A very real, not figurative danger

I'll admit, I have an issue with St. Augustine. While he may look pretty harmless (in fact, somewhat like a turtle in this picture) I've found that his ideas can cause a lot of problems.

In his book On Christian Teaching, St. Augustine advocates for a very conflicted way of reading and interpreting the Bible. At the same time that he says there are multiple interpretations that can be found in the same sentence, he writes that the reader only has 2 options - to interpret something entirely literally or entirely figuratively. And he gives hardly any instruction as to how to figure out which one! At the same time that he suggests that many violent portraits of God or instructions he may give (ie: smashing babies against the rocks" is figurative, he also says that "any harsh and even cruel word or deed attributed to God or his saints that is found in the holy scriptures applies to the destruction of the realm of lust" (77). So which interpretation are we supposed to use? To me, this is the dangerous part. Not only does Augustine seem to condone this violent language, but he even endorses it as having a higher purpose of achieving a world made up of love and devoid of lust. Then again, he also writes that different cultures and times interpret things differently. Another problem - what one culture consideres to be lustful another may endorse as loving! So, to kill or not to kill? And who gets to do the killing?

These are all questions we discussed in class on Friday, but another that came up in Book 4 is Augustine's strong belief that everything in the Old Testament is foreshadowing for the coming of Jesus Christ. For example, "In Genesis [Gen. 9:21-3] we find an anticipation of it and a figure of the Lord's passion in the holy teaching about Noah...it is sufficient to grasp the fact that Noah, presenting a type of the truth to come, drank not water but wine and thus produced a representation of the Lord's passion" (132). While I'd been aware in the periphery that many people read the Old Testament through a Christian lens, Augustine's thoughts on the relationship between Noah and Jesus really brought this into focus for me. Here he presents another dangerous idea, which is that everything that has happened or is happening now is only a reflection of what is to come. I see how this could be used in conjunction with the elimination of lust from the world, and this idea scares me even further.
As if people needed any more motivation or self-justification for killing each other.