Wonder

I wrote a paper last semester on “The Hermeneutics of Wonder in the Gospel according to Luke”.  I think it was pretty good.  What inspired it was an essay I had read a year prior by a medievalist historian named Carolyn Walker Bynum, who, as its president, addressed the American Historical Association  on the posture of “wonder” as the only appropriate interpretive and investigative stance of the true historian.  I’d like to share some of my thoughts about wonder as the only appropriate interpretive and investigative stance of the true bible student.  But let me start by excerpting the final lines of Bynum’s fabulous and inspiring—her wonderful—essay.

Am I then wrong to suggest that wonder is the special characteristic of the historian? I think not—if we understand admiratio in its medieval sense, as cognitive, perspectival, non-appropriative, and deeply respectful of the specificity of the world. There is something old-fashioned, almost absurd, in such an assertion, of course. Medieval philosophers and theologians emphasized wonder as a first step toward knowledge; we, in our postmodern anxiety, tend rather to emphasize how hard it is to know. Medieval devotional and hagiographical writers stressed wonder as the opposite of imitation or possession; we are aware that any response involves some appropriation. Medieval travelers and collectors of marvels argued that awe and dread are situated, perspectival; we share this perception and give credit to feminism and postcolonial theory for it, but we suspect that such awareness shatters the possibility of writing any coherent account of the world. Medieval chroniclers and occasional writers stressed the uniqueness of events rather than the trends they illustrated, their moral significance rather than their temporal causes; we fear that the particular is the trivial and that significance is merely the projection of our own values onto the past.

Nonetheless, I would argue, we write the best history when the specificity, the novelty, the awe-fulness, of what our sources render up bowls us over with its complexity and its significance. Our research is better when we move only cautiously to understanding, when fear that we may appropriate the “other” leads us not so much to writing about ourselves and our fears as to crafting our stories with attentive, wondering care. At our best, it is the “strange view of things” for which we strive—not least because, as Thomas Aquinas understood, admiratio has to do with teaching … Surely our job as teachers is to puzzle, confuse, and amaze. We must rear a new generation of students who will gaze in wonder at texts and artifacts, quick to puzzle over a translation, slow to project or to appropriate, quick to assume there is a significance, slow to generalize about it. Not only as scholars, then, but also as teachers, we must astonish and be astonished. For the flat, generalizing, presentist view of the past encapsulates it and makes it boring, whereas amazement yearns toward an understanding, a significance, that is always just a little beyond both our theories and our fears.

Every view of things that is not wonderful is false.