Montanism

Montanism, also called the New Prophecy, is the teaching that God continued to give new, authoritative revelation to the church through Christian prophets after the apostolic age, supplementing or correcting Scripture and church discipline rather than submitting to them as complete. It began with Montanus, a Phrygian who declared himself a prophet of the Holy Spirit in the AD 160s.¹ Tertullian, its most famous adherent, “did indeed maintain that the rule of faith was fixed and immutable,” but held there was still need of “continued supernatural revelation” for matters of church discipline.²

Historical Origin

Montanus arose in Phrygia, in Asia Minor, “toward the close of the second century,” claiming that just as the Old Testament prophets foretold Christ’s coming, so Christ himself had foretold the coming of the Paraclete, through whom further revelation would be made to his people.² He was joined by two women, Maximilla and Priscilla, who prophesied alongside him and were regarded by the movement as authoritative voices of the Spirit in their own right.¹ Montanus proclaimed the Phrygian village of Pepuza the site where the New Jerusalem would descend from heaven, and he and his companions urged strict ethical practice on their followers to prepare for it.¹ Maximilla is reported to have claimed a unique, final place in this unfolding revelation: “after me there will no longer be a prophet, but the end.”¹

The movement’s exclusive, denunciatory spirit toward the wider church brought about its formal rejection: “as the Montanists excommunicated the Church, the Church excommunicated them.”²

Montanism should not be confused with Monarchianism, the family of heresies (including Sabellian modalism) that denied three distinct persons in the Godhead. The two errors are unrelated: Tertullian, the movement’s most notable adherent, is also the theologian who coined the Latin tres personae (“three persons”) in his treatise Against Praxeas, written specifically to refute Praxeas’s modalism.

Core Tenets

Montanism’s central claim was that the prophetic office, through which God spoke directly and authoritatively to his people, remained open after the apostles rather than having closed with them. Hodge identifies its two defining marks: the assumption “that the Scriptures and the ordinances of the Church” were insufficient on their own “for the full development of the Christian life,” and the assertion “of the necessity of a continued, supernatural revelation from the Spirit of God.”² This supernatural guidance was directed outward rather than inward, toward “the reformation of manners and strictness of discipline”: Montanists prized fasting and other ascetic practices, and their reliance on ongoing prophetic guidance put them at odds both with the church’s developing philosophical reflection and with the growing authority of its bishops.²

Montanus and his two prophetesses claimed to speak Christ’s own words directly: “Man is like a lyre, and I flit about like a plectron [a pick]; man sleeps, and I awaken him; behold, it is the Lord who changes the hearts of men and gives men a heart.”¹ Their followers awaited the imminent descent of the New Jerusalem at Pepuza, a belief that shaped the movement’s rigorous ethical demands on its adherents.¹

Confessional and Biblical Response

No confession addresses Montanism by name, since it belongs to the second century, before the Reformation-era confessions were written. But the Second London Baptist Confession’s opening chapter states the principle that rules the movement’s central claim out directly: Scripture was committed to writing “for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan, and of the world,” so that it is now “most necessary, those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased.”³

Bavinck locates the New Testament’s own prophetic office as having closed with the apostolic age: “the last of them is John the apostle,” and after him, prophets “disappear from the church, though Montanism and other enthusiastic movements of earlier or later date tried to revive prophecy.”⁴ Scripture presents God’s revelation in his Son as his last and definitive word, not one installment among an open series: “in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:2), a faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) rather than one still being added to through new prophetic oracles.

Related Doctrines

References

Nicholas J. Frederick, “Facing the End: The Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the Millennium,” in Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints, ed. Jason R. Combs, Mark D. Ellison, Catherine Gines Taylor, and Kristian S. Heal (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, 2022). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Charles Hodge, “Chapter IV. Mysticism,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 69-71. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩