Sunday, March 31, 2024

Lee Martin McDonald on the Disadvantages of a Closed Canon

  

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)