Part Three — When the Church Had to Say No: False Teaching and the Canon
Chapter 24 — Three Heresies, Three Modern Echoes (1 of 2)
Chapter 20 already handled Gnosticism's modern recurrence, and did so with real care about the difference between Voegelin's serious mid-century academic thesis and its looser, more contested popular extensions. That same discipline governs this chapter, applied fresh to three different heresies rather than reused from Chapter 20 by default — because each of these three claims a genuinely different kind of modern parallel, and each parallel needs its own evidence rather than borrowed plausibility.
Marcion's Echo: Detaching the God of Judgment from the God of Love
The clearest and best-documented modern echo in this chapter is also the mildest in one sense and the most pervasive in another. Contemporary Christian culture — across a wide range of traditions, not confined to any one theological camp — shows a real, recurring tendency to treat the Old Testament's God as somehow harder, more distant, more concerned with law and wrath, than the God revealed in Jesus, and to let that felt difference shade, however unintentionally, into something closer to Marcion's actual claim: two different Gods, or at least two different dispositions treated as though they belonged to two different beings, rather than one God whose justice and mercy were never actually in tension in the first place. This is documented and named directly in contemporary theological discussion — Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI — in Many Religions, One Covenant, among other places — was among the postwar theologians who explicitly used the term neo-Marcionism for exactly this recurring temptation: rejecting the Old Testament as embarrassing, primitive, or obsolete. Ratzinger and others raised this warning with particular urgency in the decades after the church's encounter with Nazi ideology and its own attempts to manufacture a de-Judaized Christianity — a reminder that separating Christianity from its Old Testament roots this sharply also risks separating Jesus from His own people, His own Scriptures, and His own history. This is not a claim that any particular contemporary teacher or movement is a self-conscious Marcionite. It is a claim that the underlying instinct — comfort with the New Testament's grace, discomfort with the Old Testament's judgment, and a felt rather than argued sense that these belong to two different Gods — recurs constantly in ordinary Christian devotional life without anyone involved intending heresy at all.
Montanus's Echo: A Real Distinction, Not a Forced Parallel
Chapter 22 already corrected the popular overstatement of Montanism's relationship to the closing of the New Testament canon, and that same caution governs this section. It would be easy, and would match a reader's expectation, to name some contemporary movement claiming ongoing revelation as "the new Montanism" and move on without checking whether the label actually fits. This book draws the line where the evidence in Chapter 22 itself draws it.
Mainstream continuationist Christian traditions today — the many churches and movements that hold the gift of prophecy continues in the church — sit on Montanus's own side of the line, not past it. They do not generally claim that modern prophecy carries Scripture's own closed, canonical authority; the distinction Chapter 22 drew from 1 Thessalonians 5, examine everything and hold to what is good, is exactly the test such traditions typically apply to their own prophetic claims, weighing them against the received apostolic deposit rather than adding them to it. This is Montanism's own actual position, on the evidence in Chapter 22 — not a rival scripture, but ongoing guidance tested against a already-closed deposit.
The genuinely different case — the one that does cross the line Montanus himself apparently respected — is a movement that treats ongoing revelation as literally supplementing the canon rather than merely guiding life under it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the clearest, best-documented instance: continuing revelation through a living prophet is a formal feature of the tradition's own self-understanding, and new revelation has, within that tradition's own history, been added directly to a body of scripture that the tradition itself does not consider closed — as recently and concretely as 1978, when a revelation received by church president Spencer W. Kimball was canonized as Official Declaration 2 within the Doctrine and Covenants, the tradition's own scripture still open to addition in a way no branch of historical Christianity, including the actual second-century Montanists, ever claimed for itself. That is a structurally different claim than anything the actual historical Montanism can be shown to have made, and a more honest modern parallel for the version of "Montanism" the popular imagination fears than anything drawn from mainstream Pentecostal or charismatic Christianity, which — like Montanus himself, rightly understood — tests its prophecy against a canon it treats as finished.