IF THE POPE ISN'T "INFALLIBLE," WHAT IS?

Ecumenical Council

For Old Catholics, The Issue of “Infallibility” Lies in Ecumenical Councils, Not in the Roman Pontiff.

Perhaps it may be silly to even utter a word like “infallibility” in a time when we have access to more information than any other period of history, and that increased information seems to produce and debunk and reproduce new ideas and “facts” every day (or even many times a day). Maybe the word we are searching for, or would be more comfortable with, is “reliable” rather than “infallible.” Nevertheless, infallible is the word that was used, and it is a word still in use by Protestants as well as Roman Catholics.

Some Protestants use the word “infallible” when talking about the Bible. The information in the Bible is inerrant"it is all true and there are no errors that crept in over a thousand years of copying it by hand (often by hearing it read, and writing what was heard). Everything in it is history and fact. It is infallible. I won’t go into the whole issue that if the Bible really is infallible, why then did Protestants start stripping away books from the Bible when they presented doctrines that the Reformers didn’t like. Why did those books of the Bible become fallible? I also won’t mention that Martin Luther didn’t like the Book of Esther and especially hated the Epistle of James, and wanted them taken out of the Bible. He failed in his attempt, so they remained “infallible”; but would they have suddenly been “fallible” if he succeeded?

This idea of the Bible being infallible has been around for a few hundred years, but it was the product of the Reformation and was not used before that time. The Reformers needed a logical means of justifying their views since they sought to undermine the teaching authority of the church. The authority they arrived at was Sola Scriptura, "Scripture alone." This meant that the Scripture had to become inerrant so they could then use it as the basis of their Scripture alone doctrine. (I also won’t mention that the doctrine of Sola Scriptura is nowhere found in Scripture; therefore, the doctrine of Sola Scriptura violates the principle of Sola Scriptura).

MORE...