Gratitude: An Intellectual History is a book on an important topic that pays a careful reading. The impatient, or reviewers with deadlines, can read an Introduction that deftly summarizes Western civilizations’ views on gratitude in very few pages. The gourmet can sup deeply into chapter one and chapter two, well-researched enough to withstand the palate and spicy enough to stay fascinating.
As with all “live readings” this takes place in real time. I blog as I read. The posts are not edited at all or only lightly.
One can almost feel the joy in Leithart’s prose as he turns to the early Christians. Here at last he has come to his people, his thesis, and the book is taking off.
I think the first-century church is relevant for today, but not because we can go back in time and be early Christians. God has put His people in this time and we must learn to stand in it, but there are lessons to be gleaned from the attitude of the Church in its infancy. The early Church spoke out about evils in Rome, but were happily Roman. The Church was in Rome, and Roman, but not uncritical. The Church took unpopular stands against gladiatorial games, Roman theater, and government. They refused even the most “reasonable” compromise with Roman civil religion. Second, the Church wanted to be good citizens. Some Christians courted martyrdom, but most appreciated Roman law and peace.
They were Christian first, Roman second, and this was shocking to the Roman mind. Christians were ingrates to the highest obligation a Roman could imagine. Rome gave peace, the Christians refused to sacrifice to the genius of Rome. Rome gave law, the Christians used it, but then refused to worship the Emperor was the executive source of that law. Christians were impious ingrates, as far as the state was concerned functional atheists. Caesar did not care who else was lord, if a citizen was willing to say Caesar was lord.
Christians were subjects of King Jesus before they were citizens of Rome. Leithart cautions that Christians did not make giving unidirectional, all giving from agape, but that Christians did change the calculative aspects of gratitude. Since Leithart focusses his comparison of Christians mostly with the Romans (where i think he has the attitude right) and not with the Greeks (where I am not so sure) my concerns with the thesis are lessened.
Christians were commanded to be a thankful people and extended their thankfulness to Rome, but they had their priorities. A Christian had to serve God before family, God before Caesar, God before a friend. Christians were eager to be thankful, but their thankfulness poured out a superabundance of love toward God. No man could claim to be the ultimate source of any good thing, not even Caesar, so no man could claim to be owed ultimate gratitude.
Leithart begins, as Christianity does, with the ancient religion of the Jews. Jews were commanded to be grateful and celebrated feasts of thanksgiving. Israelis were commanded to care for the poor more than any other nation around them. This concern for the poor was not limited to poor Jews, but was extended to the stranger and sojourner. Critics of Old Testament ethics should pause and note how revolutionary such commands really were and how difficult they were to express in the limited ethical vocabulary of the Old Testament period.
God taught the Jews the vocabulary of social justice slowly, organically, and persistently.
Why? The Jews were reminded that they were once strangers and sojourners and God had liberated and given them a home. Out of gratitude to God, they were to treat the “other” as God had treated them! God is partner if every gift. God does not want sacrifice for Himself, but gifts to the poor. If the poor are “blessed,” then the giver will be blessed by God. It is God who stands behind every loan to a poor man, every gift of food to a widow, and the cost of the education of an orphan. The poor, so long as they are poor, are not commanded to repay.
Jews were givers when they could give, but under no obligation to give when they could not. Ancient Jews were not unwilling to return blessing for blessing, they wished to do so, but God was the ultimate source for blessing and payment for blessing! You could only give a man what God had given you and if the man could not pay (due to poverty or evil will), then God would pay you both back: good to good, evil for evil. A good man wished to repay, but the God of Israel only commanded gift, not the repayment.
This is key insight into the character of the Faith. Leithart sees a falling back from the best part of Jewish revelation about giving during the period of time after Malachi prophesied. He sees Jewish thought as becoming Hellenized in the “interTestamental” period. For those Christians who take the Apocrypha as part of Scripture (at one level or another), Leithart’s argument is disturbing. For example, Sirach commands giving to to the just and hopes for repayment. The apocryphal books do not command putting hope for benefit in men, so perhaps this concern is overblown.
Outside the Apocrypha writers such as Philo and Josephus express fully Roman views of gratitude. By the time of Jesus, the poor Jew was all too often expected to repay and be grateful for the loan.
By this standard, “Jesus was an ingrate.” And with that explosive bit of prose, Leithart shows that Jesus restored the Old Testament teachings on the relationship between giving, God, and receiving. Jesus wanted a person to give to men out of the good gifts of God in order to get good gifts from God. Leithart cautions against an important mistake: Christians are happy to get gifts, but we want them from God not each other. To the unworldly super-saints that would come later Jesus’ promises of Paradise seemed vulgar. We should love God for His own sake.
And of course that is true, but God Himself is the greatest gift of all. Too see God is to experience joy so epic that one must be born again to stand it! Christians give to the poor to lay up a Heavenly bank account! The prosperity teachers are right: we do well by doing good. The prosperity teachers are vile: they expect to do well from their congregants and not from God. They want all repayment now and they will get all they will get in this life.
If not careful in the age to come, they will watch over a gulf as the children of God feast and they starve.
Paul works out the theology of thanksgiving seen in the life of Jesus. Paul has the holy people of God sanctify all things by thanksgiving. As a kingdom of priests all we touch is holy if we thank God for it. All things are God’s, He is the maker, and when His people return thanks for any of His creatures, then that creation becomes holy: set apart for God and His people. There can be no debts in this Kingdom, because nobody but God can owe any debt but thanks!
Give a Christian money and he will thank God for the money. Give a Christian liberty and he will thank God for the liberty. A Christian cannot contract a debt, because the Christian only owes God thanksgiving, constant thanksgiving. What of the giver? Ah, for the Christian there is greater joy in giving than in receiving, because the giver gets to give thanks through the tangible gift.
Paul and the Church could recognize a hierarchy of gifts: some spiritual and some material. Paul was an apostle so gifted by God with authority, but this authority is from God and not from Paul. We obey God in the apostle, not the apostle. We owe reverence to the Word of God and not to the preacher. The gift of preaching is given so the preacher can preach.
We love the preacher, we do not obey him. We obey only God in the Word of the minister. Christianity made every individual count, but it did not do so by making the bottom count more than the top of the social pyramid. Instead, Christianity replaced the social pyramid with a globe of obligations of love. Looked at one way, the poor man is greater than the rich man: he gets to receive. Looked at another way the rich man is greater than the poor man: he gets the greater blessing of giving.
The fullness of this vision will, of course, only be seen in Paradise, but the Kingdom is breaking into our social reality now. This is an exciting truth and I have only summarized the beauty of this chapter and attempted as I read to apply it to myself. I owe no man. I owe only God. I must love each man. God will work justice.
Maranatha!
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