Another odd obsession of mine is whether or not to capitalize pronouns referring to deity. I fall pretty firmly on the side of not doing so. The general reason is that historically no one has capitalized these pronouns, so why start now. In fact the early manuscripts of the New Testament had all capital letters with no spaces. How on earth will I know when Jesus does stuff?!
A second angle is similar to my dislike for red letter editions. These practices privilege words that were never meant to be privileged.
My latest reason came the other day as I was reading some unedited copy with pronouns referring to Jesus capitalized. I was struck with the strong sense that the capitalized pronouns were used almost as a name so that the antecedents didn't really need to be defined. If this is the case, then that simply points out authorial laziness.
We should never use specific words as an out so we can avoid good writing. (See "stuff" above.)
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1 comment:
I also share your detest for red letter bibles. I also have a complex about whether to capitalize bible or not, and only do so on rare occasion. Capitalizing pronouns bothers me on occasion, but I tend to gloss over it pretty easily.
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