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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Can you use Augustine to interpret the Psalms?


Read book 2 of Augustine's On Christian Teaching and write about how the ideas in this section could be used by you to interpret the Psalms. Are these ideas helpful for interpreting scripture?

Augustine in book 2 brings up a lot of points and ideas having to do with interpretation of christianity. The one I'm going to focus on is his opinion on the change in meaning from translations. He states that if we are to translate into latin for example, we should learn the languages that latin derives from to achieve the highest understanding  of the text. He also states that latin is difficult to translate into because meanings are difficult to translate from certain phrases versus single words meanings. Applying Augustine's ideas of translation to the Psalms is an idea that should definitely be considered, though is very extensive to the general public who are reading and attempting to understand these Psalms. If everyone was required to fully understand the languages that make up the language of their religious scripture then you would end up having less people making the attempt to do so. Though, if you could get people to really master the derived languages the translations would be more true to the original text. It also makes me wonder wether the element of change/ evolving being a crucial element to religion is more for practical reasons such as translations will never hold completely true to the original documents after a certain point, so you just have to be okay with change because it will happen inevitably. 

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