Nun Danket Alle Gott

With the Thanksgiving feast upon us, many of our churches will sing the old Lutheran hymn, Nun Danket Alle Gott (“Now Thank We All Our God” LSB 895).

A magnificent reflection upon the hymn, its author, and the circumstances of its composition is found here in a recent piece by the great Dr. Anthony Esolen - the Roman Catholic professor, author, translator, poet, Christian thinker, and friend of the Missouri Synod (also a bearer of an honorary doctorate from Concordia Theological Seminary) - who is arguably our age’s answer to the Inklings. Dr. Esolen’s Substack Word & Song is well worth subscribing to and reading.

The author of the hymn is the Rev. Martin Rinkart (1586-1649), who labored in the Lord’s vineyard when it was being decimated by the Thirty Years’ War and the associated plagues, pestilences, and famines that grow out of such horrific human destruction. Rinkart was pastor of St. Nicholas Church in Eilenburg, which was built in the 12th century, survived the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, as well as World War II, but not without damage.

As Glenn Sunshine notes:

In 1637 plague arrived in the overcrowded city. Of the four clergy in Eilenburg, the Superintendent fled, and two pastors soon succumbed to the disease. Rinkart was left alone to tend the sick and bury the dead. He performed up to fifty funerals per day, in all totaling over 4,480, including his wife’s. When the death toll got too high for individual funerals, trenches were dug for mass burials. In all, 8,000 died in the city.

Dr. Esolen muses:

The pastor, poet, church historian, and theologian Martin Rinkart, left the city gates all by himself to approach the Swedes and plead with them. I don’t have a transcript of what he said. He wasn’t a young man, and he too was acquainted with suffering, having lost his beloved wife two years before. Whatever this brave man of God said to those Swedes, it worked. They refrained from destruction, accepting what the people of the town could pay them. That town, by the way, is Eilenburg, in the eastern quarter of Germany, and most of whatever Pastor Rinkart saved in 1638 was reduced to rubble by the bombs of World War II. But Rinkart’s church, St. Nicholas, did survive, not without damage, and that is where the good pastor is buried.

The author of the melody paired with Rinkart’s poetry is Cantor Johann Crüger (1598-1662), who served with the great pastor and hymnwriter, the Rev. Paul Gerhardt at a different St. Nicholas Church (in Berlin). Cantor Crüger was also a great and prolific Lutheran hymnwriter of the seventeenth century.

On a recent visit to Wittenberg, several of us pastors and their wives, walking around after landing in Berlin and dropping off our things at the hotel, walked around the Nikolaiviertel and stumbled upon St. Nicholas Church, including the plaques honoring Gerhardt and Crüger. Unfortunately, St. Thomas was seized by the German government in 1938 and decommissioned, was badly damaged in World War II, and was rebuilt by the East German government to be used as a museum in 1981. It remains a museum to this day.

Dr. Esolen writes:

When it comes to man and God, we owe Him not only all that we have, but the very fact that we exist at all. Without His creative power, working now, at every instant of our lives, we would fall into nothingness, as a thought forgotten forever. But though we may forget God sometimes, He does not forget us. Then let us sing this old song with all the greater fervor.

Living just a few blocks from a Roman Catholic parish with a carillon, I often get to hear this hymn ringing out in our community. Like many American Lutherans, we sing it in English in our parish, of course. And ironically, it is also a favorite hymn in Sweden, and makes its appearance in the poignant scene in the film version of Bishop Bo Giertz’s classic novel, The Hammer of God, in which young Pastor Savonius administers the Holy Supper to a dying peasant named Johannes, whose family takes the Sacrament and sings “Nu tacka Gud, allt folk.”