What did Saint Augustine mean when he said this about regarding Bible interpretation?
“Writing in the fifth century, Augustine offered an interpretation [of the Genesis creation account] that wasn’t influenced by scientific theories, because he was writing in the days before science. We might think that in his commentary ‘The Literal Interpretation of Genesis’, he argued that creation took six 24-hour periods. But he didn’t. He saw the early chapters of Genesis as being figurative. The third-century theologian Origen also had a very figurative understanding of Genesis. This suggests to me that for centuries the early chapters have been treated by many commentators as a figurative, theological text inspired by God, foundational to the rest of Scripture, but not intended to be regarded as a scientific text. It’s a pity that in the twentieth century people started reading Genesis as though it were a scientific textbook. Trying to impose science on the text is a misuse of Scripture.” But Augustine (like all Bible-believing Christians) insisted that man was a special, direct
