309. Wonderful Story of Love

The Story Behind the Hymn

"Wonderful Story of Love" was written, words and music both, by John Merritte Driver, a Methodist Episcopal minister born in 1858 in Jefferson County, Illinois. Sources differ slightly on the exact date of first publication — some point to Driver's own 1885 collection Songs of the Soul, while others place its wider circulation closer to 1892 — but the hymn had clearly taken hold in gospel-song circles by the close of the nineteenth century.

Driver was, by the standards of gospel songwriters of his era, unusually varied in his output. Beyond hymn texts and a handful of tunes, he also wrote works of fiction, history, and travel over the course of his ministry. "Wonderful Story of Love" stands as his best-remembered contribution to congregational song, and it is built on a device Driver leaned on deliberately: near-total repetition.

Every one of the three stanzas opens with the identical phrase, "Wonderful story of love," repeated twice more within the verse itself before moving into new material. The refrain compresses the same phrase down further still, into a chain of exclamations — "Wonderful! Wonderful!" — that functions almost like a shout of astonishment rather than a statement.

That repetition is the hymn's whole argument: rather than explaining the gospel story point by point, it treats the story itself as something to be turned over and said again, the way one might repeat good news simply for the pleasure of hearing it once more. The final stanza extends the story past Calvary into the promised rest of the mansions above, closing the hymn on the same rapturous chorus its opening stanza asked to hear again.