Signs and Language and Augustine

I am a Christian. And I dont read the Bible....ok, I do read it but I dont read it enough. I could pile on the excuses, but the one prevailing excuse is that it is too difficult to read and so therefore, I give up. That difficulty, I think, stems from the very argument Augustine is trying to make in his essay. He stated that there was a need for authorized interpretation of the Scriptures to stablize the unity of the Christian religion, yet interpretation proved to be difficult when trying to bridge a sign and a signifier to find meaning. He questioned, How do you know when a meaning of the text is literal or figurative? I ask this very question and still I am not certain if there is an answer. Sure, Augustine is an excellent systematic theologian and philosopher, but even he admits that faith is the only thing that can bridge this gap between sign and signifier. We must have faith that the Bible truly is the Word of God, and how we interpret it is the right way....but sometimes I am frustrated with chalking all problems in Christianity up to just having faith. No, I say! We must talk about it and argue and question...

Augustine writes in his essay that things written are obscured because of unknown or ambiguous signs. I see this when I read passages in the Bible about revelation with the 24 elders dressed in white clothes or the seal on the scroll or the pregnant woman with the fiery crown. I see this when I read Jesus' extreme teachings about selling all I have to be a part of the Kingdom of God. The literal and figurative language of the Bible has always been such a huge topic for Christians because we could ask which type of language it truly is for many many passages. Was the world created in six days really? Did Jesus really heal a blind man by touching his eyes with spit or mud? Some people say it is not imperative to know these things, but I feel like it is. If this is the book we must live by, dont we want to understand it fully? If God truly is speaking to us, can we really listen and will we know it's His voice when we hear it? Somtimes I think that when I die, there will be no afterlife. Like Emily Dickinson's poem, I might just hear a fly buzz, the stillness in the room, and nothing more. I might then realize that the Bible was nothing more than a piece of propaganda, written by real human men who imposed their own assumptions and emotions into what they wrote, as Annette Kolodny explored in her essay on interpretation. I know I sound a bit blasphemous, but dont you all wonder about the validity of the Bible. I dont personally believe in speaking in tongues, so I wonder why God does not work so explicitly through us to produce some tangible work like a book or painting. Does God have an agenda anymore? Sure, artists say that their works were inspired by God maybe, but few say that their work is God-breathed, is in fact God Himself. Why does that not happen anymore? And at the time the Bible was being written, what did the writers' contemporaries think of them? Did people accept these separate, varied passages as the Word of God? Did they only accept them after the passages had come together and writers had (most definitely) manipulated the original texts to fit together nicely with the other texts, to form some cohesive work? I dont know much about the Apocrypha, but why was it left out? Did it not fit in with the other works of the Bible? But what if those writings were also the Word of God? It seems sometimes there is too much humanness in the Bible.

Kind of a side note, Augustine writes of the importance and necessity of knowledge of the ancient languages of the Bible. He writes that the Greek meaning of a text in the Bible should not be taught to someone ignorant of Greek through one biblical passage, but that person should learn the language fully and then tackle the original language of the Bible. I think we are proud of ourselves when we think we know the meaning of some Greek word in the Bible, and yet we fail to realize that that word was probably translated a thousand different ways from the more inaccessible Hebrew or Aramaic. We think we are getting back to our roots, understanding from the beginning, but no. I do wish I knew these ancient biblical languages. I took conversational Hebrew at Temple University and I like how they made you take this class and two others before taking biblical Hebrew. We don’t do that at Messiah. We should. Maybe then we would know what was meant in a certain passage, if the writer intended it to be literal or figurative, but wed still have that problem of if the word is really the Word. I guess were left with faith...