Why do Protestants accept the inerrancy of the canon, while rejecting other decisions of the Roman Church?

Upvote:3

First, it should be noted that not all protestants do accept the inerrancy of the canon. In fact, biblical inerrancy has really only been a topic of discussion during the last two centuries. Uniterians reject the doctrine of inerrancy, The Princton and Fuller Theological seminaries rejected this teaching and the and the entire Liberal Theology movement rejects the idea of biblical inerrancy which was was an idea first advanced in 1881 by two conservative Presbyterian theologians, Benjamin B. Warfield and Archibald Alexander Hodge.

Really, only Evangelical Protestants have this doctrine as a formal tenant as of 1978 with the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

For this group of Protestants, the reason that the inerrancy of the canon is accepted while other doctrines were rejected has a great deal to do with the Pope. Many of the edicts from the Roman Catholic Church come from the pope. For example, only the first 7 ecumenical councils were originally recognized as ecumenical until the 11th century when Pope Gregory VII claimed them to be ecumenical. Because the pope is human, Protestants typically regard him as fallable and by extension his edicts, such as encyclicals, bulls and other such decrees and declarations can also be fallable and therefore errant (though not all necessarially are)

Conversely, Evangelicals typically regard scripture as infallable because of it's verification by those who walked with Jesus or it's authorship by his disciples and apostles. This creates an environment where texts which were false or incorrect would be discarded because those closest to Jesus would have claimed them to be wrong and refuted them. This would have led to their unpopularity which would have prevented their inclusion in the canon. This sidesteps the problem of mankind's fallen nature from introducing errors into scripture, but allows for all subsequent teachings to be errant because they do not come from Christ himself and therefore are fallable while the Gospels, and Epistles come from Christ and are thus regarded as inerrant.

Upvote:4

To answer your main question: The Council of Laodicea, being a regional council, would only have been binding on the Faithful living in the region (specifically, on areas that were represented by their bishops). Being only a regional, and not an ecumenical council, it is not binding on all the Faithful.

For your question about scripture, the answer is a little complicated. Wikipedia summarizes it well, but the important point is that we have points at time where we know Canon was already considered settled, which was certainly before 400. It is harder to point to the moment where it actually was settled, although the broad strokes clearly had been in agreement for a while.

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