What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church

by Gavin Ortlund

the New Testament contains an enormous amount of detailed information about the offices of the church. Consider all you can learn from the pastoral epistles alone about the offices of presbyters and deacons. And then we have numerous passages that flesh out the offices of the church specifically with a view to its unity, like Ephesians 4:11–16 or 1 Corinthians 12:27–31. Why is there not a single verse anywhere that ever mentions, “By the way, there is actually a supreme and infallible office above all these others”? This would be rather important information! If Jesus and the apostles envisioned an ongoing office in the church characterized by supremacy and infallibility, it is not unreasonable to expect it to come up somewhere in their teaching or writings.