The Watchtower Reinterprets This Generation

Four years after Jehovah's Witnesses were legalized following the Soviet collapse in 1991, and twenty two years before Russia banned Jehovah's Witnesses as extremist in 2017, both already recorded here, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society revised one of its longest standing teachings about the timing of the end. Since the early twentieth century, Witnesses had understood this generation at Matthew 24:34, the generation Jesus said would not pass away before all these things take place, to mean the specific generation of people alive in 1914, the year Witnesses hold marks the start of Christ's invisible presence and the last days. As that generation aged, the 1 November 1995 issue of The Watchtower explained instead that this generation meant the contemporaneous generation of unbelievers who would see the sign of Christ's presence, detaching the teaching from a single dateable cohort of survivors. Christ's Presence, What Does It Mean to You?, a later Watchtower study article, quotes the 1995 explanation directly and situates it within the doctrine's wider history. George Chryssides's peer reviewed study of Witness prophecy traces the same 1995 reinterpretation as one stage in a series of changing understandings of generation running from Charles Taze Russell's own era to the present.