Wonder, Curiosity, and Reading Scripture Like a Child

Thank you, Gordy—that was really lovely and kind. He did fail to mention one very important fact: we became relatives a few years ago when I adopted a puppy from his dogs. I’m pretty sure that makes us family, and I appreciate it.

I also apologize for the delay earlier. I seem to have a special effect on computers, and it’s been particularly powerful today. Both my laptop beforehand and this computer just now kept lagging and skipping letters as I typed. Why do I mention this? Because I honestly have no idea if the slideshow that eventually appeared is the one I thought I made. So I do have something written down, but if there ends up being a need for freestyling, I’ll be creative.

Today, though, the “visuals” are mostly words—so apologies in advance.

Wonder, Philosophy, and Scripture

I want to start with a passage from Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus. Socrates is talking with a young mathematician who’s troubled because he can’t define knowledge with the same precision he can give to mathematical concepts. As he struggles and works with Socrates to bring his ideas out, he finally says:

“By the gods, Socrates, I am lost in wonder when I think of all these things. Sometimes, when I regard them, it really makes my head swim.”

I love translations of ancient Greek where they suddenly sound very conversational—“my head swims,” “I feel like I might be mad.” However it’s phrased, I think we know that feeling.

Socrates replies:

“This feeling you have of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.”

I can relate to Theaetetus. I often find myself lost in wonder, my head swimming with ideas. Sometimes that experience is energizing and joyful. Sometimes it’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s almost compulsive—like, I’m not enjoying this, but I can’t put it down. And occasionally it’s distressing, especially when the stakes of the thing I’m wondering about feel high—when it matters whether I get to an answer, or what that answer turns out to be.

According to Plato, in all those cases, the experience of wonder is a sign of being a philosopher—and that’s good news for me professionally.

This series is called The Wonder of Scripture, which I find wonderfully convenient. The title suggests that scripture itself is a source of wonder and therefore a starting point for doing philosophy. When we engage scripture with wonder, we are doing something deeply philosophical.

Today I want to think about what it means to engage the scriptures with a sense of philosophical wonder.

Wonder as Puzzlement

The Greek word Plato uses for “wonder” can also be translated as “puzzlement.” Aristotle has this in mind when he writes:

“It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize, wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities and then, by gradual progression, raising questions about the greater matters too. Now he who wonders and is perplexed feels that he is ignorant. It was to escape ignorance that men studied philosophy.”

Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have continued to theorize about wonder. Often they understand it as a form of curiosity. In many contexts, wonder and curiosity are treated as intellectual virtues—though sometimes curiosity can also be an intellectual vice (“curiosity killed the cat”).

Contemporary philosophers, especially those working in dialogue with cognitive science, tend to see curiosity as part of our biological makeup, aimed at helping us survive and learn. They sometimes identify it with a “mammalian seeking system” that, as one theorist says, provides “the very conditions of knowledge itself.”

To bring this down to earth:

• Think of a kitten discovering a popsicle for the first time—eyes huge, nose forward, tiny paws reaching.
• Or my son, Elliot, the first time he tasted Italian gelato and said, very indignantly, “How come no one told me about this before?”

In both cases, curiosity has been activated.

Some theorists suggest that intellectual curiosity—the kind that drives us to solve a puzzle that has nothing obvious to do with survival—is specifically human. They connect it to dopamine-based seeking systems that kick in when we perceive a gap, a mismatch between the way we expect the world to be and how some part of it is actually presenting itself.

That perceptible “gap” can feel pleasant or unpleasant or anywhere in between. Sometimes it’s fun—like a puzzle on a lazy afternoon. Sometimes it’s agitating—an uncomfortable sense that we need to know something. Either way, we feel the urge to close the information gap.

And that’s one form of wonder.

There’s also a more joyful form: wonder as awe, as delight in something new or beautiful. When we feel safe and secure, we often enjoy encountering novelty. Newness catches us, engages us, and invites us to explore.

I think both of these are in view when we talk about the “wonder” of scripture:

• Scripture can puzzle us.
• Scripture can delight us, surprise us, and expand our vision.

Making Space for Wonder in a Fast-Moving World

As I thought about this presentation—when I was, if you’ll forgive me, wondering about wonder—I realized how seldom our fast-moving world actually encourages us to sit with our curiosities.

We live in a culture that values answers and actions. We’re under a lot of pressure to live in:

• the knowing,
• the deciding,
• the doing,

and not in the questioning or the pausing or the wondering.

But there is at least one demographic that still tends to have more space for wonder: children.

So I went to my children for help. I asked each of them to imagine they had an opportunity to sit down with Heavenly Father and ask Him one question—and He would give them the answer. Then I said, “I’ll give you some time. Think about what your question would be.”

I’m going to invite you to do the same for just a moment:

If you could ask Heavenly Father one question and know He’d answer right there, what would you ask?

We often struggle with this more than we expect. Two things tend to happen:

1. We worry about finding the “right” question. We wonder what question would sound impressive or faithful enough.
2. Instead of paying attention to what we genuinely wonder about, we start trying to guess what answer would earn praise.

My children did exactly this at first. And I strongly suspect most of us do it too.

But the point of this little exercise is to notice:

• What do you actually wonder about?
• And if you haven’t wondered for a while—because you’ve been so busy knowing the right answers and doing all the things—can you reconnect with the last time you genuinely wondered?

You don’t have to share your question, of course. Let me share my kids’ questions instead.

What My Kids Wonder About

Gus (13)
My oldest, Gus, said he would ask:

“Were you always all-knowing, or did you have to learn things at some point?”

I loved this question. I had so many thoughts. But I deliberately decided not to answer it for him. This exercise was supposed to create space for his wonder, not immediately close it down with Mom’s opinion.

As a parent and as an authority figure in his life, if I immediately say, “Here’s what I think,” his natural inclination might be to defer to me. If I rush in with a neat answer, I may unintentionally steal that interior space where he’s wrestling, thinking, and growing with God.

So I said almost nothing, and quietly rejoiced that he’s thinking about these things.

Tommy (11)
My next child, Tommy, did not like the question. I let him sit with it for a while, and then he explained his concern. He said, in essence:

“I don’t feel like I should be telling God to give me answers right this minute. What if it’s better that I don’t know that answer yet? I want to know what God wants me to know.”

So he said he’d rather ask the question in prayer and leave it up to God whether to answer it now or later—or to redirect him to something else he needs.

This was a very fair, very mature concern that completely undermined my original experiment.

So I rephrased the question:

“What is something you would like to know eventually—in God’s time—but that you’d really like to know?”

Then the floodgates opened.

He started talking about everything he’s been hearing about the Second Coming and prophecy. His questions finally boiled down to something like:

“Is every little detail part of the plan that you know is going to happen? Or do you know the big things and how things will turn out, but not the little things that are not so significant?”

He riffed on this for a while, connecting different prophecies and current events. I listened and thought, “What exactly are they teaching in Primary and Young Men’s these days?” But again: there was a lot of genuine wonder there.

Elliot (8)
My eight-year-old, Elliot, answered almost casually. I loved that. For him, imagining sitting down and talking with Heavenly Father felt very natural.

His question was:

“Why did you make my body look like this?”

And honestly, if I were that cute, I’d be wondering the same thing.

Anna (5¾)
Finally, I asked my five-year-old, Anna—although she would correct me and say she is five and three quarters. Anna’s answer was very clear: she refused to give me a question.

Every time I revisited the idea over a few days, her answer was essentially, “Don’t want to.”

We’ll come back to Anna later.

A Scripture I Wonder About: Mosiah 3:19

You might also wonder what I would ask. I have many questions. But given the theme of this series, I wanted to focus on a scripture I wonder about—one I keep coming back to.

The scripture my husband suggested (because I talk about it to him constantly) is Mosiah 3:19:

“For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.”

Sometimes this passage inspires awe and comfort, and I’ve experienced that. But I’ve also experienced the other kind of wonder—the puzzling, unsettling kind: I’m not sure this is fitting together for me.

Here’s why.

Philosophy Background: The “Natural Man”

My academic work is in early modern philosophy—roughly the 17th and 18th centuries in the Western tradition. It’s a period of enormous change:

• The scientific method is taking shape,
• The natural world is increasingly studied somewhat independently from religious commitments,
• Global travel, trade, and colonization are accelerating,
• Moral and political philosophers are scrambling to make sense of new, complex realities.

One of the debates many early modern philosophers engaged was the idea of a “state of nature”:

• Is there such a thing as an original human condition prior to society?
• And if so, what were humans like in that state? What is “human nature”?

Thomas Hobbes famously argued that in the state of nature, without a powerful external authority, humans are at war with one another, living in “continual fear and danger of violent death,” and that human life in such a condition is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

If that’s your picture of “natural” humanity, then “the natural man is an enemy to God” fits neatly. Natural = violent, selfish, and chaotic. Of course that’s not what God wants.

I suspect that even people who have never heard of Hobbes are influenced by this kind of picture when they hear phrases like “natural man.” It can sound like: “Your basic nature is bad. God wants you to become something entirely different.”

But I don’t think Hobbes is right about human nature.

Humans are, by nature, deeply social creatures. David Hume—another early modern philosopher, and the one I work on most—argued that humans have natural benevolence and empathy toward one another. These aren’t perfect. They get stressed and distorted when we face scarcity or competition. But our “natural” condition isn’t pure war. We’re wired for connection and cooperation.

So I already come to Mosiah 3:19 with a philosophical suspicion of the idea that “natural human” automatically equals “bad human.”

And then the scripture itself deepens my puzzle, because it doesn’t just say, “Stop being natural.” It says, “Put off the natural man and become as a child.”

What is more natural than a child?

So here’s the tension that generates my wonder:

• The verse calls the natural man “an enemy to God.”
• Then it says we must become as a child.
• But children are, in an obvious sense, the most “natural” humans of all.

So what exactly is being called “natural” here? And what exactly is God asking us to put off?

That’s the kind of incongruity that activates my philosophical curiosity.

Letting Scripture Become a Puzzle (On Purpose)

This is where wonder lives: in the gap between what we expect and what the text actually says.

If we rush past that gap, we miss something important. Sometimes that gap feels delightful and energizing. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable. Sometimes it feels scary—especially with sacred texts we love and trust. We may worry, “What if I can’t resolve this? What if I won’t like the answer?”

Because this can feel threatening, we sometimes shut down wonder instead of making space for it.

I want to suggest a few steps I try to take when I meet a puzzling scripture. These steps are my attempt to embrace wonder rather than escape from it.

Step 1: Slow Down and Ask Every Question

First, I take my time reading and rereading the verse itself. Not because I expect to find every answer in one verse, but because I want to get very clear on my questions.

With Mosiah 3:19, I went line by line and simply wrote down every question that came to mind—no matter how small or strange:

• What exactly is “the natural man”?
• In what sense is the natural man an “enemy” to God?
• What does it mean that this has been true “from the fall of Adam”?
• What is the role of “yielding to the enticings of the Holy Spirit”?
• What does “becoming a saint” actually mean here?
• Why “as a child”? What aspects of a child are we supposed to emulate?
• What does it mean to be “willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict”?
• How does this fit with God’s love and desire for our joy?

The list got long very quickly. For almost every phrase, there was at least one interesting question, and usually several sub-questions.

The point of this is not to create a to-do list of questions I must answer one by one. That would be utterly overwhelming.

The point is to prime my attention. Now, when I move on to the next step, I know which themes and words I want to watch for.

Step 2: Read the Verse in Its Context

With my questions in mind, I then read the surrounding text—in this case, all of King Benjamin’s sermon.

Because I’ve already looked closely at Mosiah 3:19, I’m now more alert to repeated phrases and patterns in the broader sermon. I’m looking especially for:

• words that repeat (like “children,” “hearts,” “change”),
• images that recur (birth, becoming a child of Christ),
• and any structures or patterns that help frame the verse.

One major thing stands out: King Benjamin talks about children and birth a lot.

• Christ will come as a child.
• We must become as little children.
• “The natural man” is contrasted with becoming “a child.”
• After the sermon, the people experience a “mighty change of heart” and speak of being “born of God.”
• They enter a covenant and are called “the children of Christ, his sons and his daughters.”

Mosiah 5:7 captures this beautifully:

“Because of the covenant which ye have made ye shall be called the children of Christ, his sons and his daughters; for behold, this day he hath spiritually begotten you; for ye say that your hearts are changed through faith on his name; therefore ye are born of him and have become his sons and his daughters.”

So the contrast in Mosiah 3:19 is not between “natural child” and “spiritual adult,” as if our childlike nature were the problem. Instead, the trajectory of the sermon is:

• from a certain “natural” way of being human,
• back into the childlike posture that is proper to disciples of Christ,
• where we are spiritually begotten and sustained by Him.

So now my question shifts:

• Maybe the problem isn’t “human nature” as such.
• Maybe “the natural man” refers to something else that has become “natural” to us in a fallen world.

To explore that further, I bring in another kind of context.

Step 3: Bring in Other Knowledge (Carefully)

The next thing I do is connect the scripture with other things I’ve learned—in this case, from research on childhood development. One book that has been especially helpful is Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby.

Gopnik argues that babies and young children are, in some ways, more open-minded and aware than adults:

• They have a “beginner’s mind,” open to everything because they’re building their sense of reality from the ground up.
• Adult brains tend to filter out anything “irrelevant” to our goals. Children haven’t fully learned that filtering yet.
• They are consumed with curiosity about causes. If you’ve ever heard a child ask “Why?” seventeen times in a row, you know this.

She compares babies to travelers in a foreign country:

When you don’t know the language or the customs, you notice everything. You don’t yet know which details are “unimportant,” so your attention is broad and flexible. There’s a kind of wonder built into that state.

Adults, in contrast, are very good at narrowing their focus:

• What’s on my to-do list?
• What’s the next deadline?
• What’s the practical action here?

That’s incredibly useful for getting things done. But it can also make us blind to parts of reality that aren’t obviously connected to our immediate plans.

So, if King Benjamin is inviting us to “become as a child,” maybe part of what’s at stake is learning to:

• remain open,
• remain teachable,
• keep our capacity for wonder alive,

even as we grow into adult responsibilities.

Children:

• become intensely focused on one object (the toy in their hand),
• then look around to gather context,
• and very quickly look to other people—especially caregivers—to interpret what they’re seeing.

That last part is crucial.

Reading Scripture Like a Child

Out of all of this, I’ve tried to articulate a kind of “childlike method” for approaching puzzling scriptures.

1. Focus closely on the verse

Like a baby staring at a single toy, we start by letting one verse have our full attention. We notice every word. We let questions multiply. We feel the pull of, “Why is it phrased like that? What does that mean?”

2. Look around for context

Like a toddler exploring the room, we then look around:

• the immediate chapter,
• the whole sermon or book,
• other scriptures that use similar language or images.

We look at how the verse sits in its environment.

3. Make connections to what we’ve already learned

As we gain experience, we naturally connect new things to things we’ve learned before. So we can ask:

• How does this verse interact with what I know about human nature, agency, covenants?
• How does it resonate with things I’ve read from philosophers, psychologists, theologians, or poets?

This doesn’t replace scripture; it helps us hear scripture more fully.

4. Look to other people

Children constantly look to caregivers’ faces to interpret the world. In the same way, part of our scripture study can and should be social:

• Talk with trusted friends, family members, teachers, leaders.
• Read commentary from other Saints and from broader Christian or Jewish traditions.
• Listen to how others have wrestled with the same passage.

Human beings are one of the main “contexts” God has given us for learning.

5. Most importantly: look to God

And above all, we turn our faces toward our Heavenly Parents.

Gopnik talks about babies learning the “statistics of love”: they notice that when they smile, their caregiver smiles back; when they cry, their caregiver looks concerned and comforts them. Over time, they build up a lived sense of “this is what love is like in practice.”

I think something similar can happen spiritually. As we bring our questions, fears, and confusions to God—honestly, vulnerably, repeatedly—we learn the “statistics” of divine love:

• What it feels like to be comforted,
• What it feels like when an answer comes,
• What it feels like when an answer does not come yet,
• How God shows up for us over time.

Prayer is often not a vending machine. It’s not “insert righteousness, receive answer.” It’s a relationship. It’s more like a conversation with a loving Parent than a transaction with a customer-service chatbot.

Which brings me back to Anna.

Anna’s “I Don’t Want To” and Vulnerable Wonder

Why didn’t Anna want to ask a question?

She is, of all my children, especially concerned about getting things “right.” She’s still very young, but already worries about mistakes and about being wrong.

Being asked, “What would you ask Heavenly Father?” backed her into a space where she felt totally exposed. There was no clear “right” answer, and that made her deeply uncomfortable.

So she shut down. “Don’t want to.”

I think many of us do something similar with God and with scripture. The vulnerability of not knowing, the vulnerability of wondering, can feel scary. So we default to:

• quick answers,
• borrowed certainty,
• or avoidance.

But wonder—especially the puzzling, unresolved kind—is one of the places where genuine growth and genuine relationship can happen, if we’re willing to be vulnerable with God.

Gopnik notes that babies only learn the statistics of love because they are willing to express their actual feelings—joy, fear, hunger, frustration—and trust that someone will meet them there. Likewise, if we only ever come to God with tidy, “correct” thoughts, we may never discover how He responds to our raw confusion or pain.

Back to Mosiah 3:19

Let me circle back briefly to Mosiah 3:19.

I don’t have a final, perfect solution to every question that verse raises. But wonder has helped me see at least this much:

• “The natural man” here is not simply “human nature” or “being embodied” or “being a child.”
• In context, what needs to be “put off” looks more like:
  • complacency,
  • pride,
  • self-justification,
  • and a refusal to yield to the Spirit.

The invitation is to become “as a child”—not childish, but:

• open,
• teachable,
• curious,
• willing to trust and submit in a relationship of love.

Children aren’t perfect. They throw tantrums and spill things and break toys. But they are also remarkably willing to question, to explore, to admit they don’t know, and to reach out for help.

I’m starting to think that part of “putting off the natural man” is putting off the hardened, defensive, over-controlling part of ourselves that refuses to wonder, refuses to be wrong, refuses to be held.

And “becoming as a child” includes reclaiming a holy kind of wonder—about God, about ourselves, about scripture—inside a relationship of trust.

The Market vs. God’s Rhythms

I’m convinced one of the greatest challenges to 21st-century discipleship is the massive gap between:

• what the market wants from us, and
• what God wants from us.

The market wants us:

• constantly distracted,
• constantly overstimulated,
• perpetually entertained,
• multitasking ourselves into exhaustion,

so that at the end of the day, all we can do is collapse in front of another screen and absorb more of the world’s values.

God, by contrast, needs a people who:

• can pay attention,
• can sit still,
• can endure boredom and monotony,
• can tolerate not having all the answers yet.

Because sacrament meeting is often boring. Ministering is often monotonous. The arc of redemption is long. God’s work and glory span the eternities. His timing is not “skip ad in 5 seconds.”

We need new hearts:

• with longer attention spans,
• with holier desires,
• with a more eternal perspective.

And scripture teaches that those hearts are given to us in and through Christ.

We cannot manufacture them ourselves. If you’ve ever tried to simply “fix your heart” by sheer willpower, you know this. Our part is to keep showing up to the daily appointment where hearts are changed—that appointment is prayerful, wondering, scripture-soaked relationship with Christ.

Closing Witness

So here is where all of this lands for me:

• Wonder—even unsettling, uncomfortable wonder—is not a sign that something has gone wrong with our faith.
• It can be the birthplace of deeper discipleship.
• When we bring that wonder, honestly and vulnerably, into conversation with scripture, with trusted people, and most of all with God, our roots grow deeper.

I’ve seen that in small ways in my own life. When my husband lost his job earlier this year, I did not collapse into the panic I might have felt a year or two ago. Instead, my thoughts almost instinctively ran down a new channel that had been slowly carved by many small prayers and much time in scripture. I found myself turning more naturally to memories of God’s past care and to trust in His future provision.

That didn’t happen overnight. It happened one wondering, vulnerable, slightly uncomfortable conversation with God at a time.

I don’t know whether the particular style of prayer and scripture engagement I’ve described will work for you the way it’s beginning to work for me. But I do know this:

• Our relationship with our Heavenly Parents is real.
• Our curiosity and wonder—about scripture, about doctrine, about life—can be part of that relationship.
• When we bring our questions to Them with childlike openness, even when the questions are uncomfortable, They meet us there in love.

I am grateful for that love, for the gift of wonder, and for the hope that we can grow deep roots by the living water of Christ.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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