"Thou"
Knox, 4 September 2011 © Scott McAndless
Exodus 20:1-17, Psalm 139:1-16, Romans 8:26-28, Matthew 6:5-8
When people think about the King James Version of the Bible – when they talk about the language of the book – there is always one word that is picked out for special attention. And that word, of course, is “thou.” The book is just full of thees and thous they will say. And for many people, of course, that is a complaint – a way of saying that the translation is hopelessly out of date and so completely irrelevant to modern life.
But not everybody reacts like that. For some people, the use of pronouns like thee and thou is one of the things that makes people love this translation all the more. And they particularly like it when it is used as a way to address God. Calling God thou (or thee or saying to God that something is thine) just seems right to lots of people. God, after all, is special – unlike anybody else that you might ever speak to and so it just seems right to use a special word when addressing him. I’m sure that many of these people will still, in their private devotions, address God as thou. They may even cringe when somebody likes me uses a vulgar word like you to address God.
For many, a word like thou is just one way of showing God the special respect that he deserves. It is a reminder of how distant and different God is from us. It is the kind of word that we might imagine a medieval peasant using when speaking to a king. But is that the way that the people who first read the King James Bible when it was published 400 years ago would have understood the word like that?
Let’s go back in time and take a look at where a word like thou actually comes from. First a little reminder of something that you might like to forget from your childhood – your grade school grammar lessons. Let’s talk about pronouns. Pronouns, in most languages, come in three persons and in singular and plural. So the first person singular in modern English is I and the first person plural is we. The third person singular is he or she while the plural is they. The issue in English is the second person – the word that you use when addressing someone directly – for modern English only has one pronoun in the second person that is used for both singular and plural and that is, of course, you. This causes some confusion as you can imagine because, when you say you, people never know how many people you’re talking to. It is probably why certain North American dialects have actually invented a new word to use for the second person plural like in this phrase: “What are yous guys doing over there?” or in this one “What can I do for y’all?”
But, of course, English didn’t always have this problem. There was a time when, like all sensible languages, English had both a singular and a plural form for the second person. And that time was, oh, about 400 years ago when a certain book was first published. The second person plural was you and the singular was thou. And that is how the translators of the King James used the word. If the original Hebrew or Greek had a second person singular pronoun they translated it as thou or thee. If it was plural, they used you or maybe ye. And this actually makes the King James rather useful sometimes because you can consult it if you want to know how many people are being addressed in a particular passage. You discover, for example, that the Ten Commandments are all written in the singular – they all begin with “Thou shalt not…” because following them is a personal obligation.
But there is no sense at all in the 1611 edition of the Bible that thou or thee is a special word reserved for addressing God. It is used for anybody – as long as you are addressing him or her alone. So where did this idea come from that thee and thou were special ways to talk to God? Well, to understand that, we need to understand an important change that occurred in English after the publication of the King James Version.
As time went on from 1611, a new use for the second person plural began to develop. It was used as a way of being formal and polite. If you were talking to someone and you didn’t want to seem too familiar, you would call them you, even though they were just one person. This is very similar to modern French usage where you call a person tu if you know them well but vous if you do not. So, as time went by, people would hesitate to use thou in speaking to someone unless they knew them very well. Now at first this was just a minor change – people would just say you to someone who was a complete stranger or who was completely outside of their social circle. (And that means, by the way, that a peasant would most certainly not address a king as thou but rather as you.)
But then something strange happened. It was a kind of mania for politeness or perhaps a fear of too much familiarity. People started to say thou to fewer and fewer people. They began to speak to their neighbours and associates and even more distant relatives as they would to total strangers. Before long it became the fashion to only speak to your immediate family on such familiar terms. And then, I guess people began to ask themselves, “How much do I really know my children? And how much do they really know me?” They began to address even their children with the more formal you – eventually this even extended to their pets and livestock.
At the end of this process, that took a few centuries, the average male English speaker only had two people that he figured he knew well enough to address with the familiar word thou: his wife and his God. Likewise a woman only said thou to her husband and her God. And since husbands and wives would only speak so familiarly in the privacy of the bedroom where it might be said that they truly knew one another in the Biblical sense, this habit was not even picked up by their children so, by the next generation, there was only one person left to whom you could say thou, and that was God.
So it is true that, by a certain point in time (long after the publication of the King James Bible), thou did become a special word that you only used when you spoke to God in prayer. But that special usage did not mean what you maybe thought it meant. It was not about showing God some sort of special respect, nor was it used as a reminder of just how completely different God was from you. Most of all, it was not about keeping God at some sort of safe distance – far removed from the concerns and needs of everyday life.
It was quite the contrary. When you called God thou it was a way of reminding yourself that God – much more than anybody you had ever met – truly knew you. Here was someone from whom you could have no secrets – who probably knew you better than you knew yourself. By restricting the use of the word thou only to God, our English speaking ancestors were proclaiming a profound theological truth – that nobody can know you like God. They were reminding us all that prayer is the most intimate and familiar kind of communication that you will ever have.
The people who learned to speak to God like this were certainly on the same wavelength as the Biblical writers. Almost every time the Bible seeks to instruct us on the practice of prayer, this is the point that it emphasizes: that the God to whom you speak is no stranger – that the God you address is the one who knows everything about you, who probably knows you better than you know yourself.
Nowhere is this put better than in Psalm 139: “O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.” To speak with such a God and to imagine that there was anything in you that could possibly be kept hidden or private would be to delude yourself.
Jesus – who was clearly no stranger to prayer – also understood this. In fact, his advice was that the best way to pray was to enter into a closet – a secret place. He is not just talking about physical space here because you hardly need to be in an actual closet to be able to communicate with God. God is just as near whether you are in a closet or a crowd. He is talking about how it is possible to find a sense of intimacy and shared privacy with God like you can know with no one else in this world. Whether or not you can withdraw into a physical closet to pass your time with your God there is always a way to enter into a spiritual closet with him – a place where there are no secrets.
And because there are no secrets that is also no fear because there is nothing – no deep dark secret – that you can ever reveal to God that will surprise him much less make him turn from you in revulsion. He already knows it about you and none of it is bigger than the grace that allows God to forgive it.
The apostle Paul also understood this. He made perhaps the most amazing pronouncement about prayer of all: “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities:” he wrote, “for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” He is saying, in other words, that the thou who we address in our prayers, doesn’t just know us better than anyone else, he knows us even better than we know ourselves! There are times when we don’t even know what to pray for – times when we don’t even know what it is that we want.
I’m sure that all of us have been in that very place at least once in our lives – perhaps when you were praying for someone who was so desperately ill that you really didn’t know if it was better for them to recover or to be set free from their misery or when you were praying for something to happen but somewhere inside weren’t entirely sure whether or not you really wanted it to happen. It is hard to be in that position – where you almost feel as if you are at war with yourself – but Paul is saying that even when you do feel like that you can come and encounter a thou in prayer and the thou that you encounter will be able to pray for you the things that you can’t even pray for yourself.
Normally when I lead in public prayer (something that I often get to do, of course) I avoid addressing God as thou. This is not because I don’t like it or because I find such language too archaic. I do it because I think that people will misunderstand what it means – they will think that it means that God is so far above us and so removed from our daily concerns that we have to address him with a special pronoun. It means the opposite – that God is so close that nobody could be closer.
But today – when I am sure that we all understand what it means – I am going to make an exception. In our worship today, we do approach God as thou – the eternal thou. And let us understand that when we address him as such, God meets us like no one else can.