A Response to “Pagan Christianity?”
2.4 The distinction between description and prescription
The final principle I want to clarify is the distinction we have to make between those New Testament passages that merely describe the activities of the church in those days, and those that prescribe for the church the activities she is to perform. For example, it is well understood that much of the Book of Acts is to be understood as history first and foremost, and much of what is described for us should not necessarily be taken as normative for the church today. It was a unique time in the history of the church. Indeed, trying to derive a formula of church practice from Acts would leave you with all manner of contradictions and difficulties.[1] This also applies to some of the descriptions of early church life we find in the epistles. Major differences between then and now include the existence of Apostles, revelatory sign gifts, and the incompleteness of the biblical canon. These differences necessitate certain differences in how the church will operate. We have to understand that the church we see in the New Testament, particularly in Acts, was the church in embryonic form. The mature, established church cannot be, and should not seek to be, identical to the New Testament church in every respect. No more than a teenager should aspire to return to toddlerhood. Whenever we see glimpses in Scripture of what the earliest churches were like, we have to ask the question, is this describing commanded elements of worship or is it just describing particular circumstances unique to that time and place? The answer to this question is not always obvious, so we should approach these passages with great care and attention, interpreting (as always) each passage in context and in light of the whole biblical canon. Ideally, we would find an explicit command or commendation from Scripture for any element of worship we want to make binding on the church. We should not assume that description is entails prescription.
[1] This article outlines some of these difficulties: Voorwinde, S. (2010). How Normative Is Acts? Vox Reformata, 33-56. https://rtc.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/How-Normative-is-Acts.pdf
Next Section: 3.1 Preface and Introduction Review
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