What does a "descriptive Gospel" require?
What does a "descriptive Gospel" require?
This post is the second in a conversation (with myself) about a prescriptive and descriptive Gospel. Find the original here.
First I'll answer a different question: "what does a prescriptive Gospel require?”
Remember, a prescription is a solution given for a particular problem, and can be effective in treating the problem if its instructions are followed.
A prescriptive Gospel would say that sin is the problem, but I think what is really implied here if we're honest about it is the idea that the sinner is the problem. Sin itself wouldn't be a problem if Adam and Eve hadn't chosen it in the first place, but they did, and so now all of us are stuck with that very same problem. Thanks a lot, Adam and Eve, geez.
But good news! We can get free of sin if we will recognize just how amazingly sinful and bad we are, and realize that Jesus is the only one who can fix it! So we say the prayer to accept Jesus-the-fixer-of-our-badness into our hearts, and then often live the rest of our lives trying harder to measure up to what we judge to be the standard for the ideal Christian life.
This can have a few different outcomes:
-Sometimes it seems pretty easy to be a good Christian; we don't have much trouble meeting our idea of what God's standard is, and we often don't understand why other people do. In this case we tend more toward self-righteousness than righteousness.
-Sometimes it is hard to keep up with that assumed standard, and we fall into a cycle of failing and trying harder, failing and trying harder. We'll feel guilty and ashamed when we can't measure up, and then, depending on our fortitude or personality, we'll either redouble our efforts, or give up completely, deciding that this God stuff just isn't for us – that God Himself must not be for us. Often our giving up will be accompanied by hurt and shame, as well as bitterness and resentment, because the prescription didn't do what we thought, and what we were told, it should do.
Prescriptive Gospel boiled way, way down: I am the problem for being a sinner. Jesus is the solution to the problem of me. If I accept Jesus into my heart, then Jesus will save me from my badness and take me to heaven – as long as I try to have faith and to not sin, and try to do better and be better to be worthy of what He did for me.
“Alright, already, so what does a descriptive Gospel require, then?”
A descriptive Gospel really just requires that we believe that it is descriptive, of both God and us. It requires we give up our self-appointed role of judge, arbiter, and standard. It requires that we repent (a)– literally: change our minds– when presented with God's standard.
Here's is what I'm claiming is God's standard:
1. What He says about Himself.
2. What He says about us in light of Jesus' resurrection.
“Okay but the Bible says a lot of things about God. How do we know which of those things are part of His standard?”
God's standard is Christ – but He's not saying, "be better like my Son Jesus!" (prescriptive think). He's saying, "I am making you into the spitting image of my Son, Jesus" (descriptive think).
To grasp the foundation of this, I have found it simple and enlightening, if maybe not entirely obvious, to start with the names God adopts throughout the Bible. They are pretty straightforward, they each beautifully capture a facet of His very essence, and comprehensively explain what He's about.
One reason I begin with this is that every time God says something about Himself, He is saying something about us: every name of God has implications for us, not because we've asked Him to be the fixer of our badness, but because He is the lover of our souls. Each name is a promise to us and has been since the garden. When we fell into sin and were torn from Him, the promise still stood, but God had to cross the chasm to bring us back to it.
“Why do God's names apply to us, though? What makes you say that?”
This, the second reason I begin here, circles back to God's standard being Christ: every name of God is embodied in the person of Christ, as in, He literally fleshes them out (b, c).
Every promise of God is fulfilled on our behalf by Christ's death and resurrection (d).
Restoring us to the Father and restoring us to wholeness is the entire point of His resurrection.
What I'm claiming here is that the prescriptive Gospel hinges on our own judgment, whereas the descriptive Gospel hinges on God's.
It's our word against His... but His word is for us.
a- Hebrews 12:18-25
b- Matthew 1:23
c- Colossians 2:9-10
d- 2 Corinthians 1:20
Part 1: Prescription vs Description – Which is the Gospel?