HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Pity the poor atheist who feels grateful but finds no one to thank.

It’s different with us.
Thank God our Benefactor sought us out.
Thank God we know His Name.

The Hebrew scholar Bruce Waltke taught me the Psalms in the early 70s. Once in class he told how his son Jonathan had often to be interrupted while saying grace. The problem was Jonathan’s endless elaboration of particulars. First he would give thanks for the toast. Then he would offer thanks for the butter on the toast, followed, as night follows day, by the jam. The toast having yielded up its three spheres, he would then turn with relish to the eggs. Those key breakfast crucialities, the salt and pepper, were seldom forgotten.

I know now that the Jonathans of the world should never be reined in. Such men are rare. Let them be unleashed.

I was born in Atlanta and we enjoyed the local rituals. The Georgia-Georgia Tech freshman football game was always played on Thanksgiving Day. Furman Bisher was the Sports Editor of the Atlanta Journal. He was a prose stylist of a high order. As far as I know he never registered any special Christian conviction, though he always ended each column with ‘Selah.’ Every Thanksgiving he wrote a much anticipated piece on what he was thankful for. Furman Bisher had his 90th birthday this month. That column is in the Atlanta paper today.

My favorite all-time quote has to do with Thanksgiving. It comes from John Calvin, the French-Swiss theologian whose 500th we celebrate next year. Calvin wrote, “To be human is to be that part of the cosmos which responds to the goodness of God with gratitude.” One reason I find this exciting is because convincing definitions of the human are elusive. It’s harder than we think to determine just what Man is--especially when we stray outside the biblical framework. The Marxists insisted the key to the definition was economic; the Fascists, racial; the Freudians, psycho-sexual; and so on. They were wrong, of course. But Calvin gets to the heart of it.

Scripture teaches that Man is a fallen image bearer who can only be rescued by a Wounded Healer. I am grateful for that rescue. I wish I were so learned that I could claim to have discovered the Calvin quote in the primary sources. I did not. It was in a book called Philosophers who Believe and the reference was cited by Nicholas Woltersdorf, the retired philosopher at Yale. He insisted that he was writing not as a philosopher and not even as a Christian particularly, but as the father of a son who died. He lost his 25 year old in a mountain climbing accident in Austria. In the teeth of the sorrow he was grappling with the question, “Is God still good, and am I still grateful?” Dostoyevsky called man the “ungrateful biped.” Calvin’s point was that if we sink below gratitude for God’s goodness, we sink below the level of the human. We humans are a product of design, and we were designed to give thanks to God.

Jane and I send Thanksgiving Greetings from the old Hungarian capital.
They don’t mark the date here, but we will have fellowship with those who do.

Jonathan, wherever you are, I hope you’re still at it.
May your tribe increase.