The WTBTS claims to be "spirit-directed". How this is different from being "inspired", only a lawyer could tell. There is no doubt that the WTBTS has many, many times claimed to be "God's only true channel", "appointed by God", "not a false prophet", and so forth.
My question here is: How does the WTBTS describe the actual mechanism of "spirit-direction"?
Joe Rutherford wrote that he got the whole story from angels. And in at least one case, the decision in 1931 to rename the group to "Jehovah's Witnesses", he claimed it came from an angelic source while he slept the night before the announcement. Maybe he was hitting the booze pretty hard at the time; possibly a case of Canadian whiskey had recently been smuggled into Brooklyn just for him.
Has the WTBTS in recent years written anything more about their sources? Have they ever denied Rutherford's angelic assertions? Do any in the WTBTS leadership still claim a special relationship with angels? Or, like Rutherford, do the spirits speak only after a lot of spirits have been consumed?
"Pour me another Scotch, bartender! All these damned apostates are making this faithful slave really thirsty. I need some more visions to fix up the chronology. Bartender, better make that a double!"