Readings

by Rick Dietrich

Robert C. Fuller, Wonder: from Emotion to Spirituality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

God's common grace, the Westminster Confession tells us, allows us to consult the wisdom of the philosophers, at least on occasion. Two philosophical works I'm recommending these days are actually about common grace, even if they don't use the term. Robert Fuller is Caterpillar Professor of Religious Studies at Bradley University. His most recent book, Wonder, came out this year. I wish I could say that Paul Woodruff is Butterfly Professor of … ; but he's not: he's Mary Helen Thompson Professor of the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin. Reverence was published in 2001.

Fuller treats "wonder" as an emotional state, making particular use of recent discoveries by evolutionary psychologists, who are interested in how our emotions help us adapt. The book is not long — less than 160 pages. It is highly readable though also somewhat repetitive. Woodruff, as his subtitle indicates, is interested in "reverence" as a virtue, important in ancient Greece and China, but almost lost today. It is a virtue well worth recovering, however, for its benefits to the individual and even more for its benefits to society. Moreover, it is recoverable, because it is an essential virtue. (Human beings are reverent by their nature.)

Fuller describes wonder as "a complex and subtle emotional feeling"; it is difficult to define, but it is closely related to joy and curiosity, also to awe and gratitude. It is a combination of these — and surprise and amazement — often in the face of the unexpected, something that "stops" us, so we have to catch our breaths.

But Fuller isn't only interested in what happens at the moment we encounter wonder. Wonder has positive effects. It causes us to wonder. It affects our intelligence, opening us up to asking why, to contemplating underlying causes, what makes this the way it is and what, then, will happen next. Wonder affects our moral lives. It also opens us up to others. Not only does the energy that wonder brings "elicit prolonged engagement with life," it is an engagement that presses us to transcend an instrumental view of people and things and brings us to attend to them "in their own fullness and richness."

Fuller is concerned about wonder's effects on our religious lives. And he's especially concerned about religious movements that seek to suppress wonder, because wonder does tend to question literalism and test authority, not to mention to blur the boundaries between sacred and secular. (This is hardly a new "problem." Consider, for example, the church's recurring problems with mystics, who tend to abide in wonder.)

If wonder is an emotional state that occurs as a response to certain phenomena, it is also a sensibility that can be cultivated. Fuller gives three examples in mini-biographies of William James, John Muir, and Rachel Carson. Here "wonder" may begin to overlap with "reverence," which Woodruff describes as "the well-developed capacity to have feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have" (italics mine). Reverence, then, can also be cultivated, so that it knows how to distinguish between that which deserves reverence and that which does not. In short, reverence can "see." It is not blind, like faith, according to Woodruff's definition. (The one real drawback of Reverence is that Woodruff equates "faith" and "unthinking adherence to doctrine.")

Still, his distinction between faith (according to his definition) and reverence proves a helpful one. In the chapter "Without Reverence," he creates the fictional (but believable) example of God's voting in a city election. The signs, "God voted against Proposition Two" are everywhere in his city of churches. The issue is whether the city should offer the same benefits package to same-sex partners as to husbands and wives of its employees. "The council has approved a plan to do so, but opponents have brought on this referendum — in which, if the signs are true, God has long since cast his vote.

"Here," Woodruff argues, "the difference between faith [according to his definition] and reverence is glaring. The people behind the signs are showing faith, and plenty of it. But they are acting against reverence. They are human beings, and yet they suppose they know the mind of God so clearly that they can declare His [sic] vote on a civic matter. Reverence requires us to maintain a modest sense of the difference between the human and divine. If you wish to be reverent, never claim the awful majesty of God in support of your political views."

In fact, for Woodruff such "arrogance" (Greek hubris) is the opposite of reverence. This is why he thinks reverence needs to be reclaimed for society's sake. It is reverence not justice that separates true leaders from tyrants, he believes. Only reverence can maintain "an orderly system that is least vulnerable to hubris, to the violence of mind or action that comes from forgetting our common human limitations," forgetting especially that we are not in control.

There is much more in Reverence. Woodruff is a classics scholar, and the sections on reverence in ancient Greece and ancient China are a treat. But in both books, there is the matter of control and letting go of it. Both impel this reader to get out more, especially out of himself, to attend — reverently — to others, to go somewhere beautiful and wonder.

Rick Dietrich is the Pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Stranton, VA. For more from Rick log onto Theologic Al's Bar & Grill.