1.B 12. Closing of the Books

Closing of the Books iv. The process of canonization was, therefore, begun by a heretic, and it is a curious fact that it was also completed by a heretic, or at least completed in principle. How did it come about that the canon of the New Testament was closed? Christianity has always been a religion of the Spirit; according to the Fourth Gospel Jesus had promised to His people ever greater and greater revelations and insights into the truth (John 16:12). How then did there ever come a time when the Church declared that all the inspired books that could be written had been written, and that nothing more could ever be added to the written word of God? How did it come about that, as TertuUian bitterly put it, "the Holy Spirit was chased into a book"? In the second half of the second century a change was coming over the Church. The days of enthusiasm were passing and the days of ecclesiasticism were arriving. No more was the Church a place in which the spirit of prophecy was a commonplace. People were flooding into the Church. No more was there the sharp distinction between Church and world. The Church was becoming secularized; it was coming to terms with heathen thought and culture and philosophy. The Christian ethic was tending to become less lofty, and the Christian demand less absolute. Into this situation somewhere between A.D. 156 and 172 there burst a man called Montanus. He had once been a priest of Cybele, and had been converted to Christianity, and he emerged in Asia Minor. He came with a demand for a higher standard and a greater discipline and sharper separation of the Church from the world. Had he halted there, he could have done little but good, and, when Montanism did settle down and purge itself of its extravagances, in the days when TertuUian became a Montanist in A.D. 202, that was the emphasis of Montanist teacliing. But Montanus himself went much further. He and his two prophetesses Prisca and Maximilla went about prophesying in the name of the Spirit, and foretelling the speedy second coming of Christ. More, Montanus claimed to be the promised Paraclete, come with a new vision and a new message for the Church. He was convinced that he and his prophetesses were the God-given instruments of revelation, the lyres across which the Spirit swept to draw new music. But this can be a dangerous tendency. As W. D. Niven writes in The Conflicts of the Early Church: " When Montanus said, *I am the Father and the Son and the Paraclete/ he had manifestly crossed the line which separates fervour from extravagance. When one prophetess declared that Christ, in the form of a woman, slept with her, she was on the verge of something more repulsive."

Clearly this was a situation in which the Church had to act. Montanus as a herald of a new spiritual vitality and a new challenge to holiness was one thing; Montanus as the claimant to divine revelation was quite another. It was in face of this new situation that die Church decided that Scripture was closed, that the book of the new covenant was signed and sealed, that the basic Christian documents were written. The result of Montanism was the decision in principle that the canon of Scripture was completed and closed.

So, then, by the end of the second century die Church had reached a position in which the Canon of the New Testament was well on the way to being defined, and in which in principle it was agreed that the production of sacred Scripture had come to an end.