Dogma: an official system of principles or tenets concerning faith, morals, behavior, etc., as of a church. For instance, a fundamental dogma of Christianity is the Resurrection, but among sects of Christianity, dogmas about other details vary. Nonetheless, they are insisted upon in their basic unavoidable, unchanging form - otherwise there would be no basis for the particular sect's belief other than habit. When these things are identified, they show up like the Apostle's or the Nicene Creed. Now how about an idea like the Faithful & Discrete Slave? Or the significance of 1914? Or the Overlapping Generation? Do we need a new word to convey the concept of dogmas repeatedly altered by New Light? Just change that first letter to F or Fr and...
If I look back over 100 years of the use of the Faithful & Discreet Slave, I discover it is first invoked in such form as a title bestowed on pyramidologist Charles Taze Russell, more like the Good and Faithful Servant. The "Discreet" part came along later because as Joseph Rutherford's legal counsel Olin R. Moyle was not. He didn't keep his mouth shut or his pen away from paper about things he objected to at Bethel. In this way, Moyle contributed something to the New World Translation of the New Testament and a mutating concept. Evolving further from the original parable, the FDS becomes something akin to the Soviet Politburo. It's not a parable or an individual, but a collective entity to which one or more individuals can be appointed or expelled. Russell became a non-person and could no longer qualify.
It's a tenet all right, but not dogma. For that you have to picture something like Fido cast ten feet tall in stone guarding a bone. This belief is surrounded by fog and is slippery. So it is either Fogma or Frogma. With its leaps of supposition I vote for the latter.
When it comes to 1914, Mr. Russell declared that it was the End, the Armageddon he was searching for. He wasn't sure at first even though a hellacious war had broken out in late July of that year, but October had to be significant. No going back.
That was 100 years ago. One hundred plus years. We know (?) now that Satan fell to Earth and Jesus Christ had arrived incognito or both - or that it was the time of the last generation before ...
I vote for Fogmatism on this one, especially since we live in an era of the Overlapping Generations.
The term "dogma" derives from Greek δόγμα "that which seems to one, opinion or belief"and that from δοκέω (dokeo), "to think, to suppose, to imagine". In the first century CE, dogma came to signify laws or ordinances adjudged and imposed upon others... Well, that last part rings true for sure.
Now here' another. The sacred scriptures were collected and canonized in an Era of Apostasy a couple of hundred years after Christ was on Earth. Moreover, the Era lasted up until the WT&BTS got under way with little or no guidance from above because the principals were off somewhere else in the heavens and couldn't be present on Earth until very recently - and invisibly. So you've got to admit that it's a wonder we've got that book at all. Nonetheless, from amid all the versions of it, it has to be retranslated - including the NT into present day Greek for the people of that land who never had those words in their possession. Now if that is not selling refrigerators to Eskimos. Perhaps it was on account of the accompanying commentary. They just had to have that.
Fogmatism.
Suggestion: Rename the Watchtower - Perpetual New Light