What
are some disadvantages of a closed canon? A closed canon may indicate Deism;
that is, God created the world and then left it to spin on its own without any
guidance. A closed book unfortunately has suggested to some that God’s mouth
has been muted for virtually 2,000 years. A closed canon may imply that many
books once considered inspired and revelatory are unimportant or threatening
because they were eventually not included in the canon. The phenomenon of
exclusion does not mean the early compositions on the “fringe of the Bible” are
discarded, irrelevant for historical and theological insights, or
pseudepigraphical (many books in the canon are pseudepigraphical; that is,
David did not write all the Davidic Psalms and Solomon did not write Proverbs).
(Lee Martin McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon, 2 vols.
[London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017], 1:xix)
