Lessing's Ditch and Theology

The well known problem of "Lessing's Ditch" has been bothering my lately. The basic idea of the problem is that there can be no "necessary" truths based on "contingent" events. In other words, the ditch is trying to jump from contingent happenings (i.e. historical revelation) to truth that is necessary (i.e., divine revelation). How can one assert the ultimate truth of something that is particular, that happens just at one time and one time only? I really have no good answer to this. It has been particularly bothersome because, as someone who will be a pastor in a congregation in a few months, I have to figure out how to deal with very contingent historical material that is presented in a book that the community takes to be more than contingent. 

One good example. In Corinthians Paul admonishes women to keep their hair long, because that's what women do. Now, from all the historical research on this particular passage, it appears in the ancient world that a woman's fecundity was intimately connected with the length of her hair. So, the longer the hair, the more babies she could produce. In a world where average length of life was normally less than 30 years, and in which famine and death were the norm, one could very well understand why Paul went along with it. It would be analogous to a pastor today saying, 'we know that smoking is really bad when you're pregnant, so don't do it.' That's good advice, but of course its historical. This was not known 80 years ago. 

So, what to do with this? One might dismiss this particular passage, and the justification would be quite good: this is an archaic belief that we know now is not the case. But then the claim that this is divine revelation of an ultimate kind starts to be murky. Drawing a line, of course, is not really that difficult. Theologians for centuries have had "rules for reading," i.e. rules for how to take problematic passages and interpret them in the "correct" theological way. I suppose a passage like this would need to a rule for reading. Perhaps something like this: 'if the author is pointing to an untranslatable practice based on certain medical knowledge of the time, then one ought to not take it too seriously.' 

Of course, that does nothing at all for the problem of Lessing's ditch. But what it does do is point out something essential about reading texts like this. Let's say this points out the way interpretation works, i.e. the "hermeneutical circle." This "circle," especially as articulated by Heidegger (and perhaps as thought through in Wittgenstein's notion of form of life), is essential to any interpretation of such complex passages. The basic notion is that there is what Heidegger called a "fore-structure" to all understanding. When we try to understand something, it's not just a "subject" (us) and and "object" (a particular text), and the subject - without any presuppositions attached - just "reads" the object in a flat, one-way manner. Instead, its a circle: we have presuppositions that are necessary for us to be able to read, and we bring these presuppositions to the particular texts. These presuppositions include our language, our cultural history, our life history, etc. These are absolutely essential aspects of reading anything, and hence cannot be thrown away. At the same time, the more we attend to the "matter itself" (as Heidegger puts it), we will find that the text throws us back on ourselves, and forces us to sometimes adjust our interpretation, and sometimes to allow it to change our presuppositions. This process, this hermeneutical circle, is essential to any working out of problems just as the one from Corinthians. We hear this historically, and realize that our understanding of it (in the sense of an understanding that forces us to act, or to change our behavior) is predicated upon our ability to match our presuppositions with the text, and the ability of the text to alter those same presuppositions. But of course, when it comes to the "hair" example, this would hardly alter our presuppositions - we are too imbued with modern medicine to even be able to hear this text fully. 

This also, I think, helps with Lessing's ditch. It helps because it collapses the problem. The real issue isn't the transition form "contingent" to "necessary" truth. The real issue is how does one's understanding interact with a text which one's understanding and tradition claim is ultimate. The real problem is not the historical events themselves, but rather how our understanding interacts with these historical events, and makes sense of the claim they have on us now. This is less a philosophical and more a hermeneutical problem. This is the direction people like Hans Frei and George Linbeck go. And this is the only direction I see myself going.