Okay ... so

Jerome, whom I tend to listen to even when I don't want to, says I was too hasty in removing an earlier post. So here it is again with some minor edits. It is here for comments. Comments make this blog worthwhile. Without them it serves no useful purpose.

B's intro essay in partial rough draft

Introduction

...

            Criticisms have been few. Some continue to believe that Russell was a Mason, part of a conspiracy seeking world domination. If he was, he was very ineffective. Though this conspiracy theory is dying a slow death on Internet boards, we readdress this in appendix one. Despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary, some continue to assert that Russell was an Adventist. We think the evidence presented in volume one is plain. Those who reject it should do so on the basis of some evidence other than speculation about what ‘might have been.’

            Zoe Knox wrote a largely positive review but added this suggestion: “Schulz and de Vienne make little attempt to connect their work meaningfully to research on nineteenth-century American religious history, which they might have done by, for example, considering what was unique about the emergence of the Bible Students as compared with other ‘American originals.’”[1] We think we made the most significant connections in volume one, but her comment has led us to reflect on the current approach to American religious history particularly by British writers. Frankly, we thought the elements of American religious history so obvious – so widely know – that we did not need to address them. We were wrong.

            For the last three quarters of a century the approach to so-called American Originals has been based on a flawed often superficial understanding of America’s religious journey.[2] Cultic growth is seen as a phenomenon primarily of the last half of the 19^th Century. Christian Science, Watch Tower faith and Latter-day Saints, grew in this period. The growth of fringe sects continued into the early 20^th Century giving us Pentecostalism. In the minds of sociologists and some historians, they developed out of similar causes. Sociologists especially feel it is obligatory to make a cursory comparison between “Russellism” and other “new religions.” Some give us a ‘compare and contrast’ essay similar to that I might assign to middle school children.

            Andrew Holden believed that Christian Science and the Watch Tower movement arose from like causes, and he believed that Watch Tower movement was connected to other 19^th Century religious movements: “The Witnesses were founded at a time marked not only by great social unrest but also by the birth of a number of other world-renouncing movements.”[3] Without clearly adopting any of the current interpretations of millenarianism, he uncritically adopted a generalized social-crisis view.[4] This omits key elements in the development of Watch Tower and similar theologies.  

The remainder of this post has been deleted.