. That is obviously the case here. The faithful and wise steward parable is also narratively parallel to other parables like the parable of the talents, the parable of the thief, etc.
The parable presupposes a particular eschatological view because the very purpose of the parable is to illustrate eschatological readiness with respect to the coming of the Son of Man in judgment.
FWFranz....Very interesting stuff. I was quite bothered by this when I was a JW too. The people that the Society mentioned as possible torch-bearers of the F&DS class had really little to do with each other historically or religiously (some were non-trinitarian, some followed an annual Last Supper custom, some used some form of the tetragrammaton, some sought to bring the Bible to the masses, some protested and were persecuted by the Church, some were looking for the fulfillment of prophecy, etc.), and were utterly scattered throughout the centuries. Against this, Franz weakly argued in the same book quoted above: "Just how the 'faithful and discreet' slave class existed and served down through the centuries after the death of the apostles of the Master Jesus Christ, we do not have a distinct historical picture. Apparently one generation of the 'slave' class fed the next succeeding generation thereof" (p. 344). It's the JW version of apostolic succession, except there is precious little evidence of it in history. Even in an article about one of those torch-bearers, the Waldenses, the Society could only raise the question of whether "the Waldenses were a link in the unbroken chain of dissenters between the time of Emperor Constantine (fourth century C.E.) and the Protestant reformers of the 16th century" or were simply "an isolated phenomenon," without giving any answer to that question (1 August 1981 Watchtower, p. 12).
Nothing has really changed, except they have essentially delayed the starting point of choosing the slave. If the R&F swallow THAT, then future spin in order to further delay the " end " will be swallowed as well. Am I on the same page here? What I see is an official delaying tactic, because we know they have been doing this for years anyway.
DATA-DOG....It still makes no sense to me why the GB would want to defer into the future its own appointment over the Lord's belongings, since it is THAT EVENT, dated to 1919, that precludes any thought that the Society could be the wicked servant. All the new teaching seems to do is rob the GB of that certainty because their identification as the F&DS is now truly only prospective and dependent on their conduct from here on out. If there occurs a power struggle within the Society over the authority of the GB (or rather those appointed to be on the GB), this could come back to bite them in the butt.
That's because it is incoherent. Did you forget? These are the same people that gave us "Overlapping Generation" as an explanation for what Jesus meant at Matthew 24:34.
00DAD...I have no expectation that it be any more coherent, I'm just pointing out how like the "overlapping generation" teaching, it creates greater incoherence than there was before, and that's gonna make it a harder sell for those JWs left in the org who aren't mindless drones.
The GB are using this message board, they probably let leak the annual meeting and using this board to refine how they print it.
EoM....I think it'll take more than refining to fix this one, if they care to (they don't care to fix the new generation doctrine).
