Latter-day Scripture. Robert M. Price
1: The Problem of the Canon and Further Revelation
The whole point of a "canon," an official list of scriptures, would seem to be to exclude any further candidates for revelation. A new prophet may come along and announce "I have a new word from God," but if those to whom he speaks have an official canon of revelations, the prophet may expect to receive pretty much the same reply as a writer getting a rejection slip from a publisher: "I'm so sorry, but we already have as many of those as we need!" A canon of scripture, for example, the twenty-seven writings of the New Testament, is rather like the doctrine of the Trinity. Trinitarianism does not so much mean that there are no less than three persons in the Godhead as it means that there can be no more than three. To choose a list of twenty-seven revealed writings is to rule out any proposed number twenty-eight. When Saint Athanasius sent out his Easter Letter in 367 A.D., listing the twenty-seven New Testament documents we still use today, he was not issuing a descriptive statement ("No one uses any others, do they?") but rather a prescriptive statement ("You'd better stop using all the others if you know what's good for you!"). The same thing had happened centuries earlier when the Jewish scribes had announced that the age of revelations had drawn to a close. It's not that no new prophets were coming forward to prophesy, you understand, but that none of them would ever again be given a hearing: "Sorry, pal, but you missed the deadline. Now hit the road!"). From now on there should be no more prophets, only scribes to interpret the old inspired writings. When the Prophet Muhammad died, that was the end of revelation. Thenceforth it would be a matter of jurists extrapolating from the Qur'an to answer new questions as they should arise.
The problem of the canon versus new revelations is a perennial one throughout the history of religion. There is a cycle that repeats itself over and over again: a new prophet proclaims a new revelation. The old guard of the traditional religion refuse to accept it. The new prophet founds his own new religion, but as soon as the new prophet dies, his followers enshrine his revelations as a new canon of scripture. And when an even newer prophet arises with a new and updated revelation to share, he will be in for a rude surprise. He had expected that a new religious community, so recently started, would be open to new revelations. After all, isn't that why they started this religion in the first place? In fact, the new religion immediately becomes as rigid as the old one was, believers hugging to their breasts the new canon of scriptures, the revelation of their founder. The very revelations that had superseded the old have now become the old. The guardians of the new canon are as deaf to the new revelations as the guardians of the old canon had been. And so it starts all over again.
An early, perhaps prototypical, example of this dilemma may be found in the story of Abraham being summoned by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. The New Testament writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews sums up the situation well: "By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promise was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, 'Through Isaac shall your promised offspring come'" (Hebrews 11:17-18). Abraham had once puzzled over the question of how God could possibly fulfill his promise to give the land of Canaan to Abraham's descendants--when Abraham had as yet no children. His wife was barren, and he himself was nearly a century old. Nonetheless, he believed God and was rewarded with the miraculous birth of a son, Isaac. So God's promise had been a real revelation, and it was corroborated when Isaac was born. That promise was, so to speak, the canon of revelation. We might imagine that, having seen this great revelation, Abraham would have stood by it and refused to listen to what purported to be a new revelation from God to the effect that he ought to go and kill his son! If the first had been true, then the second, which grossly contradicted it, could not possibly be true, could it? Why shouldn't Abraham have discarded it as a false prophecy? It would have made a lot of sense. Wouldn't that response had proven Abraham's faith? That he believed the first revelation had been of God even when what purported to be a new revelation contradicted it? This is the problem of the canon and further revelation in a nutshell.
Our problem is clearly posed in an old Muslim saying: "All other books than the Qur'an are superfluous. If a book agrees with the Qur'an, it is merely redundant; if it doesn't agree with the Qur'an, it is in error." In short, if an established canon of scripture tells you all you need to know, you do not need anything new revealed. And if a supposed new revelation must first be verified by checking it against the canon, then no new revelation can ever be accepted. It could be accepted only if everything in it was already there in the old canon--but then what new has been revealed?
This is why the Gospel of John has the scribes unable to accept Jesus as the Christ--the scriptures don't happen to anticipate any prophet coming from Galilee, and they, being "strict constructionists," don't dare go outside the letter of the law. Many centuries later, we can see the same Catch 22 creating the same mischief in the 1962 Hayward Consultation on Christianity in Africa. They had convened to consider the luxuriant growth of "Aladura" churches, indigenous African churches and denominations which felt free to mix biblical doctrines with traditional African folk belief, ancestor worship, and ritual. The Consultation branded it a "danger" for these new churches to "claim direct revelation from the Spirit not anchored in Scripture." How ironic, considering that Christianity itself began precisely by claiming such new direct revelations and flouting traditional orthodoxies.
There are, I think, certain phenomenological dynamics which help make sense of our dilemma. They will help us understand why some people, faced with the challenge of a new revelation will stick loyally to the traditional canon, whole others will stick their necks out to join with the new faith.
It is absolutely fundamental to get one thing straight: despite the fact that both the canonical scriptures and the new prophetic message are supposed to be revelations, the two have nothing in common. The resemblance is purely superficial and deceptive. This is because the same adjective, "revealed," covers a more important difference between the two that is determined not by definition but by function. The canon is a body of documents that has come to serve as a foundational charter for a particular religious community. One looks back on this revelation to legitimize the present. The revealed canon calls for faithfulness. But a new revelation is a rallying cry to start something new. It is a summons into the future, beyond the past, beyond the present, too. The new revelation calls for faith, a leap of faith into the unknown future. It is safer to stick with the canon, with the divine pedigree of the past; it is more exciting to leap into the future.
So what will happen when a new revelation is offered to the religious community? It all depends on what kind of a revelation it is, how much discontinuity there is between it and the traditional revelation. What we might call an orthodox revelation is not a revelation of anything really new. If accepted, it will serve merely to reinforce the canon and its teachings, since it is entirely within the bounds of the canonical teachings. For example, I once attended a Catholic Charismatic prayer meeting in Muskeegon, Michigan in 1976. A woman arose proclaiming a word from God. In disappointingly prosaic tones she began to try to allay any doubts the group might have as to the propriety of infant baptism! Apparently some had begun to suspect that "believers' baptism" might be more consistent with the conversionistic nature of the Charismatic movement. But this prompted someone to disguise a defense of the traditional party line under the form of a new prophecy! In a similar gathering the same year in Atlantic City I heard several prophetic messages from Christ or the Virgin Mary assuring the assembled pious of God's great love for them personally. Here the point was simply to personalize the abstract doctrine of God's love for the Church. To put a new face on the old belief, pretty much the same job undertaken by a modernizing paraphrase of the Bible, making it speak its old message anew to a new generation.
An eccentric revelation (as I like to call them), if taken seriously, will affect only marginal details of orthodox belief. And such marginal modifications one may prudently resolve to keep to oneself. An example would be a Catholic or Fundamentalist who reads Raymond F. Moody's Life After Life. This is a book about visionary "near death experiences" which seem to provide proof of life after death, but in terms not very close to traditional biblical depictions of life after death. Tempted by the lure of being able to buttress one's faith with solid data, an individual may silently adjust his belief to something like Moody's, even though it requires him to take some traditional beliefs a bit less than literally. But not that much has changed in any case.
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