Gratitude to God: The Heart of Christian Formation (Kent Dunnington) Review
Growing up, I was taught the
importance of two words or phrases: "please" and "thank
you." In other words, I learned that it was important to show gratitude
when you receive something, whether a gift or something similar. But what about
showing gratitude to God? Is that something we are apt to do, even as devout
believers? It might not be as easy or natural as we would like to believe; at
least that is the view of Kent Dunnington, a philosophy professor at Biola
University.
Kent Dunnington raises the question
of how we should understand the question of showing gratitude to God in his
aptly titled book Gratitude to God: The Heart of Christian Formation.
The book’s subtitle—The Heart of Christian Formation— is an important
signal of what the author is up to with this book. As I noted, Dunnington is a
professor of Philosophy at Biola University, a Christian university located in
Southern California. While other Christian authors have written books that
speak of the value of gratitude, they tend to focus on horizontal,
person-to-person relationships. In this book, Dunnington has something
different in mind. A central element of Dunnington’s message is the question of
human dependence on God, including whether we recognize/affirm our dependence.
At the same time, he acknowledges the challenges that face us as we consider
what it means to be grateful to God.
In his view, showing gratitude to
God can include prayer, but such prayer involves more than simply saying thank
you to God for the good things that happen to us. As the book’s subtitle suggests,
this is a book about Christian spiritual formation. By that, Dunnington means
the "process whereby one comes to image Jesus in his way of consistent
communion with God the Father through the Holy Spirit. So, Christian formation
is formation for relationship" (pp. 2-3). While Dunnington believes that
this is an important process, he admits his own struggles with expressing
gratitude to God. For him, this is a heart issue, which highlights the
importance of spiritual formation.
With Chapter 1 serving as an
introduction that addresses the question of "Who This Book Is For,"
the remainder of the fifteen chapters are organized in three parts. Part 1,
which contains three chapters, is titled "The Promise of Gratitude to
God." Part 2 is titled "The Pitfalls of Gratitude to God"
(chapters 6-7). Finally, chapters 8 to 15 form Part 3: "The Practice of
Gratitude to God."
Beginning in Part 1, the first of
the three chapters is titled "Why Be Grateful?" In answering this
question, Dunnington distinguishes what he is doing here from the field of Positive
Psychology. When it comes to expressing gratitude to God as a form of spiritual
formation, he suggests that this is not a question of happiness or developing
healthy traits. When he speaks of gratitude, he wants to dive deeper, focusing
on giving to God what God is due. That is, it involves seeing ourselves as
being beneficiaries of unmerited favor. Chapter 3 takes this a step further and
focuses on "Why Be Grateful to God Specifically?" Here is where he
distinguishes this book from other books on gratitude, which have their place.
He offers several reasons why this is true, including that God deserves our
gratitude and that such gratitude helps us flourish. Remember that he views
spiritual formation as formation of a relationship, and gratitude is an
expression of one's relationship with God. Then in chapter 4, he returns to the
definition of gratitude with a chapter titled "What Exactly Is
Gratitude?" In answering that question, he wants the reader to understand
that gratitude is something that must be learned and practiced. It isn’t an
innate behavior.
As we move on to Part 2, we
encounter a section that carries the intriguing title, "The Pitfalls of
Gratitude to God." Chapter 5 is titled "The Analogy View of Gratitude
to God." In other words, he invites us to consider how gratitude to God is
like other forms of gratitude. In this chapter, he seeks to demonstrate that
there are analogies that work as we seek to understand what expressing
gratitude to God involves; these analogies do fall short of fully describing
what it means to share our gratitude to God. With that as a start, we turn to
"Strange Giver, Strange Gifts" (Chapter 6). The first part of the chapter
title reminds us that God is different from us, which means that God's
generosity will be different since God's gifts are different from other gifts.
If we start with a human frame of reference, God's gifts will seem strange. The
final chapter in this section is titled "Natural and Graced Gratitude to
God" (Chapter 7). The discussion here focuses on two kinds of gratitude—natural
and spiritual—such that gratitude to God is of a different order.
Now that we have discussed the
nature of gratitude and the challenges involved in defining gratitude, we come
to the section titled "The Practice of Gratitude to God" (Part 3).
Remembering his own struggles with expressing gratitude to God, Dunnington
begins this section with a chapter titled "Familiar Foes: The Vices
Opposed to Gratitude to God" (Chapter 8). What he has in mind here are vices
that obscure the benefactor (God), those that obscure us, and those that
obscure the gift. Regarding the vices discussed in the chapter, he includes
resentment, pride, entitlement, self-loathing, greed, cynicism, apathy,
nostalgia, busyness, distraction, and forgetfulness. Having named these vices
and how they obscure gratitude, he writes that if we are willing to deal with
them, then we can grow in gratitude. Having addressed several particular vices
in Chapter 8, we turn in Chapter 9 to a discussion of "Putting Feelings in
Their Place: The Biblical Invention of Gratitude." In this chapter, he
contrasts the views of Seneca, Paul, and Adam Smith on how feelings relate to
gratitude. In dealing with feelings, he seeks to place his understanding, rooted
in Paul's teachings, in contrast to Seneca's "mere-action gratitude"
and Smith's "mere-feeling gratitude." Biblical gratitude, he suggests,
involves both action and feelings. From here we dive deeper into understanding
gratitude to God, beginning in Chapter 10: "Trinity: God's Gratitude to
God." In other words, how should we understand gratitude in the context of
God's inner personal relationship? This is a rather dense chapter, so I will
leave it to the reader to discover its riches. In Chapter 11, titled "Me,
Myself, and Christ," he deals with "The Anthropology of Gratitude to
God." Here he reminds us that this is not Aristotle's God who is the
unmoved mover. He roots theological anthropology in God's being, such that we
are created in the image of God. He writes that what he is doing here is
focusing on "the tight connection between gratitude to God and accepting
oneself as a gift from God" (p. 148). The following chapter is titled
"Beyond the Market: The Economics of Gratitude to God" (Chapter 12).
In this view of the economics of gratitude, Dunnington addresses questions of
reciprocity and expectation of return. Here he notes the difference between
generous giving without expectation of direct return and generosity without
expectation of return. While there may not be direct return, that does not mean
blessings do not accrue in other ways. He reminds us that the divine economy is
eternal, affecting things both here and now. The next chapter is, to me, an
important one. Titled "The Elephant in the Room," Chapter 13 deals
with "Suffering and Gratitude to God." In this chapter, he reveals
his own struggles with suffering and how the question of God and suffering has
affected his ability to show gratitude to God. He points out that suffering is
often a barrier to expressing gratitude to God. In addressing this barrier, he
rules out theodicies, which I appreciated. Many are attempted, but none seem to
work. Since, in his view, theodicies do not help, he turns instead to lament,
which is, in his view, the foundation for showing gratitude despite suffering.
While suffering can serve as a barrier for many to sharing gratitude to God,
sharing gratitude to God is still important to spiritual flourishing. Thus, in
Chapter 14 we turn to a conversation titled "In All Things: Learning How
to Be Blessed." Here he notes that religious people tend to be more
grateful on the whole than nonbelievers, largely because they understand
serendipitous occurrences to be providential rather than luck. He speaks here
of ways of tracking blessings or acts of gratitude, such as gratitude journals.
Though he acknowledges something Diana Butler Bass also acknowledges in her
book Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks, that what
appears may reflect being white and middle-class. But true blessings must be more
than middle-class benefits. As Jesus teaches, blessings involve being close to
God, to experience intimacy with God, which is the source of gratitude. The
final chapter is titled "Methods of Growth" (Chapter 15). Here he
offers a set of practical ways of growing in gratitude, starting with the
importance of friendship, gratitude journaling, and recognizing our personhood
in God. Drawing from the experiences of AA, he suggests that gratitude grows as
one acknowledges one's dependence on God.
I think we all struggle with
gratitude in general, but more specifically we struggle with offering gratitude
to God beyond, perhaps perfunctory prayers. We can sing about giving thanks
with grateful hearts, but how grateful are our hearts, especially when we deal
with suffering and the presence of evil in the world? Acknowledging these
questions, Kent Dunnington reminds us in his book Gratitude to God: The
Heart of Christian Formation that these struggles are commonplace. For
various reasons, many of us, me included, find it challenging to show gratitude
to God. It's not that we don't have reasons to be grateful. We simply find
ourselves unable to truly recognize the blessings that come from God and our
own dependence on God. May this book be of help in experiencing spiritual
formation that leads to recognition of what God, the strange giver of strange
gifts, offers.
Copies of Gratitude to God may be purchased at your favorite retailer, including my Amazon affiliate and my Bookshop.org affiliate.
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