Gratitude to God: The Heart of Christian Formation

by Kent Dunnington, Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung (Foreword)

Is gratitude the path to a good life filled with happiness?

The positive psychology movement promotes gratitude as one of the keys to a good life--a posture that resonates with Christians seeking to live faithfully. But does our modern view of gratitude align with the experience, practice, and goals of gratitude described in Scripture?

Kent Dunnington argues that our understanding of gratitude must be reclaimed by Christian theology if we are to experience our lives as evidence of God's generosity. Recognizing that gratitude to God often feels less natural than gratitude to others, he invites readers to walk with him on his journey to cultivate gratitude, even in seasons of suffering and lament. Along the way, Dunnington traces how cultural understandings of gratitude have shifted and examines the vices that block gratitude, including resentment, self-loathing, pride, apathy, and distraction.

With a foreword by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, this book offers a robust theological and philosophical perspective on gratitude to God. It invites readers to see gratitude as the heart of spiritual formation, offering practices for growing in gratitude to God to experience life--trials and all--as gift and favor.

232 pages, Paperback

Published May 26, 2026

Reviews

[Robert D. Cornwall]

Growing up, I learned the importance of two words/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.

The issue of whether one is grateful to God is a question that Kent Dunnington raises in his aptly titled book "Gratitude to God: The Heart of Christian Formation." The subtitle is an important signal of what the author is up to with this book. Dunnington is a professor of Philosophy at Biola University, a Christian university located in Southern California. While there are books written by Christians that speak about the value of gratitude on a horizontal, person-to-person level, Dunnington has something different in mind with this book. Central to the message of Dunnington's book is the question of human dependence on God and whether we recognize/affirm dependence. At the same time, he acknowledges the challenges that face us as we consider what it means to be grateful to God. Showing gratitude to God can include prayer, but it is more than simply saying thank you to God in a prayer. As the subtitle notes, 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 --- thus the importance of spiritual formation.

With Chapter 1 serving as an introduction focusing on 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 Positive Psychology. 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, seeing oneself as being a beneficiary 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, 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 title "What Exactly Is Gratitude?" In answering that question, he wants the reader to understand that gratitude is something that must be learned and practiced.

We move on to Part 2, which carries the intriguing title "The Pitfalls of Gratitude to God." Chapter 5 is titled "The Analogy View of Gratitude to God." In other words, how is gratitude to God like other forms of gratitude? As he demonstrates, there are analogies that work, but not completely. There is something different here. With that as a start, we turn to "Strange Giver, Strange Gifts" (Chapter 6). The first part of the 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 had a discussion of the nature and the challenges in defining gratitude, we can get to "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). These are vices that obscure the benefactor (God, those that obscure ourselves, and those that obscure the gift. In regard to the vices discussed in the chapter, he offers 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 deal with them, we can grow in gratitude. Having addressed vices, in Chapter 9, he discusses "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 offers, 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 that has affected his ability to show gratitude to God. He points out that suffering is often a barrier to gratitude to God. In addressing this barrier, he rules out theodicies, which I appreciated. Many are attempted, but none seem to work. So theodicies won't help. What he turns to instead is 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, 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, gratitude grows as one acknowledges one's dependence on God.

I think we all struggle with gratitude in general, but more specifically gratitude to God. Kent Dunnington reminds us in Gratitude to God that this is common. For various reasons, many of us, myself 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.

[Timothy Koch]

Full disclosure: I have signed a contract to write a book on "gratitude," thus I am particularly primed to find this topic fascinating.

This book was fantastic (in spite of my few objections). Gratitude is difficult to define. There are so many components at play. Is it an emotion, and action, an obligation? Is it a one-time event or a durative property? What, exactly, are the component parts of gratitude?

Dunnington is a philosophy professor at Biola University and he expertly tackled these questions. He even addressed them in a way that I could understand. His clarity in writing is a skill that cannot be overstated. Dunnington also did a wonderful job of explaining that gratitude TO GOD is not like gratitude to other people. He explains in great detail how this complicates our lives of gratitude (particularly in light of Scriptures exhortation that we give thanks in all circumstances). His refrain that God is a "stranger giver who gives strange gifts" was perfect.

I cannot do justice to this book in this review. Here are some things I learned that I will be chewing on for a long long time.
1.) Justice requires us to become grateful people. We know this intuitively and a vestige of this truth is found in our language when we say, "Much obliged."
2.) The Bible is far more concerned about our gratitude to God than the gratitude we owe one another. (This is this greatest insight I hope to draw out in my own book—should it get written).
3.) Gratitude is the label for whatever counts as a proper response to another's generosity
4.) He—citing Peter Leithart—blames Adam Smith for the modern notion that gratitude is primarily an "emotion." Dunnington rightly opposes this idea, insisting that gratitude is primarily words and actions. By way of proof, he makes the simple observation that we train our children to say "Thank you." We don't run around telling our children to "Feel grateful."
5.) The observation that "pride is the concern [of someone] to ACHIEVE an identity" whereas "gratitude is the glad readiness to RECEIVE an identity" is perhaps the most profound insight of his entire book.

My biggest critique of this book is (1) in spite of St. Paul explicitly identifying "baptism" as the manner in which one "puts on Christ", Dunnington backpacks all the way to Jonathan Edwards to find a framework for how Christians can "put on Christ." It's uncharacteristically unhelpful. My second biggest critique is his suspicious dismissal of 1st Article Gifts (clothing, shoes, food, drink, house, home) as legitimate things to be grateful for.

With that said, I really think this has been the most insightful theological book I've read in years. "Everything is Never Enough" by Jamieson remains the best theology book I've read this year, but I definitely LEARNED more from this Dunnington book.

This book should be on more people's radars. I worry it won't be. I worry I will be only a handful of people read and benefit from it. That's a shame, Dunnington has blessed the church with a good gift in this book. We should honor his work and read it.