what i believe: continuing revelation

I've been thinking about this post for weeks now, and having a hard time getting my thoughts together. Then I missed the last session of general conference and this week as I was listening to it, I was surprised to hear the talk by Elder Holland about continuing revelation. He pretty much said everything I wanted to say, so in this post I'll quote a bit from his talk.

First, as Mormons, “We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God” (articles of faith 1:9).

Some people believe the Bible to be the only source of the word of God, and so they reject the scriptures that we read as Mormons: in addition to the Bible we read the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, the Doctrine and Covenants, and ongoing revelation from a living prophet.

i loved this portion of elder holland's talk, and so i quote from it here:

One of the arguments often used in any defense of a closed canon is the New Testament passage recorded in Revelation 22:18: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of . . . this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” However, there is now overwhelming consensus among virtually all biblical scholars that this verse applies only to the book of Revelation, not the whole Bible. Those scholars of our day acknowledge a number of New Testament “books” that were almost certainly written after John’s revelation on the Isle of Patmos was received. Included in this category are at least the books of Jude, the three Epistles of John, and probably the entire Gospel of John itself.¹ Perhaps there are even more than these.

But there is a simpler answer as to why that passage in the final book of the current New Testament cannot apply to the whole Bible. That is because the whole Bible as we know it—one collection of texts bound in a single volume—did not exist when that verse was written. For centuries after John produced his writing, the individual books of the New Testament were in circulation singly or perhaps in combinations with a few other texts but almost never as a complete collection. Of the entire corpus of 5,366 known Greek New Testament manuscripts, only 35 contain the whole New Testament as we now know it, and 34 of those were compiled after A.D. 1000.²

The fact of the matter is that virtually every prophet of the Old and New Testament has added scripture to that received by his predecessors. If the Old Testament words of Moses were sufficient, as some could have mistakenly thought them to be,³ then why, for example, the subsequent prophecies of Isaiah or of Jeremiah, who follows him? To say nothing of Ezekiel and Daniel, of Joel, Amos, and all the rest. If one revelation to one prophet in one moment of time is sufficient for all time, what justifies these many others? What justifies them was made clear by Jehovah Himself when He said to Moses, “My works are without end, and . . . my words . . . never cease.”⁴

The fact that we have continuing revelation does not mean we don't believe in the old revelations. We read the Bible, and love it, and learn from it. Elder Holland said "...one of the great purposes of continuing revelation through living prophets is to declare to the world through additional witnesses that the Bible is true. 'This is written,' an ancient prophet said, speaking of the Book of Mormon, 'for the intent that ye may believe that,' speaking of the Bible.⁸ In one of the earliest revelations received by Joseph Smith, the Lord said, 'Behold, I do not bring [the Book of Mormon forth] to destroy [the Bible] but to build it up.'”⁹

Elder Holland also spoke about a challenge put to the Harvard Divinity School 170 years ago by Ralph Waldo Emerson. "To that group of the Protestant best and brightest, the great sage of Concord pled that they teach 'that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.'”¹⁵

I am so grateful for continuing revelation. I believe in Jesus Christ, and I believe in the Bible. I also believe in the Book of Mormon, and I believe that Thomas S. Monson is a prophet and that he receives revelation for our Church. I also believe that I am entitled to my own revelation from God concerning my life, and that I have received it numerous times. I don't believe that God has stopped speaking to us.

I believe in continuing revelation.


(art: "The Sacred Grove" by Greg Olsen)