In a private exchange with a prominent Evangelical apologist some years ago, I posed this question: “Suppose, for a moment, we treated the Apostles, their co-workers, and the New Testament writings themselves as fallible. How would that affect your understanding of the Christian faith?” He replied, in substance: “It would cripple Christianity. Everything would then be subject to the tyranny of human opinion. We would have little to no certainty about the New Covenant religion. The faith would become putty in human hands. We wouldn't have certainty over the Judaizer controversy. The very Apostolic council in Jerusalem would have split the Church. The consequences of this would have been detrimental. Infallible teaching is essential to Protestantism, even if that infallibility is confined strictly to the Apostolic age.” I answered as follows. That concession is very coherent. Now, follow me closely here: "If the falliblization (= rendering fallible) of the pastoral work of the Apostles would crippled the entire Christian religion by an extreme and severe lack of certainty over its definition, how much more would the fallibization of the pastoral work of the much longer, more arduous, more consequential, and more complicated post-Apostolic age of the last 2,000 years?" Below are some further observations. One could argue that the raw material of infallible output, measured by the Protestant, comes out to, at most, 27 documents. And this is being very generous b/c there are good reasons to believe there was not a New Testament canon by the time of St. John's death. But let's go with it. Twenty-seven documents, many of which were not directly educational for Christian catechesis but are matters of correspondence on subjects largely assumed by both author and readership. In other words, most of the books of the New Testament assume a prior Christian education and catechesis. Moreover, most of those documents are written by 1 Apostle (Paul), and the rest include only 3 other Apostles, leaving the other 9 without a surviving record. The rest are written by co-workers with the Apostles. That puts the majority of the infallible teachers with no surviving record. Compare that to the raw material output of post-Apostolic pastoral activity and ecclesiastical government in the last 2,000 years that sought to teach, unfold, unpack, interpret, explain, resolve, and clarify the contents of the Christian faith. Is it too much of a stretch to say that if, by the above concession, the process of laying down the foundation is ineffectual (even paralyzing) without the gift of infallible protection, the process of building on that foundation over a much longer period of time without the same gift makes it equally ineffectual (and paralyzing)? But this ineffectiveness of managing a coherent Christian faith seems to match the Protestant gloss on Church history. Protestants across the board reject ecclesiastical indulgences as heretical, and yet the Western Church practiced that for hundreds of years before Luther. Protestants can go through all of the Ecumenical Councils and find one intolerable error after another. There are a myriad of ways to see this, but the most recent revelation is Dr. William Lane Craig raising suspicions about the theological foundations of the Nicene dogma (A.D. 325). I myself saw it years ago when I read Rupert Davies's "Why I am a Protestant." Davies was a British scholar who specialized in religious authority, the Reformers, and Church history. He himself came to the conclusion that the Old and New Testaments were not inerrant after all. And yet, he arrived here while deeming himself in the same logical vein of Protestant thinking, regardless of how contradictory he was to Protestant confessionalism. And get this - that did not disturb his comfort as a Christian in the least bit. Most Protestants might say Davies reached an absurd satisfaction. For how then can he be certain of what he believes? We'll return to that question in a moment. What Protestants have traditionally done in response to these sorts of experiments is to maximize the clarity of the Bible. What else is there to do ? The Bible has to become unmistakably clear, otherwise the crippling doom spelled out above comes crashing down. But this "perspicuity" is given a mighty steroid that has no power to keep the dam from breaking. This almighty clarity has power to override, correct, and even condemn ecclesiastical tradition. Whatever degree of authority is attributed to tradition, councils, church fathers, and Popes... all of it can be cut down by the sword of Sacred Scripture. And the sword of Scripture is strapped to the waist of every man. Having been forced to maximize the clarity of Scripture in order to avoid the obvious capsizing of the Christian religion outlined above, why couldn't Rupert Davies do the same thing with the clarity of fallible documents? Perhaps not inerrant, but that doesn't preclude clarity nor sufficiency. Who is to draw the line, anyway? Heck, why can't someone just claim perspicuity to any subdivision they can think of? I digress. "Sigh. Bottom line it, Ybarra!" In practice, therefore, Protestants ascribe infallible protection to a very narrow sliver of magisterial activity and consign the rest to human opinion. And the result is not only predictive but illustrative. No matter the degree of clarity and sufficiency, the Bible alone will continue to crystallize the diversity of Protestantism. And we have it conceded by a prominent Protestant scholar that if the very same fallibization, diversification, and incoherence of the post-Apostolic Church were to have reigned during the Apostolic age, the Christian religion would have been crippled. The initial proclamation of the Gospel is indispensable, but so is its faithful transmission, interpretation, and application across centuries. Confining infallibility to the former while denying it to the latter leaves the greater part of the Church’s task unprotected.