Prayer language

The logic is that you are talking to the one and only supreme God, so you should treat him like royalty. But I agree that prayer becomes more heartfelt when you speak to God as if he is your father.

ok, understood…, but isn’t that just an apologetic answer? wasn’t the origin a little different than that? and then, why in other languages is the familiar/intimate used instead of formal? My question isn’t so much about why we do it, but why we must do it.

wayfarer, Brown agreed with you. Just sayin’.

As I often do, here is a link to another thread about this exact topic:

“THOU hast it all wrong” (http://forum.staylds.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2637&hilit=thee) – 18 comments

Yes, I expected that you had a thread on it. as well, I appreciate that brown is pretty much on the same page. But there is more to this. I’ve been around the church for nearly sixty years, and know all the answers on this topic. Does it make it right?

Look at what was said in your earlier thread you reference:

I think it’s an obstacle to spiritual growth, and thus is a false teaching, one of those philosophies of men mingled with the scriptures.

I think this is exactly what i’m getting to. I’m tired of the apologetic answers for why we do silly stuff in the church. What we do when we are rigid on these traditions and rules is we tend to exclude those who don’t act that way.

Example – for most people, coming to church usually involves being a bit relaxed in clothing. But no, we wear in church an IBM standard attire of what shirts and suits. Most people don’t dress like this. What does it say when we require a specific dress code to worship god? What does it say when we require a certain language to talk to god?

I heard today, a 12 year old boy talk to god as if he were real and present. It transported me. It wasn’t artificial, some hokey language that he clearly would not have used naturally by himself. He wasn’t speaking something he had been taught to say. He prayed with meaning, with intent, and with relationship.

I’m pretty sure some young mens leaders somewhere will correct him, or have a lesson about the right type of prayer language. And I wonder, what will happen to this boy’s authenticity when he uses artificial language?

We use “thee” and “thou” because we use the KJV of the bible, period. This has probably already been covered elsewhere here, so people are probably already aware that “thee” is/was the second-person singular familiar pronoun. From Wikipedia:

Originally, thou was simply the singular counterpart to the plural pronoun ye, derived from an ancient Indo-European root. Following a process found in other Indo-European languages, thou was later used to express intimacy, familiarity or even disrespect, while another pronoun, you, the oblique/objective form of ye, was used for formal circumstances.

So any attempts to say that we use “thee” and “thou” out of a sense of respect (as we have seen in GC and elsewhere) are specious. But it’s a new world, they can say whatever they want, I suppose.

wayfarer, when you said:

i just heard the most amazing prayer by a young deacon. He didn’t use jacobian english, but rather, modern “you” in a way that i felt as if he really had a relationship with the person to whom he was talking. it was really authentic and heart-felt.

Did you tell the young man how his prayer affected you?

Or, did you talk with his parents about how they taught him to pray?

Personally, I would like to know the answers.

I might change the way I feel about praying.

Mike from Milton.

no and no, but i wish i had now that you mention it.

I’ve said it before on here… “thou” and “thee” do NOT represent respect, they demonstrate familiarity.

One would “thou” with close family and friends, much as “tu” in Spanish.

You wouldn’t actually use it to your boss.

no one speaks today to their friends in jacobian thees and thous (maybe the amish…)

Actually there are several dialects in which it is in frequent use. Including parts of urban Northern England, so it’s not just hicks in the styx.

if the point were to use the intimate and informal, then i am all for it, and i knew that it was informal in jacobian times. but it isnt informal or intimate today, but rather, formal. that is the way it is explained by the church in english…out of respect. in today’s english, it isnt a natural way to talk to someone we love, deeply. when i use it with my wife, she thinks i am mocking sacred language.

Jake at Wheat & Tares posted on this topic about a week ago, and he had an interesting twist I hadn’t heard before. This is one thing that really bothered me several years ago when one of the apostles in Gen Conf talked about it denoting respect vs. familiarity. I just shook my head in cog dis thinking 5 minutes of research would have put that notion to bed. Anyway, Jake talks about the history of the language in the KJV and that essentially it was used to retain clerical supremacy by using an already archaic language form. http://www.wheatandtares.org/2012/03/01/thou-art-a-whore/

The post title is in reference to the fact that “thou” was used with inferiors, never to superiors, as revealed in Shakespeare and in court records.

I had no idea that “thee” was once considered informal and “you” was the formal. Just another thing that everyone assumes to be true without bothering to look it up I suppose. I find it interesting that this minor issue seems characteristic of the larger problems with Church history/doctrine/culture etc., being that once you dig a little into these things, the underlying facts almost always cast a shadow of doubt on the subject.

As for prayer language-Public prayers are for the public-it seems reasonable to use the “formal” language if that’s what the group is expecting, otherwise they are thinking about how you said the prayer, rather than its content. However, behind closed doors, so long as the prayer is honest, I don’t see how the pronouns matter much.