thanksgiving: the grateful acknowledgment of a benefit received, felt in the heart and voiced in words; in the New Testament almost always offered to God.
In everyday Greek this was simply the word for gratitude and the thanks a person expressed for a kindness, whether to a friend, a ruler, or a god. The New Testament writers did not change what the word means; they narrowed where it points. Nearly every time it appears, the thanks is aimed at God through Christ, and it holds together two things English tends to separate: a grateful heart and the spoken prayer that heart pours out. Scholars agree the line between the inner attitude and its expression is a soft one, so it is better to hear the word as a single movement, gratitude becoming speech, than to force each use onto one side.
Because the thanks is God-ward, it belongs to worship. It is the thanksgiving prayer the congregation seals with "Amen," the note sounded in heaven's praise in Revelation, and the goal Paul sets for his collection for the poor, whose real purpose is to send thanksgiving back up to God. Its content is drawn less from polite Greek courtesy than from Israel's long habit of acknowledging what God has done, so it carries the weight of remembering God's deeds rather than merely saying "thank you."
The word also reaches into ordinary life and, once, into plain courtesy. It is the grace said over food, a table-blessing that defends the goodness of what God made against teachers who forbade certain foods. It is grateful speech held up as the mark of a Christian in place of coarse or empty talk. And in a single courtroom scene it is the flattering thanks a lawyer offers a Roman governor, a reminder that the word could still carry its everyday, this-worldly sense.
Nuances
Disputed
What conceptual background primarily shapes Paul's use of thanksgiving: the reciprocity of Greco-Roman gift and patronage, or the covenantal thanksgiving of the Hebrew Scriptures.
- contestedPaul's thanksgiving is best read against Greco-Roman benefaction, in which a benefactor's gift calls for a fitting return of thanks; God is the ultimate benefactor and thanksgiving is the beneficiary's proper return within that patron-client framework.; Ceslas Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, vol. 2, s.v. εὐχαριστέω κτλ.; G. W. Peterman, Paul's Gift from Philippi: Conventions of Gift Exchange and Christian Giving (SNTSMS 92; Cambridge: CUP, 1997)
- contestedPauline thanksgiving is primarily covenantal and theocentric, drawn from Israel's tradition of acknowledging God's saving deeds, and is not a measured return within an exchange of favors; John Barclay adds that it is the response to God's uncalculated grace, which escapes quantitative reciprocity.; David W. Pao, Thanksgiving: An Investigation of a Pauline Theme (NSBT 13; Downers Grove: Apollos/IVP, 2002); Peter T. O'Brien, Introductory Thanksgivings in the Letters of Paul (NovTSup 49; Leiden: Brill, 1977)