Judgment Day Must Wait

Fear of the apocalypse that never comes! This is what holds a Jehovah's Witness power-bound by the Watch Tower Society. Armageddon is always just a little way around the corner.

Poul Bregninge presents a complete history and ideology of the Watch Tower Society and why it keeps a keen focus on the Day of Judgment. He tells of multiple "days of reckoning" that pass uneventfully and how each failure of Christ to reappear is re-evaluated by the Society to foretell of yet another apocalypse still to come. It is the fear of that moment of reckoning that keeps Witnesses firmly in the fold. Judgment Day is a carrot dangled before them.

Although the book's subject is the whole of the Jehovah's Witnesses movement, it is a comprehensive consideration of all of church history as well. It is about more than a few idealistic, overwrought Christians in late-19th-century America, who believed that Christ had [invisibly] returned to earth. It recycles the motives and arguments that were the central revelations of the very first Christians-the message that the world was near to its end-that all of mankind could be saved through conversion to Christianity-that they would ascend to a heavenly life on Judgment Day. Millions now-living would never die! It was an alluring message, first presented at a time when one of the most terrible wars the world had ever seen, indeed the first war ever to be called a World War, was raging.

This book deals with religious Fundamentalism, a belief that erects impenetrable walls around its adherents by clinging to outdated perceptions and radical ideas. The author dismantles the JW's main biblical storage battery, Matthew, Chapter 24, from which the movement takes their many "signs" of the impending end. The reinterpretation of these biblical readings is a virtual bomb beneath the understanding that Witnesses find in those key Bible texts.

YBK Publishers devotes much effort to locating well-researched scholarship. Poul Bregnine's Judgment Day Must Wait is an example of excellent scholastic research. It is based in the investigative work he did during the writing of his first book in 1966, a Danish-language publication. In 2013, YBK published the first edition of his brand new writing in English, Judgment Day Must Wait. Bregninge has continually been adding to and honing his original research that began in 1966.

Bregninge is a Dane. English is not his first language. JDMW however, reads as though it was written by a native English-speaker. Thanks must initially be given to his American editor, Dawn Johnson, and directly now to Poul, for continuing, ever, to improve his communication skills.

We have discovered that JDMW has become the de facto authority on the history of the Jehovah's Witnesses organization. YBK is most honored to provide the platform by which this work is brought to religious scholarship. Now, issuing its fourth edition during 2021, we are well-pleased with yet another substantial advancement in the information available about the evolution of the Jehovah's Witnesses organization.

Poul Bregninge was born and presently lives in Copenhagen. He was raised a Witness who informally left the movement in 1959. In 1964 he published several letters, articles, and features about the Society that the Witnesses deemed unacceptable. A three-man committee expelled Poul. Two years later he published his first book, Jehovas Vidner under anklage (Jehovah's Witnesses Accused) in Danish. The present book, Judgment Day Must Wait, is a massive reworking (two and one-half times) of that first book, augmented by many years of continuing investigation that brings the history to the present in a text edited for the American reader.