ISSN: 1522-5658
An Outsider’s Notes on the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Revelation: Its Grand Climax at Hand!
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?
[1] Stanley Fish answers his well-known titular question - Is There a Text in This Class? - rather playfully in the opening words of his preface: “there is and there isn’t” (Fish: vii). There isn’t, he goes on to explain, if by text one understands an unchanging entity, one that is stable moment-to-moment. But there is a text if by the term one means the obvious “structure of meaning” that presents itself to an interpretive community guided by particular assumptions. Said differently, all readers are guided by protocols which invariably shape the expectations placed on the text being read. This understanding of text as something unstable and fluid, and the shift away from author-and text-centered interpretation towards an audience-centered theory of reading is particularly helpful when considering the unique ways religious presuppositions influence encounters with texts. The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society is well-described as an interpretive community with a worldview and reading strategies that shape the way the Bible is experienced by members. (With respect to nomenclature, I am using the shorter “Watch Tower” when referring to the organization and “Jehovah’s Witnesses” when discussing its members. The term Watchtower is the title of one of the organization’s publications.) Reader-response criticism is a helpful methodology for approaching this literature and so a few more comments about Stanley Fish’s theory of reading will serve as a preface for this study of a Watch Tower publication.
[2] Fish’s opening chapter proposes a new “method” that is at once simple and significant. It is the reader’s experience, he suggests, not the text itself, which is “the proper object of analysis” (21). As a method, the reader needs to ask what it is that individual words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, novels, plays, and poems do, not what the author intended (26-27). Risking censure by proponents of text-centered criticism who find in this approach “affective and intentional fallacies” (2; cf. 22-23, 27, 32, 344, 349),<2> Fish questions the assumed stability of texts and substitutes “the structure of the reader’s experience for the formal structures of the text on the grounds that while the latter were the more visible, they acquired significance only in the context of the former” (2). This suggestion is a clear departure from the dominant text-centered New Criticism of the 1960s and 1970s that Fish resists (his first major study was Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost [1967]; many of the essays included in Is There a Text in This Class? are reprinted, the earliest previously published in 1970).
[3] Two key concepts in Fish’s book illustrate how meaning resides in readers, not the text or authorial intent. The first Fish calls “affective stylistics,” which indicates how readers make sense of words on the page by anticipating what is to follow. Readers may be right or wrong in their expectations and when errors occur their point of reference is made uncertain; at such a point, rather than “following an argument along a well lighted path [. . . they are] now looking for one” (24). This kind of ambiguity is part of the reading experience and meaning is found in that encounter with the utterance, even with mistakes made along the way. Fish goes so far as to suggest, “there is no direct relationship between the meaning of a sentence (paragraph, novel, poem) and what its words mean.” Whatever information is found in an utterance, its message is, therefore, “constituent of, but certainly not to be identified with, its meaning. It is the experience of an utterance - all of it and not anything that could be said about it, including anything I could say - that is its meaning” (32).<3>
[4] Fish recognizes the role individual readers have in generating meaning. He speaks of “meaning as an event, something that is happening between the words and in the reader’s mind, something not visible to the naked eye but which can be made visible (or at least palpable) by the regular introduction of a ‘searching’ question (what does this do?)” (28; italics original).<4> In his later work, however, he moves beyond this, recognizing that all readers are inevitably shaped by their environment, or what Fish calls communities. This leads into the second major concept.
[5] When making his point that environment shapes interpretation he provides a sample reading of a passage from Paradise Lost that produces a conclusion “not discovered by the analytical method but produced by it” (13). He says elsewhere “I ‘saw’ what my interpretive principles permitted or directed me to see, and then I turned around and attributed what I had ‘seen’ to a text and an intention” (163). Such a discovery is the product not of individual acumen in reading a difficult text but rather in the application of a particular reading strategy. Readers are, Fish argues, inevitably shaped by the interpretive communities to which they belong.
Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around (171).
For Fish, reading is a generative act and a form of writing. As he puts it, “meanings are not extracted but made and made not by encoded forms but by interpretive strategies that call forms into being” (172-73). There is, then, an essential relationship between the meaning found in a text and the assumptions held by the communities to which the reader belongs. The text is no longer a “privileged container of meaning” and instead the reader is given “joint responsibility for the production of meaning” (3).
The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society
[6] As a reading and interpretive community the Watch Tower employs certain strategies for navigating biblical writings and its members share a number of assumptions about the world and their place in it. This environment inevitably shapes the Bible-reading experience for Jehovah’s Witnesses since the interpretive methods and symbols of the organization are constantly in view, especially in the context of formal Bible study. The apparent uniformity in theology and praxis - at least in its public expression (tracts, website, door-to-door ministry, etc.) - owes something to the organization’s massive publishing initiative that ensures all members are reading the same texts, asking the same questions (various publications include study questions, including Revelation: Its Grand Climax at Hand! that is considered here), and applying the same interpretive grid. Their publications are an exercise in “symbol management” that involves constant repetition of essential truths held by members. Numerous tracts, magazines, and books play a key role in maintaining this highly symbolic world:
The vast quantity of literature produced by the society in order to keep the current body of symbols alive for the membership consists necessarily of a constant repetition of the basic viable symbolic themes. This repetition becomes mantric in quality, and the society’s constant rephrasing and re-presentation of the basic corpus of recognized belief becomes for the membership the rhythmic life-breath of the symbol, the truth, the ultimate security (Botting and Botting: 94, emphasis original).
The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society’s 1988 commentary Revelation: Its Grand Climax at Hand! (hereafter RGCH) is a particularly interesting example of this exercise of symbol management. This volume, like many Watch Tower publications, blurs the traditional boundaries that distinguish sacred literature from interpretation, so much so in fact that it is argued here that this book functions, in effect, as scripture for this particular reading community.
[7] The term sacred text or scripture is not easily defined (see, e.g., Smith), but at a minimum it suggests a way of looking at the world and a tool for answering questions about the meaning of life and death, morality and justice, and perceived progress or regress in the world. All of this is found in RGCH. No author(s) is (are) identified which enhances its authoritative tone and repeated suspicions about the integrity or acumen of biblical scholarship<5> encourages readers to trust the text itself and the leaders of the movement responsible for this particular interpretation of the Book of Revelation (the elders in “Jehovah’s anointed” congregations are identified with the “angels” referred to in the seven letters [RGCH 28-29]). If official interpretations of the Bible carry such authority, it is arguable that the Bible alone is not scripture for the Watch Tower, and the Old and New Testaments gain this status only when the organization’s history and presuppositions are woven into them. There is no room for ambiguity or debate in RGCH - the book includes the bold assertion, “The entire book of Revelation is explained in this publication” (5; following the table of contents) - though the possibility for future revision is left open (see especially 8-9).
[8] As far as I am aware there are no academic analyses dedicated to RGCH specifically, even though this is a fairly substantial study of John’s apocalypse (319 pages) with a very wide circulation. In its various incarnations there were apparently, by 1988, 16.6 million copies printed in 51 languages (2). Study of this book is therefore warranted if only because of its immense influence. However, because of the organization’s reclusive nature there is minimal dialogue with the academy and analysis of this book in particular is, as noted, almost non-existent. This lack of attention to Watch Tower publications by outsiders is also noted by Gutjahr who comments on the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ official translation of the Bible:
Certain large American religious traditions, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses . . . have produced and circulated alternative translations of the Bible. As early as 1890, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were producing portions of the Scriptures that bore their name. By 1926, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were producing complete Bible editions, and in 1946 they embarked on translating their own version of the Scriptures, in an edition that highlighted their tradition’s beliefs. Completed in 1960, this new Bible edition was called the New World Translation. By 1992, nearly eighty million copies of this version were in print, and yet no extended study of this Bible version has been undertaken by anyone outside this religious tradition (344).
This paper puts forward at least a few preliminary observations on this widely influential book.
[9] Although RGCH is a Bible commentary, there are several departures from what is usually understood by that term. As a result this book shapes, it is argued, the reader’s reception of that ancient document in significant ways. Here we have an example of the content (Revelation) being shaped by the package (RGCH; the entire text of the Apocalypse in the New World Translation is included). Reading Revelation through Watch Tower publications, that is to say through the lens of this interpretive community’s ideology, is a very different experience than reading it on its own. As a way into RGCH, attention will be given to four features of this book that illustrate its idiosyncratic style and distinctive form of Bible presentation.<6>
Authoritative Interpretation
[10] According to Fish, interpretive communities are not stable. As communities grow and decline, as individual readers come and go, there is bound to be some degree of flux.
. . . while the alignments are not permanent, they are always there, providing just enough stability for the interpretive battles to go on, and just enough shift and slippage to assure that they will never be settled. The notion of interpretive communities thus stands between an impossible ideal and the fear which leads so many to maintain it. The ideal is of perfect agreement and it would require texts to have a status independent of interpretation. The fear is of interpretive anarchy, but it would only be realized if interpretation (text making) were completely random. It is the fragile but real consolidation of interpretive communities that allows us to talk to one another, but with no hope or fear of ever being able to stop (172).
Allowing this there is still remarkable uniformity among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, at least if their literature is any indication.<7> The Book of Revelation is a highly contentious work that rarely permits any reading community to reach a consensus about its meaning, but the Jehovah’s Witnesses have made an ambitious attempt to do just that. RGCH makes no claim to infallibility (9), yet this interpretation of Revelation assumes that no ambiguities exist in the biblical text. This is carefully qualified because clarity of understanding is contingent on God’s illumination and progressive revelation meaning doctrinal positions are subject to adjustment over time. The book begins with a rehearsal of the organization’s history of formal study of the Book of Revelation beginning in 1917. Their reading of the text has been revised many times since then for two primary reasons, namely the unfolding of world events and continual but gradual revelation from Jehovah (8). In RGCH they lay claim to their uniquely authoritative and God-sanctioned reading of Revelation in a few ways.
[11] To begin with, there is the oft-repeated assertion that biblical literature is accessible and comprehensible to faithful Christians.<8> Rather than approaching this difficult book with uncertainty, readers in this interpretive community are assured from the outset that they can fully understand its mysteries. Second, alternative interpretations of biblical literature are vilified as non-members are identified with the villains in Revelation while the Witnesses are aligned with God and his emissaries. Questioning the RGCH interpretation thus raises the spectre of one’s allegiance to God. Finally, this reading of the Book of Revelation makes repeated connections between (a) John’s visions, (b) selected historical events of the twentieth century (see note 9), and (c) the organization’s past experiences. This creates a reading experience that is in some sense self-fulfilling: if Revelation accurately describes our past it must also be concerned with our present while predicting our future.
Reading Revelation in the First Person Plural: John is Telling Our Story
[12] Jehovah’s Witnesses identify themselves as participants in John’s story since Revelation is largely concerned with the twentieth century: “Most of the prophecies in Revelation were to be fulfilled after John’s time” (RGCH 24).<9> Sympathetic readers therefore find their own story in RGCH - it is a first-person plural (“we”) reading experience that announces this community’s ultimate vindication and the demise of its detractors. A few selected examples of this reading strategy through which the organization “finds itself” in the Book of Revelation can be noted.
[13] To begin with, the great multitude of Rev 7:10 is said to refer to Jehovah’s Witnesses because they alone are reaching out to “all people of earth with one united message” through their enormous publication program (123; the great crowd [Rev 7:10] is distinguished from the 144,000 of Rev 7:4-8 in RGCH; this number is believed to refer to a literal 144,000 anointed Christians who make up spiritual Israel [118]). On another occasion, an eschatological timetable incorporates the movement’s own history into the interpretation of John’s phrase “the Lord’s day” (Rev 1:10; see note 9). Having identified the year 1914 as the beginning of Jesus’ “heavenly rule” (24) and the year in which “the Messianic Kingdom was born” (200), much is made of the organization’s activities during the three and a half years between 1914-1918 and Jesus’ three and a half year ministry (see especially 32). Just as the first three and a half year period began when Jesus was baptized as King-Designate in October of 29 C.E. and ended when he judged the money changers in the Temple in 33 C.E., so too the later three and a half year period (1914-1918) follows a similar pattern of events:
There appears to be a parallel to this [Jesus’ earthly ministry, framed by baptism and judgment of the money changers] in the three-and-a-half-year period from Jesus’ “sitting down on his glorious throne” in the heavens in October 1914 until his coming to inspect professed Christians as judgment began with the house of God . . . Early in 1918 the Kingdom activity of Jehovah’s people met with great opposition. In May 1918 Christendom’s clergy instigated the imprisonment of officials of the Watch Tower Society, but nine months later these were released . . . As Jesus began his inspection in 1918, the clergy of Christendom no doubt received an adverse judgment (RGCH 32).
We can see in these brief statements how history, eschatology, critique of alternative religious expression, and interpretation of the organization’s place in God’s plan are tightly woven together.<10>
[14] Another interesting example of synchronizing the movement’s history and the Apocalypse occurs in the reading of Rev 8:6-11:19. Here the seven angels blowing seven trumpets are linked to the organization’s activities between 1919-1922 during which time the public ministry was restructured by the “revitalized John class”<11> and publication of the magazine The Golden Age (renamed Awake!) commenced, a publication credited with “exposing false religion’s political involvements” (132).<12> Also, the seven trumpets are closely tied to seven Watch Tower conventions held between 1922 and 1928 - an insert with the heading “Highlights of Jehovah’s Trumpetlike Judgment Proclamations” is given, complete with a brief description of each (173). Very specific connections are made between these conventions and their major themes, and the seven trumpets. For example:
When the sounding of the seven trumpets got under way in 1922, the Bible Students’ convention at Cedar Point, Ohio, featured a talk by the president of the Watch Tower Society, J. F. Rutherford . . . The trumpet blast of the seventh angel was reflected in highlights of the Bible Students’ convention in Detroit, Michigan, July 30-August 6, 1928 (172).
No other strategies for interpreting the angels’ trumpets are suggested.
Identifying the Beast, Identifying Our Opponents
[15] The Jehovah’s Witnesses go to great lengths to distance themselves from other expressions of Christian faith, and symbols associated with traditional Christianity are described as marks of the beast. New Testament announcements of a coming apostasy are invoked (2 Thess 2:3-12; 2 Pet 3:1-3; 2 John 7-11) and subsequent Church history is cited as proof that it has come. Evidence of this great apostasy is found, among other things, in the church’s supposed substitution of “Lord” and “God” for “Jehovah,” the fourth-century development of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the idea of an immortal soul (30).<13> RGCH includes numerous attacks on traditional Christianity, both Catholicism and Protestantism (e.g., 30-31, 70, 197, 134, 139-41, 154, 208, 262).
[16] One is struck by the viciousness of this commentary’s polemics when discussing those identified as the beast’s associates (e.g., the British Empire and the United States as the seventh head of the beast in Revelation 13 [188] and the United Nations as the “eighth king” of Rev 17:11 [253-54]). Even though Jehovah’s Witnesses are pacifists (e.g., 39), the sympathetic reader is permitted, it would appear, to indulge in a little Schadenfreude, knowing others will experience eschatological suffering. This comment is based on the frequency of violent illustrations scattered throughout the book that suggest a fixation with the torments of the wicked.
[17] A recurring theme in Watch Tower discourse is the conviction that Jehovah’s Witnesses are under attack by satanic forces, usually embodied as either the state, the United Nations (e.g., 247), other (therefore false) religions, or a fallen, godless society that rejects the truth and the Witnesses themselves. The latter is not entirely unfounded. Jehovah’s Witnesses have experienced maltreatment at points of their history. Because they understand John 17:14 - disciples are to have “no part of the world” (New World Translation) - as an injunction against patriotism in any form, they were conscientious objectors during the First and Second World Wars. As a result, the Witnesses were viewed with suspicion during war time on all sides of the conflict,<14> a situation frequently mentioned in RGCH (e.g., 39, 197). Their belief in the sacredness of blood introduces another point of contention between Witnesses and the state. Their refusal to accept blood transfusions - especially when minors are involved - often involves legal challenges. In RGCH it is argued that the AIDS epidemic justifies the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ position on this matter: “How thankful Jehovah’s people are that the wise counsel of his Word keeps them away from fornication and misuse of blood, through which so many diseases are transmitted today!” (97).
[18] These confrontations are interpreted in religious terms and viewed as satanic attacks on the true people of God. The faithful are therefore encouraged to keep their distance from political and social institutions that represent a satanic threat. In addition to all signs of patriotism (e.g., 196), certain social functions have similarly been viewed as involving conformity with an evil system (such as the celebration of birthdays and holidays; 197). By far the most virulent attacks are against the world’s religions. Anti-Christian statements are found on most pages of the book with particular disdain shown towards Roman Catholicism and the Pope (e.g., 91, 107, 136, 139, 184-86, 270). There is, of course, nothing new about identifying opponents with the evil figures in Revelation. The history of interpretation is riddled with examples of interpreter’s aligning themselves with God and their enemies with the beast (for discussion on this point, see, e.g., Koester; Schüssler Fiorenza; for other examples in RGCH, see 195, 247-48, and 254). Among many visible incarnations of impiety among the enemies of God, RGCH mentions ecumenical gatherings that do not pray to “Jehovah” (249) and the United States and Britain who follow Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome as great but evil powers (252-53).
Use of Visual Aids
[19] There are numerous illustrations scattered throughout Watch Tower publications that are strategically important. Andrew Holden’s sociological analysis of the movement connects the images to the construction of social boundaries that distinguish members from non-members (92). Language and the visual clues found in these pamphlets and books “enable devotees to draw around themselves a kind of mental map to affirm who belongs to the community and who does not” (92). In RGCH, specifically, the pictures help explain difficult scenes presented in the Book of Revelation and to this end they are almost always very literal representations of the text, even in places where the language is clearly symbolic (e.g., pictures of an actual “lamb” when Jesus is clearly referred to by the term [Rev 14:4-5]; cf. 202). These images also introduce an emotive force to the commentary with several representations of grotesque monsters intended to frighten, and others that are sentimental, such as reunions with deceased loved ones (e.g., 299; this picture shows children running away from gravestones and tearful embraces with their parents).
[20] Stereotyping is also a regular feature of the pictures in this book. Representations of villains, for instance, are riddled with clichés. Among them we find the seductress (e.g., 49, 182, 197, 239, 242, 245, 256, 268, 275) with long flowing hair and makeup, military figures (e.g., 182, 196, 231, 242, 245, 255), religious leaders with distinctive clothing (e.g., 182, 184, 213, 242, 249), rulers/kings (e.g., 184, 213, 242, 255), those who smoke (e.g., 197, 213, 268 [two times]), and of course those who spurn overtures from Jehovah’s Witnesses to hear the gospel (e.g., 160). Though there are clear exceptions in the book, some pictures appear to favor whites, males, heterosexuals (couples with children), westerners (indicated by clothing), and the middle class. When God’s face is visible, it is white as are the faces of Jewish male authority figures in the text (Jesus, John, the patriarchs; see e.g., 7, 16, 70, 213, 301). Other figures, like angels and the twenty-four elders, are also white. The interpretation of Revelation 11 illustrates this tendency to construct the ideal figure as a white, western male. Ezekiel’s story of the dry bones is invoked as part of the explanation for the two witnesses rising from the dead in Revelation 11. These two passages are identified as prophetic utterances which had “their striking modern-day fulfillment in 1919, when Jehovah restored his ‘deceased’ witnesses to vibrant life” (169; i.e., the early days of the organization’s history [as Bible Students]). The picture on page 169 depicts the death of bearded and robed Jewish males and presents a background of dusty bones. An inset shows the “resurrection” of these bones as two white males, with short haircuts, suits and ties that represent the rebirth and the “modern-day preaching work” of the Bible Students/Jehovah’s Witnesses.
[21] Those inhabiting heaven are not consistently represented. In some cases they are uniformly white, heterosexual, and western (e.g., 316). At other times those in glory are robed in white, youthful but without children (121). Pictures of senior citizens are often used in representations of faithful believers (e.g., 26, 62, 316). Some scenes are culturally diverse with equal representation of gender and age (e.g., 308-9).
[22] These illustrations are consistent in other respects. Physical appearance is a concern for Jehovah’s Witnesses. There is an “obsession with neatness” among members that extends to clothing and personal grooming, such as short hair for men and formal dress for both sexes during door-to-door ministry (Holden: 54). RGCH attests to this in numerous illustrations (e.g., 128) and occasionally the clothing and hairstyles of the faithful are contrasted with the appearance of the wicked (e.g., the temptress on 197 with cigarette, beer can, and loose, flowing hair who attempts to lead astray a short-haired, young, male Witness).
[23] With respect to aesthetics, the pictures are not at all appealing, by any standard of evaluation. Literal depictions of God and the devil, angels and beasts, torments and blessings remove all sense of mystery from John’s imagery. At least two reasons for this kind of representation can be suggested. First, it seems plausible that the pictures are intended for children who would likely find them compelling and frightening. This would suggest a pedagogical intention for the book and an attempt to evoke emotional responses. Second, aesthetics is not a concern for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their assembly halls do not have icons or stained glass, and they regularly criticize the visual symbols of traditional Christianity. Perhaps the avoidance of “real” art is linked to this general pattern of thought that likely goes back to biblical injunctions against representations of the divinity (Exod 20:4; though God is frequently depicted in diagrams, e.g., 86, 121, 179, 302). If the fear of art is linked to the possible temptation of substituting beautiful things for God, these simplistic and unpleasant diagrams pose no threat. Religious iconography and art is linked to idolatry and sinful behavior throughout this book. On a few occasions in RGCH “real” religious art is ridiculed as is the descriptions of Buddhist and Hindu statues:
Revolting sexual corruption is portrayed to this day in the war-damaged Buddhist sculptures at Angkor Wat in Kampuchea and in the temples at Khajuraho, India, which show the Hindu god Vishnu surrounded by disgusting erotic scenes (RGCH 262).
It is interesting to note that representations of sexuality are described as revolting and disgusting but depictions of violence are not, if dozens of graphic pictures in RGCH are any indication.
Some Conclusions
[24] RGCH is a very distinct example of biblical commentary, and if by “scripture” we mean literature providing a way of understanding the world and one’s place in it, then RGCH is well described by the term. This reading of the Apocalypse consistently identifies the organization with virtuous characters in Revelation, connects outsiders with biblical villains and the demonic realm, and presents strategies for demarcating their particular interpretive community from others who claim to have an interest in the Bible. RGCH has a functional, catechetical structure as well, one intended to assist with proselytizing and instructing its readers. Hundreds of footnotes anticipate questions raised by Revelation and each is answered definitively in the commentary itself. These questions influence how readers experience Revelation and RGCH because they are directed through both texts very methodically.
[25] Stanley Fish argues against the narrow reading strategies of New Critics who find meaning only in the text itself. Similarly problematic is any attempt to locate meaning in authorial intention which is necessarily beyond the reach of critics. Instead, “the experience of the reader, rather than the ‘text itself,’ [is] the proper object of analysis” (Fish: 21). In the published writings of The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society we find a striking example of this kind of reader-response interpretation of Scripture. The approach to scripture modelled by the Jehovah’s Witnesses resists an interpretation limited to the text itself. If meaning resides in the text alone there would be no need to rely on either God’s unfolding revelation or the unique insights of the “John class” (e.g., RGCH 221). There could also be less emphasis on formal and official group Bible study and more emphasis on private, individual reflections on the text.<15> The author (John) is also downplayed; since he wrote of events that would occur long after his death, there is little need to contextualize his writing to any great extent.
[26] The Watch Tower’s hermeneutics also resembles Fish’s reader-response criticism with its assumption that texts are open. Meaning develops outside the text, Fish argues, in a “dynamic relationship with the reader’s expectations, projections, conclusions, judgments, and assumptions” (2). These are learned from the norms of interpretive communities which are themselves “no more stable than texts because interpretive strategies are not natural or universal, but learned” (172). Communities change. So too the Watch Tower recognizes the possibility that interpretations will change over time. This is couched in religious terms as the gradual unfolding of divine revelation which allows for adjustments in their reading of the Bible.
Bibliography
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