He was doing a series about failed prophecies... Not just JW's
End of the World of the Week #51
What do you do if you throw an apocalypse and nobody
comes?
That was the challenge faced by
the Watch Tower Tract Society, an American offshoot of Christianity, when the
end of the world failed to show up on schedule in 1914.
That date had played a central role in the
Society’s prophecy since 1876, when the movement’s founder Rev. Charles Taze
Russell and Nelson Barbour, a former Millerite, wrote a book predicting the
Second Coming for that year.
As
Russell’s original International Bible Students Movement morphed into the Watch
Tower Tract Society, that prophecy became ever more central to the movement’s
hopes.
As church bells rang in the year 1915, though, it became
evident even to the most devout Watch Tower follower that Christ had pulled
another one of his frequent no-shows. Admitting that your prophecy was just
plain wrong is rarely a good career move for an apocalyptic prophet, and the
Watch Tower organization had made so much of a ballyhoo about the upcoming end
that it couldn’t get away with the usual fallback strategy of ignoring the
failure and announcing a new date (though this was tried).
It fell to Russell to come up with a third
option, one of the most ingenious in the history of apocalypses.
The Second Coming, he announced to his followers, had indeed
occurred—in heaven.
Christ was now
reigning in glory there, but the effects would take a little while to filter
down to earth, so they just had to be patient.
They’re still waiting patiently; in the 1930s, the movement renamed
itself the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and its members are still convinced that the
Second Coming took place 98 years ago and its prophesied results will be
showing up any day now.
I don't think the link to his book still works. I will try to contact him about it.
