Fallible Points to Infallible

“A fallible authority like the church goes not have to get everything wrong. Fallibility means that the capacity for error is there, not that error is necessarily  there. Put another way, a fallible authority can point to an infallible truth. When a fallible authority says something true, that truth by definition cannot be falsifiable. And this is what the church has consistently done on key doctrines, like the doctrine of Scripture, as she has been guided by the Holy Spirit throughout her history. As a fallible but true authority, she has pointed to the boundaries of Scripture and said, ‘Thus far, and no farther.’ She has published the most fundamental creed imaginable — the table of contents of the Bible. It is ironic that a confessedly fallible Protestant church has in this way produced an infallible creed — Genesis through Malachi, and Matthew through Revelation. An ‘infallible’ church undertook the same project and gummed it up by including the Apocrypha” (“Sola Scriptura,” Creeds, and Ecclesiastical Authority, in When Shall These Things Be?, pp. 264-265)