Written by L.T. Greer |
Wednesday, October 6, 2021
It’s important to recognize that when it comes to the Bible, “difficult” almost always means, “contrary to the norms, presuppositions, or expectations of my own culture.” No single culture or people group finds all of the Bible’s teaching attractive—not even the cultures recorded in the Bible itself!

I recently heard a pastor with decades of experience remark that the passage in Mark 7:24-30 is one of the most difficult in the Bible.[1] “It isn’t right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” Jesus said.[2] How does one defend this apparent ethnocentrism directed at a marginalized mother who is desperate to find a cure for her child?
Confronting difficult passages is, well, difficult. And the Mark 7 passage is but one of many that we or people in our congregations may struggle with. However, as I’ve taught and preached in my home church, I have discovered this very difficulty can help illuminate the Bible and our relationship to it.
When preaching to myself or to others, I often return to these three good things about difficult Bible passages:
We learn about veracity of the Bible.
In other words, a difficult passage about the life of Jesus (or of any other Biblical “hero”) reinforces the historicity of the documents, because this is exactly the kind of thing writers of hagiography or fiction would avoid.[3]
Read More

No matter what a Roman Catholic’s verbal profession is, both the Roman communion and the Reformed church charge Roman Catholics not to partake of the Lord’s Supper in a Protestant church. On that, Rome and Westminster concur! (Code of Canon Law, Can. 844 §1) Accordingly, how can one be regarded as having a credible profession of faith in Christ if he is forbidden in the Lord to commune with professing believers at Christ’s Supper? 

Christians may marry only in the Lord. This means that at the very least Christians may not marry faithful Roman Catholics, Muslims or any other unbelieving idolater, all of whom maintain damnable heresies. (1 Corinthians 7:39; WCF 24.3; See also: Exodus 34:16; Deuteronomy 7:3,4; 2 Corinthians 6:14-18)
A question that in more recent times accompanies this clear teaching of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) pertains to true believers within the Roman Catholic communion. Specifically, may Christians marry unfaithful Roman Catholics – those who profess the saving power of the gospel in their lives while remaining formally estranged to the Christian church while comfortably seated in Rome.What is behind such a question is a misunderstanding of (a) the relevance of the visible church, (b) the impropriety of private judgments in such matters and (c) the undue partitioning of faith and practice. Accordingly, before trying to come up with a consistently Reformed view on interfaith marriage, it might be helpful to develop those three confessionally based principles by which our theology of marriage can be better informed.
Marriage and the visible church:
The WCF is clear that (1) there is no ordinary possibility of salvation outside the visible church. In other words, it is normative but not absolutely necessary that God leads believers into identification with congregations of the universal church that profess the true religion. (WCF 25:2) The Reformed church also teaches (2) that (a) the Pope of Rome is a usurper, (b) Roman Catholicism, with the pope as her head, is an apostate church and as such (c) the Roman Catholic communion, according to her theology, is a synagogue of Satan. (WCF 25:5,6) From those two governing principles we may surmise that it is at least possible that a true believer can be a member of the Roman Catholic communion even though Rome is not a true church.
Private judgment must give way to objective ecclesiastical standing:
Although some Roman Catholics profess faith in Christ in accordance with the true religion of the Protestant Reformation, by identifying with the Roman communion through membership and attendance such professing believers objectively remain outside the visible church of Christ, and no private judgment can remedy that reality. The question is how that objective reality relates to Christians marrying Roman Catholics.
Although professing Roman Catholics can live in contradiction to their communion by professing the true gospel of salvation, by the standard of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) they are not “communicants in good standing in any evangelical church” and, therefore, are barred from the Lord’s Supper until their profession coincides with their church affiliation. Or as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) would have it, a member of the Roman communion is not a “professing communicant member in good standing in a church that professes the gospel of God’s free grace in Jesus Christ” and, therefore, is not warmly invited to partake of the body and blood of our Lord.
At the very least, from a Reformed ecclesiastical perspective, fellowship with Rome necessarily keeps one from identifying with the Christian church and receiving the nourishment of Christ with other believers at the Lord’s Supper.
It’s not enough that one merely professes faith in Christ if he also lives in the unrepentant sin of spiritual adultery, which leads us to our third and final principle pertaining to the undue dichotomization of faith and practice.
(As we read on it might be useful to consider whether ecclesiastical precepts drawn from Scripture should override private judgement on one’s salvation, or can private judgements be reconciled with the implications of sound elder-rule ecclesiology.)
Faith and practice:
It’s hardly controversial that a good and faithful Roman Catholic is one who not only trusts in the damning gospel of Rome but also considers the Protestant gospel anathema. (See: The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, Sixth session, January 13, 1547: Chapters 7,8,10, and 16, Canons 12,24,30, and 32) Not surprisingly, a good Roman Catholic’s profession of faith is never credible by confessional Protestant standards. But what about the profession of a bad Roman Catholic – one who professes “Christ alone” while remaining in communion with the pope? How should Protestants regard such as these?
Here again we must respect that it is the elders of the church and not individual maverick-Christians that “bind and loose” in the name of Christ. It is the elders on behalf of Christ that open the kingdom to penitent sinners, declare absolution and admit sinners to the Lord’s Supper. (WCF 30.2)
Read More
Related Posts:

Jesus is God in human flesh, he has two natures (one human, one divine), yet he is one person. In the incarnation, God came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ to save us from our sins. The Word became flesh is therefore, the very heart of Christianity.

At the very heart of the Christian faith we find the doctrine of the incarnation–Jesus Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity, and the eternal son of God, took to himself a true human nature in the womb of the virgin for the purpose of saving us from our sins.
The incarnation of Jesus marks Christianity off as a thoroughly supernatural religion, grounded in a specific truth claim–i.e., God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:18). The incarnation aims not for the moral improvement, enlightenment, or personal benefit for the followers of Jesus, but accomplishes the salvation of all those sinners whom God has chosen to save in Jesus Christ. Jesus is not merely our example, but primarily our Savior.
The incarnation of Jesus Christ is also the proof that God keeps his promises. This remarkable historical event is the key turning point in what is truly the greatest story ever told. At the dawn of human history, God placed Adam in Eden and commanded him not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But Adam ate from the forbidden tree, plunging the entire human race into sin and death. But even as God was pronouncing the curse upon Adam, Eve, and the serpent (as recounted in Genesis 3), God promised to rescue Adam from the consequences of his act of rebellion through the seed of the woman–that is, through a biological descendant from Eve who will redeem God’s people from their sin (Genesis 3:15). It will take a second Adam–someone who obeys the covenant of works which Adam broke and who alone can redeem us from the guilt and power of sin–to undo the consequences brought upon us by the first Adam. This brings us to the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the person in whom God fulfills his promises and who is our Immanuel (God with us). The Word must become flesh if any of us are to be saved from the havoc wrought upon us by the first Adam (cf. John 1:17). There is no other way to rescue Adam’s fallen race from the guilt and power of sin.
The Old Testament is filled with various messianic prophecies, in which God’s promise to redeem his people are set forth with an amazing specificity.
Read More
Related Posts: