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

by Gavin Ortlund

People often try to find examples of papal infallibility earlier in church history, but such efforts typically conflate infallibility per se with other qualities like papal indefectibility (i.e., not being subject to failure or flaw), papal immunity (i.e., not being subject to judgment from temporal authorities), or the general centrality, necessity, or importance of the bishop of Rome. But these are all distinct categories. For example, preservation from error in teaching is not the same as preservation from death or protection from the judgment of temporal authorities. There are also frequent conflations of personal versus ecclesial infallibility and/or infallibility in the preservation of tradition versus infallibility in the promulgation of dogma. But again, these are clearly distinct. The idea that one man can infallibly pronounce a dogma simply isn’t present in the first millennium of church history.