Is Language Infallible?

What I mean to say is, does language save us? Does it unite us? St. Thomas Aquinas grapples with the problem of how to reconcile the indeterminacy of figurative language with belief in the ability of language to guarantee stable reference and access to truth and reality. When there is an obscure passage in the Bible, we must believe that deep down, under heavy exegesis, the truth exists, waiting for us to discover it. I could wonder if maybe some of the figurative language in the Bible is meant to be illusive and enigmatic for readers until they die and go to Heaven and can ask God, What did you mean by this? Or maybe God likes all the diverging and varied interpretations of His word, allowing for healthy debate and discussion about His guide to life...but I dont know if I believe this. I believe in multiple truths, but I also believe there is one ultimate Truth and that brings us to God and His love. So, the Bible then, and what it has to say, is one Truth because the Bible is the Word and the Word is God. So then I question along side Aquinas when he asks in his essay, How can language function as vehicle of knowledge if it cannot be understood? Wow, thats a tough question!

I know that Aquinas was a devout follower of Jesus, but I wonder what his true thoughts of the Bible were. I mean, I wonder if he got frustrated often with the problem of multiple interpretations. If he walked into my local Christian bookstore and saw all the different Bible translations, what would he think? Similarly, what would he say to the now tens of thousands of denominations that all fall under the religion of Christianity? He followed in Plato's disgust for poetry, based on the absurdity of the multiple meanings one poem could have, so did he approach the Bible in the same way?

I think it is interesting that I scoffed at the Romantics idea of the one, true Poet who would be the bearer of Truth (with a capital T) and Beauty (with a capital B) and he alone would impart meaning to the masses and they would unquestioningly believe what he had to say. Isnt that like my acceptance of the Bible, and even more particular, my eager willingness to choose an NIV translation above all others. I have made an authority for myself and submitted to it unquestioningly, but I wonder on what grounds? Maybe I think I understand parts of the NIV Bible, but then someone else comes along and tells me Im wrong and they understand it differently. Who is write? See, when Aquinas asked how a language could function as vehicle of knowledge if it couldnt be understood, I wonder if he meant that the language had to be understood universally, that is, everyone understood in the same way because I dont think that ever happens. And what of the meaning of "understand"? To what degree does one have to understand a text? Can we take into consideration our own assumptions and preconceptions of our realities when we are reading and interpreting to find the Truth? Does this Truth consist of multiple experiences, in multiple readers because, after all, we all bring something different to the text when we read it.

I just think that language is so broad, so open to interpretation by its very nature. I like to think of Roland Barthes essay "The Death of the Author" and how he wrote that the authority an author has over his words is lost as soon as they leave his mouth or are written on the page. Language enters this immense space, when it leaves our mouths, where anyone can grab at it and fit it into their own minds for interpretation. We are not alone in the world, though existential philosophy will say we are. Someone will always understand the language that comes out of our mouths and take some degree of knowledge from it. This is what we do with the Bible and its figurative passages; we take what we can from it, thinking that we are gaining knowledge for our spiritual lives. But is there more? Are we right in our interpretation? How would we ever know?

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...