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Karl Barth on Gratitude
The blessedness of the elect . . . consists in gratitude for the self-offering of God. God chooses him in order that there may be gratitude in his life (and therefore life in and by grace). God chooses him in order that his existence may become simply gratitude. That he may achieve this gratitude and be this gratitude in his whole person is the determination of the elect. It is for this that God gives Himself to him in the election of Jesus Christ, in the election of Israel and the Church, in his personal election. He may be grateful. That is the secret of the gracious election of the individual.
But what is meant by gratitude, and therefore blessedness, and therefore being loved by God? Clearly, participation in the life of God in a human existence and action in which there is a representation and illustration of the glory of God Himself and its work. There can be no question of anything more. Gratitude is the response to a kindness which cannot itself be repeated or returned, which therefore can only be recognised and confirmed as such by an answer that corresponds to it and reflects it. Gratitude is the establishment of this correspondence. The gratitude of the elect for the grace of God cannot be anything more than the establishment of this correspondence. But it can and must be this. The elect man is chosen in order to respond to the gracious God, to be His creaturely image, His imitator. Not that of a self-devised picture of God-and-man, but that of the gracious, electing God Himself and as such the elect under obligation to Him. He owes himself to Him. God has chosen him for Himself before he came into being. He determines him far beyond and above all self-determination. He can possess his own life only in imitation of Him, of the gracious God. What else is the elect Jesus Christ, the incarnate gratitude of the creature, but the original of this representation and illustration of the gracious God which is free of all self-will and therefore joyful, the true imitator of His work?
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, II/2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), pp. 413-414, emphasis added.
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