How Christianity Changed the Way Thank
Photo by Edvard Alexander Rølvaag on Unsplash
Last year, I wrote about how the praise of God transforms the world. I said that praise is not merely something that we do, but that everything in the cosmos does through us. This infuses a depth to the material world that might escape even many materialists. Praise, therefore, ought to transform our perception of the material world around us.
I got to appreciate this transformation a lot more after listening to an interview with Peter Leithart by Ken Myers of the Mars Hill Audio Journal (you can listen to this interview by downloading the Mars Hill Audio app). That interview covered Leithart’s 2014 book Gratitude: An Intellectual HIstory.
It was this passage that grabbed my attention
Since all things are good and all are to be received with thanks, all things are gifts from the Creator. By giving thanks for all that comes to hand, the Christian correctly identifies the character of created things as created gifts. For Paul, thanksgiving has a performative effect on the things received. Receiving God’s gifts with thanks does not merely identify them as gifts but also sanctifies them, consecrates them as holy things. The world is sanctified made holy through thanks.
Another fascinating aspects of this book is Leithart’s narrative of the reduction of thanks to an internal private feeling. This privatisation of gratitude, Leithart argued, plastered over the way gratitude in the ancient world had an inextricably political dimension. Gratitude, Leithart suggested, was a way in which a king asserted authority over his subjects, and that the lack of gratitude to the king sowed the seeds of subversion. Gratitude and thanks, therefore, turned the one giving thanks into the subject or slave of the one being thanked.
Leithart suggested that the Christian faith changed this power dynamic of thanks by inserting God as a party to this relationship, leading all to acknowledge God as the source of all good gifts (as Paul writes), and thus the proper person to which we owe our thanks when we pray. This insertion of Himself as a party to that equation thereby acts as an equaliser between the human parties.
Moving outside the scope of the book, we also have to ask what becomes of the link between thanks and hierarchy? On the surface, it would seem that God’s insertion into our relations of gratitude-induced enslavement keeps the hierarchical relationship itself intact, and only shifts the register of enslavement from human-human to human-divine. Indeed, Scripture seems to attest to this hierarchy, especially given that Paul explicitly spoke of the economy of redemption as “being freed and enslaved to God” (Rom 6:22)
The major difference in this economy, however, is that God’s enslavement inverts the hierarchy, whereby he “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, taking on our likeness” (Phil 2:7). In other words, the master we thank is not one who lords it over us. Instead, the Lord takes his place among the slaves, and subordinating Himself to the slaves by accepting the death of slaves.
In short, our thanks not only santcifies the world but also affirms the hierarchical relationship between ourselves and the Lord, who sets in train the race to the lowest place. We who follow the Lord of Lords must follow him there.
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