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One Way to Settle the Prescriptive/Descriptive Debate

February 23, 2024 By Peter Krol

When I study a biblical narrative with a group of people, I find it inevitable that someone will eventually ask: “Is this prescriptive or descriptive?” In other words, is this passage prescribing particular behavior, which we ought to imitate? Or is it simply describing what the characters themselves did, but we ought not to do it ourselves?

It’s a great and important question.

medication pills isolated on yellow background — Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

Not Always Clear

Sometimes the answer is clear: A narrative’s villains are not being held up as models to emulate. So don’t betray your Lord like Judas (Matt 26:47-49), and don’t blame everyone else for your sin like Saul (1 Sam 15:12-16). And when the narrator includes explicit instruction to emulate a character, then we are on strong ground to do so: Avoid idolatry and immorality, unlike the people of Israel (1 Cor 10:6-11), and serve others like Jesus (John 13:12-17).

But sometimes the answer is not clear: Should we delegate authority and establish middle management like Moses (Ex 18:24-26)? Should we test our abusers to determine the sincerity of their confession, like Joseph (Gen 42-44)? Should we try to walk on water like Peter (Matt 14:28-30)? Should we follow Jesus’ instructions to the 70 he sent out to minister in his name (Luke 10:2-12)?

The prescriptive/descriptive question especially comes up when a person’s near-and-dear theology is at stake, either in affirmation or suspicion. Should we speak in tongues and heal people, like the apostles in Acts? Should we set out the fleece to discern God’s will like Gideon? Should we include the children of believers in covenant membership like Abraham?

General Guidance

The prescriptive/descriptive debate on any given passage is closely related to two healthy instincts. We must hold these instincts in tension and not choose one over the other.

The primary purpose of biblical narratives is to proclaim Jesus Christ (Luke 24:44-47; John 1:45, 5:39-40; 1 Peter 1:10-12; etc.).
Biblical narratives present characters as examples to either imitate or avoid (1 Cor 10:1-14; Hebrews 11; Hebrews 12:15-17; 1 John 3:11-13; etc.).

Those with deep commitment to axiom #1 will lean toward viewing biblical narratives as descriptive. Those committed to axiom #2 will lean toward viewing biblical narratives as prescriptive.

Throughout church history, debates have raged over whether to adhere to axiom 1 or axiom 2. But to affirm either one and deny the other is to make a sucker’s choice. We must adhere to both.

A Way Forward

But that only leaves us where we started. How are we to decide whether a passage is prescriptive or descriptive? Whether a character ought to be imitated or not? When should my church start casting lots to fill open leadership positions (Acts 1:26)? And when will our Christian generation learn that “grace” is not implicit permission for rampant divorce, abuse, or sexual immorality (1 Kings 9:1-9)?

I don’t have the final answer that will solve every instance of the question. But I do have a suggestion that—for most passages we study—might just eliminate the need for even asking the question.

Here it is: Focus on applying the passage’s main point and not incidental details.

Now I’ll immediately qualify that guidance by acknowledging that it is possible to apply sub-points, secondary points, or minor details in the text. However, when we do so, we are usually on shakier ground. It’s easier to get the application wrong, since not every detail in a text is equally applicable or even intended by the author to be applied.

In fact, seeking to apply minor details in the text undermines all the work we’ve done up to this point in our study. Why bother doing all that observing and interpreting, if not to understand the author’s main point? Why bother getting to the main point, if we’re just going to apply the passage any which way that seems right in our own eyes?

If the main point is—by definition—the main thing God wants his people to understand from the text, why wouldn’t we focus our application on putting that main point into practice? We could spend all our time applying secondary things and miss the most important thing.

In the next post, I plan to give some examples of how this approach often settles the debate. But in the meantime, I urge you to try it on your own. Study a narrative passage sometime in the next week. Do your best to determine the author’s main point. Then seek to apply that main point and see what happens. Does it make the prescriptive/descriptive question disappear?

I guarantee it won’t answer all your questions about whether particular characters or parts of the text are prescriptive or descriptive. But it will enable you to land on solid ground in your application, in a way that may be highly motivating and might just change lives for God’s glory. Try it and let me know what happens!

What to Expect of My Sample Bible Studies

October 7, 2016 By Peter Krol

I’ve been posting a series of sample Bible studies through the book of Exodus. The purpose of this post is to let you into the dark recesses of my mind, so you may know what I’m up to and why. Instead of explaining my intentions and assumptions in every post—those posts are long enough already—I’ll list those intentions and assumptions here and link back here each time for reference.

Stefan (2014), Creative Commons

What I’m Doing

With these sample Bible studies in Exodus, I’d like to show you how I go about my Bible study. When I sit down to blog, I’ve probably been thinking about the passage generally, but I don’t yet know what I will conclude about the passage’s structure, main point, connection to Christ, or application. So as I write, I’m coming to the text fresh, and I’m doing my study “out loud” by writing the post. So please read these posts as simply my thought process in working through observation, interpretation, and application.

I will show you how I observe a text for the first time—almost always by collecting repeated words. Then moving on to names & titles, then grammar & structure. I’ll mention other components (genre, mood, comparison and contrast, etc.) as they pop out to me.

I will show you how I work through interpretation—taking my list of observations and being as curious as possible. Asking a few key “why” questions, with some “what” and “so what” questions where appropriate. But I’m always working to assimilate and pull things together. I want to follow the train of thought (how the author gets us from the first verse to the last verse).

I will guess at the passage’s main point, and then I will connect that main point to the good news of Jesus Christ. After I’ve figured this out, I go back and craft a title for the blog post that highlights what I think may be the passage’s main point. [NOTE: In my personal study, this is the point at which I finally crack open some commentaries to check my work. Before then, I want only the inspired text—within its context—to speak loudest.]

I will let you in on how I must change in light of this text’s message. I can’t promise I’ll always have brilliant ideas for every one of the 6 boxes in the application matrix, but I’ll vary which boxes I land in each time.

What I’m Not Doing

I don’t claim to offer the definitive analysis of each passage. I have not spent hours crafting my ideas for written presentation. I probably haven’t read any commentaries or study guides yet, and I’m not trying to enter the scholarly conversations on these texts. With each post, I am not crafting a sermon or small group discussion guide. I’m not covering every possible question or thorny issue that may arise from the passage, nor am I stating which questions or thorny issues are the right ones to pursue. I’m not suggesting that your journey through observation, interpretation, and application should look exactly like mine.

Many things in the previous paragraph are good and right things to do. I’m just not doing them with these posts.

About Application…

My thoughts on application are usually much briefer than those on observation and interpretation. There are a few reasons for this:

Application is really hard, and I’m happy to admit it is so.
Application takes me longer than observation or interpretation, and I don’t have enough time to process it deeply every time I sit down to blog.
There are many, many articles online that focus on applying the Bible to the various aspects of life. Just google whatever topic you’re interested in, and you’ll find a trove. But there are few articles that focus on how to properly observe and interpret the Bible. I’m trying to fill that niche here.
Getting specific would require pages of context every time in order to prevent misunderstanding or over-generalizing (communicating that you need to change the same way I need to change). It’s much simpler to propose a few directions for potential application.

That said, I aim to make my application genuine each time. These paragraphs capture truly how the text impacts me, at my current stage of life, as I study it.

Why I’m Doing What I’m Doing

I find that most people don’t truly grasp OIA Bible study until they’ve been able to 1) see it done well, and 2) practice it themselves. I can’t do anything about the second point, but with these posts I’d like to help you with the first. I’ll do my best to do it well, but you’ll have to judge.

On this blog, we’ve written much about the principles of good Bible study, but those principles can still leave you wondering what it looks like to follow them in real-time. Hence, these posts on Exodus. Please let me know what would serve you as I let you into my head and walk you through my study of the book of Exodus.

Why I Write

July 23, 2014 By Peter Krol

My goal on this site is to help ordinary people learn to study the Bible. I pursue that aim through a few practices:

On Mondays, I demonstrate Bible study skills on a particular text of Scripture.
On Wednesdays, I link to other pages on the Internet that either demonstrate good Bible study skills or lay the ground work for good Bible study skills.
On Fridays, I usually back away from the text to reflect on the skills themselves. Currently, I’m explaining methods for leading effective Bible studies.

All three practices fit into a larger model for teaching people how to study the Bible. But as each post comes and goes, and we focus on very specific skills, we can easily lose sight of the model.

That’s why I occasionally write brief posts like this by way of reminder.

And that’s also why I created a table of contents page for my series on Proverbs 1-9. It’s gone so long that the forest has been long since overgrown with trees. This table of contents will let you know all the main topics I’ve hit so far, and it will let you know what remains before the series finishes. I didn’t link to every post but only to the first post for each segment of text. From that post, you should be able to click through to the next post and the next if you’d like to read through a particular section.

I’ll activate the last few links as I finish those posts over the next few months. Please let me know if you have any ideas for making this page more useful!