Does the Bible Tell Us What to Do, or Does it Tell Us What Others Did?

I am sure that most, if not all, of you reading this have heard Christians referring to such and such in the Bible as a “biblical “teaching.” This is the idea that the Bible functions largely as a teaching tool, either telling us what to believe and how to live, or at least strongly inferring the same.

This approach to the Bible is one we might call “prescriptive.” The Bible is seen largely as an instruction manual: God is speaking authoritatively to us, giving us information you need to act on.

Another approach is “descriptive.” Here rather than seeing the Bible as instructions from the deep past, it is seen more as describing what people of old believed and how they acted.

The example that keeps on giving here is Genesis 1. I have heard countless times that we should adhere to its “teachings” and accept that this passage is telling us what we should think about how the cosmos came to be–a 6-day + 1 day of rest process. 

This is a logical conclusion to come to if one approaches the Bible prescriptively. The days are after all “days,” with evenings and mornings. In my opinion, a strictly prescriptive posture will need to accept the 6 +1 sequence as a biblical “teaching.” 

But some “prescriptivists” will hedge here, or the simple fact that we know with complete confidence that this is not how things were created. So they balk here, but to maintain a prescriptivist posture, they will claim that Genesis 1 is not “teaching” a 6 + 1 sequence. 

The idea of “teaching:” is preserved as a valid and important principle, but this here is not a teaching. It can’t be. I mean, are we to believe there is a dome over our heads, which God created on Day 2?  Even Augustine said that reading Genesis 1 as a historical account of the cosmos is nutso. Whatever prescriptive value Genesis 1 has, whatever God is telling us in this passage, it is in something other than a science lesson.

Someone taking a descriptive posture would simply bypass this whole debate. Genesis 1 is not teaching us what we should believe about creation historically and scientifically. Rather, it is describing what ancient Israelites believed to be true. 

Our task is to try to enter into that ancient mindset, as much as possible, and understand the theology of the writer/s. Whatever we perceive that theology to be, it is then up to us to adapt that theology to our context. Or not.

So, a prescriptive approach sees in Scripture God’s “teachings” to us be adhered to. A descriptive approach sees in Scripture the authentic religious convictions of ancient pilgrims of faith, which are to be discerned as adaptable or not to ou0r context.

At least that’s how I see it.

Of course, the examples can be multiplied many times over. Is what we read in the Bible about divine violence, women, slaves, laws, human sexuality, etc., to be understood as prescriptive or descriptive? 

Folks, as I see it, the question of what is prescriptive and what is descriptive sums up much of the so-called “Battle for the Bible” that still rages.

And this is not just a Hebrew Bible problem. Are Paul’s letters to be read prescriptively or descriptively? I think Paul’s letters are something of a hermeneutical bootcamp for working out the prescriptive/descriptive issue. 

Here is a guy, living about 2000 years ago, writing personal letters to people we can't understand, in a language we don’t know, about circumstances that we only catch an indirect glimpse of and cannot relate to existentially. 

And we are supposed to read these letters as God’s teaching to us? OK. If you say so.

Let me close here by saying that deciding whether to read the Bible prescriptively or descriptively, or better, what parts are to be read prescriptively or descriptively, is a central question, not only for hermeneutics, but for arriving at some sense of what the Bible is.

I think working through that should be a real discussion, not a debate, and certainly not a pistols-at-dawn moment. It’s the issue that has in some sense been part of the Christian (and Jewish) journey as long as there has been a Bible.