Posted by AF [AF] on March 29, 1999 at 14:19:40 {daOt1gg/ZkvofgF2qRhsMWwDjRmAxB/kM}:
In Reply to: Revisionism & Reality posted by Tom on March 28, 1999 at 07:22:46:
Your discussion shows something very interesting: if one carefully analyzes each sentence in most of the WTS quotes, one will find almost no false ones. One will find many true statements, many that are ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness, and a small number of outright false ones. However, stringing together a bunch of true and/or ambiguous sentences does not necessarily give a true picture of what is supposedly being described.
This is well illustrated
by your quote of the December 1, 1984 issue of The Watchtower, page 14:
Russell and his associates quickly understood that Christ's presence would be invisible. They disassociated themselves from other groups and, in 1879, began publishing spiritual food in Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence. From its first year of publication, this magazine pointed forward, by sound Scriptural reckoning, to the date 1914 as an epoch-making date in Bible chronology. So when Christ's invisible presence began in 1914, happy were these Christians to have been found watching!
The first three sentences are demonstrably true, although ambiguous in isolation. The last sentence is partially an unproven doctrine and partially a mere opinion, and so it cannot be proven true or false. But the result of stringing these sentences together is to give the impression that the early Bible Students "correctly" understood that what they called the "second presence" or "parousia" would not begin until 1914, some 35 years after "Zion's Watch Tower" began publishing Russell's ideas about 1914. Let's examine in detail how this misrepresentation arises from the way the sentences are strung together:
"Russell and his associates quickly understood that Christ's presence would be invisible."
One can argue that that's what "they" taught beginning around 1875. In 1876 Russell accepted Barbour's ideas, and this included further "scriptural proofs" that the "parousia" was supposed to be an invisible event.
Note the ambiguity associated with use of the phrase "would be invisible". Is the viewpoint associated with the future/subjunctive tense "would be" attached to the 1st century prophecies, or to the people associated with Russell just after they found their new understanding? This is crucial to interpreting the sentences that follow. The first would result in a true statement, whereas the second would yield a false one because they were teaching from 1876 that the "second presence" had already begun in 1874. However, the first is virtually meaningless in conjunction with the rest of the paragraph since it results in a string of disconnected "facts" that lead nowhere. But the second understanding works well in conjunction with the future-pointing next sentences: they "understood that Christ's presence would be invisible" and so they "began publishing spiritual food in Zion's Watch Tower" and so "this magazine pointed forward ... to the date 1914". The result is that most readers understand the paragraph to mean that Russell, from the very beginning of his publishing career, pointed forward to 1914 as the beginning of the "parousia". This of course is quite wrong.
The rest of the paragraph can similarly be shown to be misleading.
Your set of quotes illustrates yet another interesting fact: you can tell a lie by telling a partial truth, one that you know is ambiguous but is almost certain to be misinterpreted by your listener. Suppose a telephone caller asks for your wife by saying, "Is Jane in? May I speak to her?" You could reply, "My wife is out", when she's standing outside the house. You've technically not lied in the sense that you meant that "Jane is outside the house", but you knew very well that the caller meant "Is Jane easily available to speak with me?" Therefore, from the caller's viewpoint you told a lie because you deliberately led him to a wrong conclusion. This technique is often used by WTS writers, and they seem to justify their actions by thinking, "I didn't really tell a lie". But lying is often in the intent, not just in the words.
I'll leave it to the reader to see how this technique of "lying by telling the truth" can be found in the set of WTS quotes you presented.
AF