Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2013, Side 32

For me, however, what is important is, how does Augustine deal with
apparently contrary biblical statements. Today, we would argue for different
authors, different traditions, or different intentions of the statements, and
we would demand that a text be interpreted strictly within its literary
context. Thus we allow contrary statements to exist side by side. Augustine,
by contrast, is not interested in the human authors; what counts for him
is that God is speaking, and God can only say what is true and without
contradiction. And, for Augustine, that principle holds even for biblical
texts that are widely separated from each other among the books of the
Bible. His knowledge of the Bible and his ability to find, even in the most
distant parts of the Bible, statements that can be correlated to each other,
is truly astonishing.
Precisely because he struggles for the truth, he does not ignore apparently
contradictory statements, on the contrary, he deliberately goes looking for
them. But in dealing with them, he does not argue in a historical or a
literary manner, but rather in a logical manner, as befits his Neo-Platonic
understanding of reality. He continues to turn over ideas and interpretations
until he manages to show that the contradiction is merely apparent and
that the apparently contrary biblical statements are basically compatible
with each other.
In conclusion, we may ask why Augustine did not call attention to his
explanation of Num 12:8 in terms of rapture when, here in qu. 11,154, he
explains Ex 33,14-23 in terms of intricate distinctions of the literal sense
aimed at grounding a christological interpretation? No clear answer to this
question can be given, but the fact that Augustine equally ignores the text
and corresponding explanation of Num 12:8 in his later Quaestiones in
Numeros,20 leads one to surmise that, for reasons unknown, he deliberately
did not want to repeat here the broader rapture theory that he had developed
earlier in ep. 147 and Gen. Litt.
20 In Qiiaestionum in Heptateuchurn IV,20, Augustine treats only v. 1 of Num 12.
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