50. Now Thank We All Our God

The Story Behind the Hymn

Martin Rinkart was a Lutheran pastor serving continuously in the small walled town of Eilenburg, in Saxony, Germany, throughout nearly the entire duration of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), one of the most catastrophically destructive military and religious conflicts in all of European history, a war that brought recurring famine, repeated outbreaks of bubonic plague, and successive military sieges to much of central Europe over three devastating decades, killing an enormous proportion of the region's total population before it finally ended.

Eilenburg, as a fortified walled town, became a crowded refuge for enormous numbers of desperate civilian refugees fleeing violence and starvation in the surrounding open countryside throughout the war, a mass influx that severely and repeatedly strained the town's already limited food supplies and directly contributed to catastrophic, recurring outbreaks of disease within its overcrowded walls. Rinkart, as one of the town's few remaining active clergy after several colleagues died or fled, found himself responsible for an almost unimaginable volume of pastoral funeral work during the epidemic's worst periods.

At the peak of one particularly severe epidemic in 1637, Rinkart reportedly conducted as many as fifty individual funeral services in a single day, and by some later biographical accounts personally oversaw and conducted more than four thousand separate funerals across that single catastrophic year alone — a scale of continuous pastoral grief work almost impossible to fully comprehend by modern standards, and one that eventually and directly included, before the war's end, the funeral of his own wife, who died during one of the same epidemics he had spent years burying his parishioners through.

It was during or very shortly after this specific period of almost unimaginable, sustained communal devastation that Rinkart wrote this now-famous hymn of thanksgiving, which by most accounts was originally intended and used simply as a table grace to be said before ordinary family meals in his own household, rather than as a piece deliberately composed for formal public congregational worship. That a hymn beginning with the confident, expansive declaration 'now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices' emerged directly from the working ministry of a pastor who had spent years burying his own plague- and war-ravaged community, including eventually his own wife, has made it, for many later readers and hymnologists across the centuries since, one of the single most striking and theologically weighty examples in the entire history of Christian hymnody of thanksgiving deliberately expressed not because of favorable surrounding circumstances, but rather in direct and sustained defiance of truly devastating ones.