Montanus and the Problem of Hearing the Holy Spirit

Montanus was an early Church heretic. His views remain interesting because they raise a question which confronts every generation of Christians. It is the question of how people can be sure that they are authentically hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit.

1. The Life and Teachings of Montanus

Montanus was a pagan priest who converted to Christianity. He flourished in the second half of the second century (i.e., from around AD 150 to 175). We know very few details about his life and death, other than that he lived and worked in central Turkey (Phrygia) and he considered himself to be a prophet, directly inspired by the Holy Spirit.

At the heart of his preaching was a message about the end of the world. He insisted that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, and that the whole world was about to be judged. Sinners would be damned, and the holy would be invited to live and reign with Christ for a (Chiliast) thousand years. They would reign in the heavenly New Jerusalem, which would descend upon Pepuza in Turkey.

This view had urgent implications for contemporary Christians. It meant that they needed to repent immediately and start undertaking ascetic practices, such as fasting. Montanus also thought that widows and widowers should be banned from re-marriage. Two of his most prominent followers (Prisca and Maximilla) abandoned marriages in order to follow him round the countryside, preaching his message.

Montanism seems to have involved a very active Charismatic style of worship, described by its critics as “frenzied.” It involved communing with the Holy Spirit, who seems to have given personal prophecies to members of the community, as well as giving divinely authoritative interpretations of Scripture.

Due to its focus upon repentance and moral renewal, some bishops initially supported Montanism. But its appeal to private messages from the Holy Spirit led to difficulties, especially when Montanists insisted that their negativity about re-marriage was due to the Holy Spirit telling them that that was the correct view.

2. Tertullian’s Conversion

One of the most famous Montanists is the Early Church Father Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 220). His precise relationship to Montanism is disputed, but from around 210 he certainly seemed to prefer to associate with Montanists and some of their views.

Before his breach with mainstream Christianity, Tertullian provided one of the classic refutations of heresy. He noted that it is generally pointless getting into disputes with heretics about the meaning of Scripture, as they will advance some weird interpretation of Scripture and insist that they just know it to be true. So, in his Prescription Against Heretics (c. 197) Tertullian served a metaphorical injunction against all heretics. He said that Christ taught the Apostles, and they handed on Christ’s teaching in their Apostolic Communities. This means that when people want to know the authentic teaching of Jesus, then they need only look at what Apostolic Churches are preaching. So, heretics (and their weird interpretations of Scripture) should be ignored unless they can first prove that they are members of Apostolic Churches (i.e., Churches with Apostolic Succession).

Around ten years after writing that refutation of all heretics, Tertullian seems to have become disillusioned with his local Church. He seems to have viewed it as worldly and morally lax, with particularly objectionable views about the acceptability of sexual attraction within marriage.

We don’t know Tertullian’s exact thought processes, but he has (somehow) gone from an insistence upon the need for Apostolic Succession to guarantee orthodoxy, to an acceptance that the Montanists are nevertheless authentically hearing the Holy Spirit, and so their version of Christianity is now a more authentic representation of the Gospel which Christ preached.

3. The Scriptural Background

The Scriptural background to Montanus’ (and Tertullian’s) confidence in the Holy Spirit can be found in John’s Gospel, where Jesus said:

I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, which… remains with you, and will be in you… He will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you. (John 14:16–17, 26)

One of the consequences of that teaching, is that it can be misused naively to self-license almost any opinion, as if that opinion were a direct message from the Holy Spirit. We know that early Christianity struggled to deal with diverse, allegedly Spirit-inspired, alternative versions of the Gospel, as St. Paul frequently mentions opponents in his letters, calling them “false apostles” (2 Corinthians 11:13), “dogs” and “evil workers” (Philippians 3:2). We also know the names of particularly significant advocates of alternative views, such as Cerinthus (c. 50–100).

Raymond Brown even suggested that perhaps disputes were such a serious problem in the Johannine Community, that Chapter 21 was added to an original ending of John’s Gospel at John 20:31. The additional chapter 21 includes the text where Jesus tells Peter to “feed my lambs” (John 21:15–17), so perhaps it was reminding Christians that Peter has a role to play in settling disputes. (On the context of John’s Gospel see “The Community that Raymond Brown Left Behind”.)

Whether or not that view is correct, the evidence of disagreement among New Testament Christians is unmistakable. At Corinth, disagreements even continued into the sub-apostolic era (see “Did St. Paul Fail with the Corinthians?”).

When Montanus appealed to the Holy Spirit as a justification for his own opinions, he was following a well-trodden methodological path, which reached back into the earliest days of Christianity.

4. Ongoing Similarities of Approach

Appeals to an inner divine messaging from the Holy Spirit have continued ever since Montanus. They crop up with an epistemological inevitability, every time that there is a disagreement about doctrine, or an exposition of particularly complex spiritual ideas.

We can see it in polemical contexts such as when John Calvin (d. 1564) said:

Our conviction of the truth of Scripture must be derived from a higher source than human conjectures, Judgments, or reasons; namely, the secret testimony of the Spirit. (Institutes, Bk 1, Chap 7, #4)

We can see it in Spiritual contexts, such as when St. Teresa of Ávila (d. 1582) said:

Now that I commence writing about the fourth mansions, it is requisite…to commend myself to the Holy…[Spirit] and to beg Him henceforth to speak for me. (The Interior Castle, 4th Mansion, Chapter 1)

And we can see it lurking in the background issues in Pope Pius X’s 1907 condemnation of Modernists, who were appealing to their inner consciousness as a source of private Revelation:

Is not that religious sentiment which is perceptible in the consciousness revelation, or at least the beginning of revelation? (Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 8)

The Modernists may not have explicitly cited the Holy Spirit, but the logic of what they were saying, and of what they were committed to, was the same as the logic of Montanus. It is an appeal to a secret source of information or evidence, which can be used to justify their claims about the real meaning and significance of Christianity.

5. The Problem

The core problem in appealing to the Holy Spirit is flagged up by St. Paul and by the author of the First Johannine Epistle.

Satan [can] masquerad[e]… as an angel of light. (2 Corinthians 11:14)

Beloved, do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. (1 John 4:1)

These Scriptural texts are making the point that individual humans can always err in what they take to be the inner teaching of the Holy Spirit. Even if it is the case that the Holy Spirit can communicate infallible truths to a human mind, humans are always going to be fallible in their inner detection of infallible teachings from the Holy Spirit.

This point was flagged up well in Martin Luther’s 1525 dispute with Von Karlstadt (Against the Heavenly Prophets). Von Karlstadt appealed to the Holy Spirit to justify his view, but Luther dismissed his approach, accusing him of effectively misunderstanding what the Holy Spirit was saying.

This problem of misunderstanding inner messages is a problem with all appeals to the Holy Spirit. It is often a central issue in destructive cults, whether it be alleged Reincarnations of Jesus with 1500 sex slaves, or Satanic raping of children. Once the principle is accepted that supernatural sources can secretly give authoritative (infallible) messages to individuals, then any form of abuse or deviant behavior can suddenly seem divinely justified.

This means that one of the issues at the heart of Montanism is not a specifically Christian or religious issue at all. It is a deeper philosophical issue about whether secret inner evidence should ever be an appropriate way of justifying personal opinions about what occurs (or what should occur) in the world outside of a person.

6. Exacerbating the Problem

The dangers of appealing to secret inner evidence are exacerbated by what modern psychology has learned about the existence and operation of cognitive biases. These are ways that minds operate, which can introduce distortions and errors in to what the mind concludes.

There are a multitude of cognitive biases, so just a few examples will illustrate the point.

There are a range of Overconfidence Effects which encourage people to assume an Illusory Superiority in the exercise of their skills and abilities (such as skills to accurately detect messages from the Holy Spirit). These effects can arise due to subtly flawed comparisons between oneself and others (Fundamental Attribution Effects). They may even be just examples of the Better-Than-Average Effect, where 95% of drivers think that they are “better than average drivers.” And, in a similar way, perhaps 100% of those who appeal to the Holy Spirit consider themselves “better than average” at avoiding misunderstandings of which ideas in their minds have actually come from the Holy Spirit.

Once an opinion arises within a human mind, it can then be subject to an Endowment Effect (Mere Ownership Effect) which can encourage people to overvalue the ideas which they happen to own, or to have produced. This can even lead to irrationally refusing to let go when such ideas cause disadvantage (e.g., Loss Aversion or Divestiture Aversion).

Ideas can become further entrenched through Confirmation Bias, where evidence and argument to the contrary can be reinterpreted by the mind, as providing a justification for the original idea.

The existence of biases like these mean that it is risky, to the point of recklessness, for individuals to claim that they can accurately assess inner evidence and ideas, as if they were somehow uniquely immune to the impact of biases. In fact, assuming oneself to be less influenced by biases than others is just another form of bias, albeit a bias blindness.

So, even if the Holy Spirit self-confirms its own authenticity, psychology warns us that there is still a separate set of cognitive biases, which people have to take into account, when claiming to hear the Holy Spirit.

7. Mitigating the Risks

One of the ways that cognitive biases can be mitigated is through collaboration and group analysis, such as peer review processes. These can still be subject to their own biases, such as Groupthink. But, by and large, the development of collaborative processes in many professions is a recognition that collaboration can be an effective way of identifying and mitigating the impact of individuals’ biases.

We can see an example of a collaborative approach in the New Testament with the Council of Jerusalem (c. AD 50). Faced by a critically important decision, the Early Church gathered in council to consider the issues. This is portrayed in the Scriptures as not just a group of humans meeting and coming up with a human idea. On the contrary, the Scriptures portray it as a process of discernment to reach a view about what the Holy Spirit is saying to the Church. This is why the conclusion to the Council is recorded with the words:

“It is the decision of the holy Spirit and of us…” (Acts 15:28)

The Scriptural model represented by the Council of Jerusalem has passed into the Tradition of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, as the appropriate way for “testing the spirits” (1 John 4:1). It is a model of the collective of the Church (especially as gathered in Ecumenical Councils), which has become a methodology for mitigating individual biases, and thus ensuring a safe(r) discernment of what the Holy Spirit is really saying to the Church. (See “Faith and Safety: Balancing Faith and Reason?”)

8. Conclusion

Montanism is an ancient heresy, but it is not just a quirky set of opinions which arose in a particular historical context, and which are only of relevance to historians.

On the contrary, Montanism is arguably one of the most thought-provoking of the ancient heresies, because its core issues continue to confront and to challenge Christians in every age and era, and in every Church and denomination.