I’ve been wondering how God got so small.
More and more – in devotional readings, on the overhead screens in worship centers, in lyrics of Christian songs, in Bibles – ‘ve been noticing a growing bent for lower-casing pronouns that reference the Trinity. Apparently, this is not a new thing, but it’s certainly becoming more common and more obvious, and … well, immersed as I am in the world of words and language, it troubles me.
I toured the internet for the prevailing rationale(s), and found them fourfold:
a) Objectivity. In Hebrew, the linguists say, all letters are the same height, while in Greek all letters are capitals. That sometimes makes it difficult to determine which pronouns refer to God and which do not. It’s a matter of interpretation … and when dealing with Holy Writ, the less things reduced to matters of interpretation, theologians humbly suggest, the better.
b) Tradition. Though I grew up seeing God’s pronouns capitalized, apparently that’s relatively new. Traditionally, neither the King James Version, the American Standard Version, or the Revised Standard version went in for the custom. Not surprisingly, neither do The Living Bible or the New International Version. But the Amplified Bible always has, and – at least until recently – the New American Standard and New King James followed suit.
c) Intimidation. None of the English style guides call for capitalizing the Almighty’s pronouns – and who are we, publishers ask, to question the grammarians?
d) Laziness. If Moses and Paul didn’t see the necessity of delineating Divinity, why should we? Besides which, double-checking the accuracy of all those pronouns would be a major undertaking, giving how many references the Bible makes to members of the Trinity.
Funny, that latter excuse doesn’t hold up for the Woke crowd and the Thought Police, busily hyper-analyzing our collective verbage and micromanaging our gender references. They’re yanking books out of stores and off library shelves, checking and re-checking for any reference – however remote, however true to its period of origin, however widely and affectionately regarded – that might contaminate our newly pristine, ironclad culture.
Whole squads of self-appointed editors, revisers, and re-writers are out there, reworking authors from Agatha Christie to Mark Twain, and characters from James Bond to Doctor Doolittle, to make them somehow more suitable to insatiable progressive sensibilities. And none of these revisionists seem in any way intimidated by the sheer number of volumes, pages, and sentences they’ll have to peruse to keep us pure.
As for Moses and Paul … ‘m told that, in their respective epochs, the same cultural and linguistic forms that negated capitalization likewise left no room for punctuation or chapter breaks – yet no one’s decided those have to come out of our Bibles. It seems a mighty selective revisionism our theologians and publishers are pressing upon us.
In English, as I was taught it, capitalization – as applied to nouns, pronouns, and objects – is a literary device frequently used to underscore a person, place, or thing’s peculiar, heightened significance or importance. In other words, it’s a way of setting something apart from other things that might, at cursory glance, seem like it.
Television showrunners, for instance, refer to a season’s “Big Bad” to distinguish the hero’s most formidable antagonist from the more run-of-the-mill, bad-guy-of-the-week type opponents. Travelers reference the “Point of No Return” to characterize a milestone with greater implications than the average turn on the trail.
The same goes for The Man Upstairs. To uppercase references to God is to magnify His importance … to give attention to His presence and weight to His words … to set Him apart from every other figure in a given passage or story.
That idea – setting Him apart – is of extraordinary importance. To God, at least. Indeed, it is His defining characteristic in Scripture. “Set apart” is the literal meaning of “holy,” and “holiness” is the quality of God that He most insists we recognize – and emulate.
Truth be told, that’s not how we usually choose to think of Him. Given our druthers, we’d like to regard Him as “love,” and the Bible certainly affirms that quality, too. But nowhere in Scripture do those who come into His presence fall on their faces because they’re on “loving ground.” When, in Isaiah and Revelation, we are given our glimpses of the saints and angels before His throne, it’s not “love, love, love is the Lord of hosts” that is shouted, but “holy, holy, holy.”
Without His holiness, His love loses its meaning … and it’s saving power. It’s His holiness that gives Him the authority to define love as something different – higher, deeper, stronger, more lasting, more harrowing – than the warm, fuzzy, mercurial feeling we would like it to be.
Whether it’s done intentionally or otherwise, then, lower-casing God’s pronouns has the effect of diminishing the primary quality of His character. Of rendering Him less holy. Of making Him seem smaller, in a world already bent on eradicating His name and influence altogether.
It may revise linguistic traditions. It may require more diligent theological study. It may ignore the predispositions of the stylists and the culture. It may be a very little thing.
But if it magnifies Him in the eyes of those who encounter Him – on a written page, on a billboard, on a song sheet – it’s worth the fuss.
He stands apart, whether we capitalize His pronouns or not. But capitalizing them is just one more small way – like praying over our meals, giving a tithe, treating those made in His image with simple courtesy – that we recognize His character, and glorify One worthy of so much more than these small tokens of respect.
Well and truly stated.