“Thee” or “You”?

Prof. Herman C. Hanko

                                                                 

[Source: Herman C. Hanko, When You Pray—Scripture’s Teaching on Prayer (RFPA, 2006), chapter 4—“Respect in Prayer”]

The question arises whether it is proper to substitute the more colloquial forms of the second personal pronouns—you and your—for the pronouns thee, thou, thy, and thine, which until recent times were used by the saints. A great deal of argumentation has been carried on over this question, and there are some who find it altogether wrong and contrary to the will of God to use the colloquial pronouns.

While it must be admitted that the practice is one of Christian liberty and that there can be no sin attached to the use of you and your, I personally prefer to use thee, thou, thy, and thine in my prayers. A case can, I think, be made for such usage.

In the first place, these pronouns—used by the King James translators to distinguish between “you” singular and “you” plural, as was done in the original Hebrew and Greek—are familiar to its readers, and because our Bibles control and direct so much of our prayers, to use the same pronouns is preferable. It can be argued, of course, that we ought to abandon the KJV in favor of a more modern translation, but the fact is, as I have argued elsewhere,[1] the KJV is still the most accurate, the most reverent, the most beautifully written of all the translations that have appeared in English and is quite arguably the translation that the people of God can trust as being God’s own word. The use of the language of the KJV in prayer is especially important in congregational and family worship, for the liturgy of the church and home ought to reflect the Bible translation used. The tradition of singing, especially the singing of the Psalms, is also the use of the traditional songs of the church taken from the KJV. It is an anomaly to use thee and thou in liturgy and singing, but to revert to you and your in prayer.

In the second place, the switch in the United States from thee and thou to you and your came about at approximately the same time as a tendency appeared to speak to God in a way that was totally out of keeping with the reverence and honor that is due to him. A certain familiarity appeared in the speech of people—ministers and laity alike—that was destructive of the fear of the Lord so essential to all prayer.

I know that some are, with the increasingly wide use of the pronoun change, brought up from childhood to use you and your, and that it is difficult for them to change later in life, especially when the use of thee and thou also requires the use of such words as hast, wast, and becomest. But to have used thee and thou from childhood and then to change suggests a wrong view of prayer so common in our day.

Finally, though others may disagree, I personally want to register my strong protest against the crass and blasphemous tendency of our day to draw God down from his throne above the heavens to our level. One way in which we can protest this is through our continued use of thee and thou.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. Herman Hanko, Our Venerable King James Translation (pamphlet) (Lansing, IL: Peace Protestant Reformed Church, 2003).