Revelation Ceased?

From the book, Here We Stand, Chapter 3, 'the Bible Says,' pages 38-48, by Joseph Fielding McConkie

"It ought to be asked, What about the twenty-seven books that constitute our New Testament? By what authority were they chosen? And who assumed the prerogative to declare that they constitute the cessation of revelation? The story is both interesting and strangely paradoxical.

Two second-century heretics get leading roles in the drama: one for being the first to close the canon of scripture, and the second for causing the church to declare the heavens closed by maintaining that he was the Holy Ghost.

Macrion, a bishop's son and a wealthy ship-owner, was the first to create a list of canonical books. His Bible was closed to all but ten of the epistles of Paul and the Gospel of Luke, from which he had taken all references to the Jews. He rejected the Old Testament in its entirety because of its Jewish origins.

Jesus, according to Macrion, was not born but sprang, like Zeus, fully grown from God. He came to earth to preach a ministry of redemption as a God of love in contrast with the capricious and cruel God of the Old Testament. So final was Macrion's excommunication from the church that even the money he had donated was returned. This threat to the church was followed by another known to its followers as "the New Prophecy" and to history as "Montanism," after its founder, Montanus, a convert to Christianity from the province of Phrygia in Asia Minor. On the eve of his crucifixion, the Savior had told his disciples that he had many things to teach them but they could not bear them at that time.

He then promised that the Holy Ghost would guide them "into all truth" and show them "things to come" (John 16:12-14). Montanus denounced the lack of revelation and the absence of spiritual gifts in the church.

In doing so he claimed himself to be the advocate promised by the Savior and said that he had come to give them the promised revelation.

Through the course of years, the church solved the problem of dealing with such heretics by announcing that revelation had ceased and that the canon of scripture was closed. Thus the biblical promise of continued revelation led the church of the second century to deny continuing revelation, while the idea of the Bible as a single, sacred, unalterable corpus of texts, which began as a heresy, was adopted in the efforts of the church to define orthodoxy. (Wikipedia mentions 'In the Christian sense the term orthodoxy means conforming to the Christian faith as represented in the creeds of the early Church')…

Is it not somewhat ironic that God himself can no longer speak in what is supposed to be his own church? Is it not strange that a theology claiming the word of angels and prophets as its very foundation refuses now to admit the existence of either?"