GRATITUDE TO GOD: The Heart of Christian Formation. By Kent Dunnington. Foreword by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2026. Xi + 215 pages.
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.
Robert D. Cornwall
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.
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.
After addressing 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.
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.
This review originally appeared on BobCornwall.com.
Robert D. Cornwall is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Now retired from his ministry at Central Woodward Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) of Troy, Michigan, he serves as Minister-at-Large in Troy. He holds a Ph.D. in Historical Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and is the author of numerous books, including “Eating With Jesus: Reflections on Divine Encounters at the Open Eucharistic Table” and “Second Thoughts About Hell: Understanding What We Believe” coauthored with Ronald J. Allen. His blog Ponderings on a Faith Journey can be found here.
