Roots of Thanksgiving

By Peter A. Lillback

Thanksgiving is the great American holiday. Regardless of distinctions, the American spirit celebrates November's long weekend with family, football, and food. Thanksgiving is the iconic recognition of America as the cornucopia, the breadbasket of the world.

Most Americans know something about the origins of Thanksgiving, dating to the Pilgrims' celebration of their first bountiful harvest in 1621 after nearly starving to death in the wilds of New England. Some even know about George Washington's presidential proclamation calling the new nation to give thanks in 1789 for its new constitutional freedoms.

But relatively few Americans know that the origins of Thanksgiving can be traced back almost 500 years, to late medieval Germany. We are only four years away from a milestone anniversary of a movement that put Thanksgiving in the hearts of all Americans and forever changed our world.

Oct. 31, 2017, will mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses on Indulgences to the Wittenberg church door. His simple act unwittingly launched the Protestant Reformation, starting a movement of thanksgiving for the goodness of God and creating an environment more receptive to new ideas.

Before the Reformation, when the Catholic Church was unchallenged, there was one official version of religious truth. With the advent of the Reformation, it became OK to ask questions about faith and the meaning of life.

People began to ask, "What is true?" and "How do we know it's true?" They had been told for centuries that the Roman Catholic Church was the only true church.

The Reformation led to creativity in the arts, freedom in government, and discoveries in science. These ideas, including the concept of religious freedom, sailed from Europe to the New World with the Pilgrims, Puritans, and other early settlers of America who wanted a home where they could worship as they saw fit.

They embraced two Latin slogans that marked Luther's Protestant Reformation: sola gratia and sola Scriptura.

The first, sola gratia, means "grace alone." Luther's teachings emphasized that everything men have in life, whether daily bread, bountiful banquets, or salvation from sin before a holy God, is a free gift from God Himself. Luther described salvation as a beggar reaching out his hand to receive a gift from a king. The only response for such unmerited regal favor, such unearned heavenly grace, was thanksgiving.

The reformation's humblest believers and highest leaders were soon inspired to give thanksgiving to God by a second reformation slogan, sola Scriptura, meaning "the Scriptures alone." Reformation teaching insisted that the Bible must be translated into common languages and read by all.

Bible readers encountered verses like Psalm 147:7 that declare "Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving." They discovered that the Scriptures are filled with calls for thanksgiving. Sola Scriptura taught reformation worship to be directed not primarily by tradition or church authorities but by people's hearts guided by Scripture.

So believe it or not, the source of the American spirit of thanksgiving can be traced to the beginning of the Reformation. Reformation-minded pilgrims brought thanksgiving to Plymouth Rock. They trusted divine providence in famine and praised heaven's bounties in harvests.

Reformation thanksgiving is found in dusty histories of our earliest settlers, in our republic's first Thanksgiving proclamation, and in contemporary Thanksgiving gatherings, even if the only praise that's heard is for another touchdown by our favorite team.

So ask yourself this question: Who deserves your thanks at Thanksgiving? Whether we know it or not, the Reformation started it all by teaching that we owe thanks to God alone for His grace and His Word.