Theological Inquiry Into Gratitude
Gratitude to God is at the heart of many religions. As an affirmation and recognition of the bond between giver and receiver, gratitude is central to the human-divine relationship. As long as people have believed in God, believers have sought ways to express gratitude and thanksgiving to this God, their ultimate giver. The joyful act of praising God is a thankfulness flowing nearly automatically from the recognition of divine gifts, and divinely inspired gratitude is foundational to human flourishing (Mathewes, 2014).
An ethic that is deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian doctrine, the word “thanks” and its various cognates (thankful, thankfulness, thanksgiving) appear over 150 times in the Hebrew scriptures and New Testament, and the practice of thanksgiving is a behavioral expression of GTG. In the most general sense, grateful affect comes from the recognition that creation is a gift of God and not a right, privilege, or accident (Wilson, 2015) occurring when the mind is turned toward contemplation of God's incomprehensible goodness. The Abrahamic traditions offer an account of how gratitude is affirmative of the human qualities that lend meaning and purpose to personal life and relational functioning, and an awareness of what one owes God for provision and even for life itself.
Beyond the Abrahamic faiths, all major world religions commend gratitude as a desirable human trait. Recognizing that there is a supernatural or superhuman provision of benefits and responding with grateful affect is one of the most common religious dispositions that believers in spiritual traditions are encouraged to develop. It would seem that gratitude to a superhuman agent is a nearly inevitable outcome of how the human mind conceives benefits that are not logically attributed to a human benefactor. This leads to some intriguing questions. Do our mental tools support the inference that benefits that cannot plausibly be attributed to human agency inevitably lead to an attribution of intentional benevolence to a divine or transcendent agent? What are the mechanisms by which people apportion credit to God for desired outcomes as opposed to human agency, or non-agency? As Schimmel (2004) points out, our natural tendency is to thank human benefactors, be grateful to them, and perhaps act toward them in a fawning manner, and to forget God’s role in the causal chain of benefaction.
Despite the centrality of gratitude in many of the world’s religions, very little psychological theory and research has explored the relationship between religiousness and this core virtue. More typically, gratitude has been empirically studied outside of the context of religion. Expressions of gratitude to God by athletes, politicians, celebrities, and other public figures are met with cynicism. How can modern social science research on gratitude to God inform decisions on how one should act and what type of character one should cultivate? Is gratitude to God a prerequisite for human flourishing? In what ways is spiritual ingratitude (the failure to acknowledge God as the ultimate giver) antithetical to flourishing?