In the Image of the Giver

Human beings are made in the image of the giving God, and this suggests that giving, reception, and return are part of the cycle of human existence as well. Man is created as a recipient of gifts; Adam’s very existence is a gift that God is not constrained to give, a gift that does not meet any lack in God’s being. Man is fundamentally a recipient – “what do you have that you did not receive?”  

But the radical character of the reception here must not go unnoticed: As John Milbank points out, this is an utterly unilateral gift, in that there is no recipient prior to the gift. At the human level, “gift” and “obligation” are contrasted: Repaying a debt is not the same as giving a gift. But because God is God, self-sufficient and transcendent, this logic does not apply. Milbank says, “gratuity arises before necessity or obligation and does not even require the contrast in order to be comprehensible. The creature as creature is not the recipient of a gift, it is itself this gift. . . . since there is no preceding recipient, the spirit is a gift to a gift and the gifting of giving oneself to oneself, which is the only way consciously to live being as a gift and so to be spirit.”

And this, Milbank argues, means that human existence, insofar as it is human reception and response, is simply gratitude: “one knows that one is not all of possible knowing and willing and feeling and moreover that, since our share of these things is what we are, we do not really command them, after the mode of a recipient of possessions. Hence to will, know, and feel is to render gratitude, else we would refuse ourselves as constituted as gift. Such gratitude to an implied infinite source can only be, as gratitude, openness to an unlimited reception from this source which is tantamount to a desire to know the giver.” Later, Milbank emphasizes that the gift of created being is “so unilateral that it gives even the recipient and the possibility of her gratitude.”

For human beings, gratitude is always prior to gift; gratitude is the stance from which gifts are given. And man is made to stand outside himself, to mimic and to seek another. He is a social being, made in the image of a Creator who is eternally gift and giving. Hence, his life is bound up with gift exchange. Created as recipient of gift, created as gift, man’s primary stance in the creation is to return thanks for what he received from God. Paul characterizes original sin as “refusal to honor God as God” and refusal to “give thanks” (Romans 1:21). Man was created to gift thanks, created as a priest – as Schmemann puts it – for a cosmic Eucharist, a grateful return of the gift given by creation. Idolatry is a form of ingratitude, or at best grossly misplaced gratitude, as gifts and thanks are offered to beings who are not responsible for our existence or for anything else for that matter.

Redemption, then, is the gift of God by which man is restored to the proper stance of a creature, the response of gratitude. Abraham by faith gives the glory to God that Adam refused to give (Romans 4). Paul’s collection for the needy Christians of Jerusalem is not merely for the sake of the needy, nor merely to permit the Gentiles to be bound together in an exchange with the Jews (returning material blessings for the spiritual blessings received), but also abounds with thanksgiving to God (2 Corinthians 9:10-12). Christian living is continuous thanksgiving (Ephesians 5:20; Philippians 4:6; Colossians 3:17; 1 Thessalonians 5:18; Hebrews 13:15).

Insofar as redemption takes a social form, it takes the form of a society bound together by gift exchange. The church is a gift, the Father’s gift to the Son (John 17:6). But the church is also constituted, nourished, and maintained by gifts. There is, first of all, the gifts exchanged between the head of the church and His body (Ephesians 4), preeminently the gift of the Spirit from Father and Son, which binds the church in a communion of gifts with the Triune God. But there is also the reality of the gifts received from the Spirit and re-given in service to the other members of the church. What edifies the church is the deployment of the charismata of the Spirit for the common good of the body (1 Corinthians 12:4-11).

And this is all ritually manifest in the sacraments, particularly in the Eucharist. As Luther insisted, the Supper is preeminently the gift of God to His people, the Father’s gift of His Son in and by the Spirit. This is the church’s potlatch, where the Chief distributes His gifts, and we are to offer praise and thanks in response.