The Closed Canon and the Insanity of Modernity
There was a time, not so long ago, in fact, when men still believed that reality had good and hard edges. That the world was not a happy accident but designed with an infinitely intelligent designer. A time when men knew that “whatever is” was the product of “God has spoken”, and His speaking had consequences you ought not run afoul of.
The sun rose in the east because the Almighty commanded it to. Marriage meant a man and a woman because the Almighty established it so. Children belonged to families because the Almighty designed them to. Truth was objective because YHWH had opened His mouth and said so. And when God opens His mouth, the matter is settled.
The world, in that older and saner age, was not understood to be soft. It was understood to be solid, which is precisely why it could be loved. It was creation. Ordered. Structured. Governed. Defined. Spoken by God, sustained by God, owned by God, and the man who tried to edit such a world was not a genius but a trespasser with a pencil.
But then modernity came shuffling in, blinking against the light, and decided it preferred scissors to submission.
And so the modern age has become one long act of vandalism against reality itself. A centuries-long tantrum carried out by a species that mistook the rules of the world they were placed in. And the more our enlightened betters hack and slash against the obvious, the more the electrons line up to laugh at them. And ultimately, the reason they will chuckle, is because we believed the absurd, that we can know better than God. That we can interpret reality with an open textbook instead of with a closed canon.
The Religion of “Openness”
The modern world is positively drunk on the word "open." Open minded. Open morality. Open identity. Open and affirming. Open gender. Open truth. Open borders. Open marriage. Open everything, all the time, in every direction, until the very concept of a wall is considered a hate crime and the very idea of a door an act of fascism.
But there is a reason that every civilization which opened everything eventually lost everything.
A nation without fixed borders lies unprotected against every invader. And a people without fixed truth lies unprotected against every lie. Strip the walls from a country and the barbarians walk in. Strip the walls from a worldview and the barbarians walk in with pocket protectors, holding clipboards, and virtue signaling pronouns. The result is a madhouse where tenured professors with three degrees and a federal grant argue that a boy can become a girl with three surgeons ready to turn an "outie" into an "innie." Forgive me for using very technical doctor speak just there. It won't happen again.
This is not the progress the progressives kept promising us. This is drinking motor oil and waiting for your joints to feel better.
Scripture, ever the older and wiser, saw this coming a few thousand years away. Agur, the lesser known proverbialist, writes like a man who has seen too many fools bumble over the guardrail and down the cliff.
"Do not add to His words, lest He rebuke you and you be found a liar."
Notice what hides beneath the warning. The whole architecture of reality is assumed in a single line. God has spoken. And that speaking was total, utterly true, and wholly sufficient. The canon is closed because God does not change his opinion every 10 years like the nutritionists who recommended seed oils. The Word of the Lord requires no updates from sociologists, no corrections from activists, no refinements from gender theorists, and certainly no moral adjustments from blowhards in Hollywood who still think most people care what they think.
God has spoken. And because He has spoken, man's duty is submission, not revision. Not editorial commentary. Not a peer review. Not a strongly worded letter to the management of the universe. Submission.
But modernity despises submission because modernity worships autonomy. The ancient serpent hissed you will be like God, and humanity has been trying to edit creation ever since, armed with red pens, scalpels, and a confidence that grows in inverse proportion to its competence.
That is the true spirit of the modern age. Modern man no longer wishes to discover reality. He wishes to author it. He no longer receives identity. He manufactures it like a ten dollar gucci bag you bought in the alleyway. He no longer submits to meaning. He invents it. He no longer believes truth lies outside himself.. He believes truth is what is how he feels within "his authentic self."
The Self Cannibalizing Comedy of Progress
Because of all this, modernity has trapped itself in an endless loop of self consuming absurdity, like a snake eating its own tail and then scheduling a TED talk to explain why it tasted funny.
One decade tells us masculinity is toxic. The next decade complains there are no real men left when a “pastrix” pins up the “sparkle creed” on your church bulletin board.
One generation murders marriage in the public square and then publishes elegant think offering guesses at why everyone is so terribly lonely.
The culture slaughters millions of children in the womb, calls it healthcare, prints it on T shirts, and then stares blankly into the abyss asking why life feels meaningless and why the birth rates are collapsing.
The academy spends half a century dismantling the very concept of objective truth, brick by brick, with the precision of a demolition crew, and then feigns outrage when nobody trusts the institutions any longer.
None of this is accidental. This is the judgment of God. This is the decades long descent of the gavel of God nearing its intended mark to crush a sick and morally mutilated people.
When men reject the revelation of God, God eventually gives them over to the humiliation of their own logic. Romans 1 is not merely a chapter about private lusts hiding in dark corners. It is a chapter about civilizational collapse playing out in slow and very methodical motion. A people that refuses to honor God eventually loses the ability to think straight. This is the short hand for where America is and is sinking deeper into as a nation.
Paul lays it out with the steady hand of a seasoned coroner. He says their foolish hearts were darkened. Their minds became futile. Their reasoning collapsed in on itself like a damp amazon box. Their worship was corrupted. Their desires were inverted. Their bodies were dishonored. And the most chilling part of the whole catalog is the verb. God gave them over. The insanity was not separate from the rebellion. The insanity was the punishment for the rebellion.
This is why watching modernity at work increasingly feels like watching a drunk man performing brain surgery with a butter knife. Sure, he may loudly insist he has the credentials. But only a true fool would let that man start sawing away at the head.
The same is true of the American people, who cannot even define womanhood.
It cannot define marriage.
It cannot define justice.
It cannot define freedom.
It cannot define a sentence.
It cannot define a child.
It cannot define a human being.
And yet these are the very people lecturing the Christians about intelligence, like the man who set fire to his dictionary attempting to correct your spelling.
Chesterton's Madhouse, Now Open for Business
Chesterton once observed that when men stop believing in God they do not believe in nothing. They will believe in anything. He said it almost casually, but the sad part is how prophetic sir Gilbert truly was.
For instance, because our society has rejected Genesis the academy and the elites in power now believe men can menstruate. Because our American people have largely rejected divine revelation, the majority of people now believe that children should be able to consent to chemical castration before they are old enough to rent a Tahoe from Enterprise. Because we live in a land that mocked Biblical morality, fat ugly men with boob jobs drape themselves in the gowns of whores to read to our five year olds. We went from the last generation scoffing at the resurrection to a culture where pedophiles wear t-shirts saying love is love.
The mental patients in the asylum, dear reader, are no longer locked away in padded rooms, but now they run your government. The patients are now in the judges robes. The ones who should stand before firing squads now amass thousands upon thousands of legal murders in the womb.
And the madness deepens precisely because there is no closed authority capable of restraining it. Once the canon is opened, reality itself becomes malleable. Once revelation becomes negotiable, humanity becomes untethered. Once truth becomes fluid, civilization becomes liquid, and liquid cannot stand.
Solomon warned us saying:
"Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint."
The Hebrew word for vision is better translated as divine revelation here. Without the Word of God, and the fixed boundaries it fastens, people begin to unravel. The seams of the soul start to rip. The civilization sloughs off its own ligaments.
And that is precisely, exactly, painstakingly what the modern West has done to itself.
We removed the Bible from the schools and replaced it with text books that teach children how to give a proper blow job .
We removed creation and replaced it with nihilism and wonder why teenage suicide rates are rising.
We removed Christ from the throne and replaced Him with the fickle golden god of self esteem.
And now our nation stands ankle deep, like happy cows, stomping around in their own excrement, wondering why nothing appears to be working anymore. Well… It does not work in the same way you cannot chop off your legs and hope to win the iron man. It does not work in the same way sawing off the branch you are sitting on won’t surrender yourself to gravity. The branch does not care how cleverly the saw is engineered and the ground doesn’t get any softer just because you have a queer theory degree from a university.
And this of course leads to the problem. The modern world wants the fruit of a Christian society without the root of it. It wants human dignity without the image of God. Morality without revelation. Rights without a righteous Judge. Meaning without transcendence. Order without authority. Blessing without obedience. Cathedrals without foundations. Harvests without sowing. A society stitched together by the very Christian instincts it openly mocks.
But the universe does not work that way. Reality is covenantal. God built the world to function beneath His rule, and when nations rebel against that rule they do not become liberated. They begin to disintegrate, atom by atom, institution by institution, family by family, sentence by sentence, until the very vocabulary by which they once thought is gone and they no longer possess the words to describe their own undoing.
The Mercy of the Closed Canon
This is why the closed canon is not oppressive. It is merciful. The commandments of God are not prison bars. They are load bearing walls. The statutes of God are not chains around the neck of civilization. They are steel beams holding civilization upright while the wind howls and the rains beat against the house. The Word of God is the difference between a functioning world and a culture suffering from advanced civilizational dementia, wondering how it has forgotten its own name.
And this is precisely why Christians must stop apologizing for conviction. Far too many believers have not discerned the times and are still stuck on the fact that I penned the words “blow job” up above. Wake up o sleeper! You are in the middle of vanity fair and hard times requires hard men with chests and spines.
Conviction is dangerous, not to the social order, but to the demons who are holding the marionette strings. The same ones who preferred the chaos before Genesis 1 and would prefer if our once noble people descend back into those murky waters again. Every devil, bound for hell, would rather you be open than orthodox, fluid than firm, exploratory than established. The serpent did not tempt Eve by giving her a new commandment. He tempted her by inviting her to renegotiate the old one.
But the Christian stands upon a revelation that cannot be revised because it comes from a God who cannot lie. We do not need the permission of activists to affirm reality. We do not need the approval of universities to confess the truth. We do not need the consensus of the culture to declare that God made mankind male and female, that Christ is Lord of heaven and earth, that truth is objective, that sin destroys civilizations, and that the fear of the Lord is the very beginning of knowledge.
The canon is closed. God has spoken. Now, cowboy, pony up. It’s time we take our country back.
