The Problem with Closed Cannon Christianity

Revelation 22:19 says that, "And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book." (NIV) The problem is that if you take the promises of God in Revelation 22:19 to indicate a closed canon of all scripture in the strictest since, then the same passage could be read in such a way as to imply that God will curse anyone that communicates anything less than the Bible for any reason in any way. Not only that but also all Bible commentary would be cursed according to the passage prior in verse eighteen.

I once attended a Baptist church years ago that believed in a somewhat strict view of scripture canon being closed, and as soon as I attended the church I was instructed to drop out of college because the church only recognized bible colleges (not seminary schools or public educational institutions) as places biblical enough to be okay for a Christian to attend. Church services included everyone opening their Bibles and reading along with the pastor, and the pastor limited his comments. The church condemned all Bible commentaries and other such literature that made comment about the Bible, and views like this have emerged all through my hometown aria.

The problem is that people thus would find fiction, the media, and communication with other people as being the only other resources of learning except the Bible. The Bible would even condemn all these other things as well in one way or another. Many libraries in my community thus housed only fiction with just a few reference books that had been non-fiction, and many that called themselves Christians did not object to watching television. Overall, communicating any message about the scripture could have the potential of disagreement with the pastor's understanding of scripture, so members could only directly quote scripture to each other or paraphrase scripture correctly.

The world of strictly closed canon Bible Christianity is often a world filled with evil, ignorance, and horror. My solution is that Bible canon be open in the way that the Bible as received by the Church is held as central or a crown to everything else. All other teachings that do not appear in the Christian Bible would be denoted as bible (with a lower case b). The Bible would thus have dominance over all bibles, but every bible should originate in one way or another from the Bible. Overall, the phrase, "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written" John 21:25 (NIV) tells us that the entire world would not have room for all the bibles that would be written just based upon what Jesus did (the term translated as book in John 21:25 is the term that we get the word bible from today and is more literally 'bible').

Sadly, all the people that attended the Baptist church that I described had been steel mill workers in a steel mill that was the largest employer in the county for over a hundred years, and none of the steel mill workers that had remained uneducated about the world for generations would have adapted well after the mill closed permanently and thus sent out thousands upon thousands of people into the community without any other industry that could even come close to supporting the wages and population of displaced workers. I do not know how many people from the Baptist church that I attended continued to keep their original 'faith', but I would speculate that the number would be few. Overall, like the Baptist church members, I had a aunt that only read the Bible from cover to cover all day long every day without doing anything else (such as making meals), and she was eventually put into a insane asylum because of her diligent efforts to keep the canon of the Bible closed to any other expression of faith (I do not think that this woman suffered persecution for Christ like the Apostles).