Prescription or Description?

Holy Post Media and Skye Jethani

Apr 01, 2026

We suffer from a common danger when reading Scripture. We are often tempted to make the particular universal. For example, Jesus called Peter to leave his fishing business and become an apostle, a “fisher of men.” Rather than seeing this as Peter’s particular calling, it is often taught as a universal expectation for all Christians. I have heard many well-intentioned preachers use this story to tell young Christians that their lives will matter more if they abandon their proverbial nets and devote themselves to full-time ministry. They transform a story that was intended to inspire into one that elicits guilt. This happens because we don’t slow down to ask a critical question: Did the gospel writers tell the story to prescribe what all believers should do, or were they merely seeking to describe what happened to Peter?

The same confusion between prescription and description is at play when we read the opening verses of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Known as the Beatitudes, Jesus begins his sermon by listing who is blessed by God in the kingdom of the heavens. He identifies the poor in spirit, those who mourn, and the meek. Some fundamentally misread the Beatitudes, assuming Jesus is prescriptive. They think a faithful Christian should seek to be poor, mournful, and meek in order to secure God’s blessing. Such a reading will lead us to think that being joyful or courageous is ungodly and that sadness and weakness are true signs of spiritual maturity. That is, of course, nonsense.

Jesus is not prescribing how to be blessed, but rather describing who is blessed. Remember, the Sermon on the Mount is a message about how the kingdom of the heavens operates differently than the kingdoms of the earth. The world’s kingdoms say the strong, powerful, and happy are “well off.” Jesus turns expectations upside down by saying in God’s kingdom, it’s the weak, sad, and overlooked who are well off. In Stanley Hauerwas’ book, In Good Company, he says it this way:

“Too often those characteristics [of the Beatitudes] . . . are turned into ideals we must strive to attain. As ideals, they can become formulas for power rather than descriptions of the kind of people characteristic of the new age brought by Christ . . . Thus Jesus does not tell us that we should try to become poor in spirit, or meek, or peacemakers. He simply says that many who are called into the kingdom will find themselves so constituted.”

Once you begin to recognize the difference between prescription and description, it has the potential to completely transform how you read and apply the Bible. You may realize that the stories and passages we universalize often fit with the values and assumptions of our culture or our particular Christian tradition. While many commands we’d prefer to ignore get dismissed as particular to the fellow Jesus was talking to in the story. Of course, discerning between prescription and description will also change the way you listen to sermons—including the Sermon on the Mount.