 The attributes of God that especially come into play in the emotion of gratitude are God’s creation and providence for our present life and God’s work of redeeming us from sin in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is true that in this standard Christian gratitude the believer does not feel “absolutely dependent” in Schleiermacher’s peculiar sense of that phrase; as we have seen, the feeling of absolute dependence does not allow for God to have any positive attributes. But the believer certainly does feel very dependent on God in the ordinary sense of ‘dependent.’ She construes her own existence as having not been, had God not willed and worked it. In so feeling, the believer attributes causality to God as the creator, preserver, and redeemer of the believer’s life; and this concept of causality is not “borrowed from natural science,” as Otto suggests, but antedates natural science by several millennia. It is a concept of causation that is embedded in the Jewish-Christian tradition. (Notice that gratitude, as a construal of what God has done for us, also has the Schleiermacherian property of self-consciousness.) The thought of these attributes of God and of God’s relation to the grateful party seems to be more than a Jamesian trigger or stimulus of some physiological perturbation in the body of the believer. It seems better to think of it as a consideration that “speaks” to the believer’s concerns about the good things in her life and about the attitude of God toward the believer that those blessings express. No mention is made of physiological perturbation, nor does the “feeling” of such figure prominently in the typical believer’s experience. The thought seems to be internal to the emotional experience in a way that thought cannot be internal to a physiological sensation.