Art & Creativity Quote by Joseph Franklin Rutherford

Rutherford’s line looks mild, almost like a Sunday-school aside, but it’s doing heavy institutional work. Declaring Revelation “largely in symbols” isn’t just a literary observation; it’s a power move about who gets to decode the end of the world. If the text is symbolic, then literal-minded readers are suddenly unreliable narrators of their own faith, and the interpreter - the clergyman, the movement, the authorized teacher - becomes indispensable. Ambiguity is converted into a chain of custody.

The timing matters. Rutherford, who led the Watch Tower movement after Charles Taze Russell, operated in an era when prophecy charts, date-setting, and millenarian fervor were popular currency across American Protestant subcultures. A symbolic Revelation offers a way to keep apocalyptic urgency while insulating the group from the reputational damage of failed literal predictions. Symbols can be recalibrated; timetables cannot. That flexibility is not an accident of hermeneutics but a survival strategy.

Subtextually, the sentence also tries to normalize a particular kind of modern religious reading: not naive fundamentalism, not academic skepticism, but an interpretive middle lane where the Bible remains authoritative while its most volatile book is treated as coded communication. Revelation becomes less a forecast than a keyhole: only those with the right key can see what’s coming. Rutherford’s restraint is rhetorical: by understating the claim, he makes a contested position sound like common sense, and common sense is the best disguise for doctrinal control.