Restoring Apostolic Faith

There are two ways people read the Bible today.

One begins with the text.

The other ends with the text.

Only one of them deserves to be taken seriously.

The Prima Facie Reading (At First Glance)

A prima facie reading asks a simple question:

“What does this appear to say on the surface?”

That’s not wrong. It’s unavoidable. Everyone starts there.

The problem is when prima facie becomes the final authority instead of the entry point.

In modern Christian usage, prima facie has quietly been redefined to mean:

• “Obvious”

• “Self-evident”

• “So clear it doesn’t require explanation”

That definition is fiction.

Historically, prima facie means:

“This holds unless challenged by further evidence.”

Which means a claim that refuses context is, by definition, not a valid prima facie conclusion—just an untested assumption.

The Contextual Reading (What the Text Is Actually Doing)

A contextual reading asks harder questions:

• Who is speaking?

• To whom?

• Why this statement here?

• What problem is being addressed?

• What assumptions does the audience already hold?

• What would not need to be said because it was already understood?

Contextual reading recognizes something uncomfortable but true:

The Bible was not written to modern readers.

It was written for them—but not to them.

Meaning doesn’t start with what sounds clear to us.

It starts with what made sense to them.

Where Things Go Off the Rails

Enter the most dangerous sentence in modern Christianity:

“The Bible plainly says…”

This phrase sounds humble. It sounds submissive.

It’s neither.

What it usually means is:

“My surface reading feels obvious to me, and I’m about to treat that feeling as divine clarity.”

Here’s the reality:

If something truly plainly meant what people think it means, we wouldn’t need:

• thousands of denominations

• endless doctrinal splits

• professional theologians

• translators’ footnotes

• centuries of debate

The fact that Christians constantly disagree—often violently—should be enough to expose the myth.

Why “Plain Reading” Is a Modern Invention

Ancient readers didn’t talk about “plain meaning.”

They assumed:

• layered meaning

• symbolic language

• shared cultural knowledge

• covenantal frameworks

• communal interpretation

The idea that any individual, with no training, no language skills, and no historical grounding, can open an English Bible and instantly grasp “the plain meaning” would have been absurd to Jews of the Second Temple period and foreign to the early Church.

What we call “plain” is usually just familiar.

A Simple Test

Try this experiment.

When someone says:

“The Bible plainly says X”

Ask:

• In which language?

• In what genre?

• According to which audience?

• Compared to which other passages?

• Under which covenant?

• As understood by whom, exactly?

If those questions feel threatening rather than clarifying, the issue isn’t Scripture—it’s certainty addiction.

The Irony No One Notices

Here’s the kicker:

The people most confident that “the Bible plainly says” something are usually the least equipped to defend that claim once context is introduced.

Because context disrupts certainty built on simplicity.

That doesn’t weaken faith.

It purifies it.

A Better Way Forward

A responsible approach sounds more like this:

“Prima facie, this passage appears to say X.

But let’s test that against context, language, and the wider witness of Scripture.”

That sentence doesn’t undermine the Bible.

It refuses to flatten it.

Final Thought

“Prima facie” is not a conclusion.

“The Bible plainly says” is not an argument.

Both are placeholders—useful only until real work begins.

Christian faith didn’t grow in the soil of first impressions.

It grew through wrestling, debate, language, and costly thought.

Anything less isn’t reverence.

It’s convenience with a verse attached.