Today I'm going to talk about you, and how woefully inadequate it is.
Other languages have better options. The embarrassingly small handful of 'foreign words' I learned in school included the French tu (informal singular) and vous (formal singular, formal or informal plural), and the Spanish tú (informal singular), usted (formal singular), vosotros (informal plural) and ustedes (formal plural).
Olden-times English disambiguated too: thou and thee for (subject, object) singular, and you and ye for (subject, object) plural. The latter could also be used in the formal singular case, just to confuse things (if anything we think of thee and thou as highfalutin now, at least in the south of the UK). But somewhere along the line we decided that we had suffered under the tyranny of common sense grammar rules for long enough and broke away from our European neighbours.
The consequence being that second person subtleties are lost in modern English rendering, with interpretation now relying wholly on context. Unless you're Hemingway, who refused to allow the shortfallings of his mother tongue to constrain the dialogue of his Spanish-speaking characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls. His solution was to make use of archaisms such as "thou" in order to more directly approximate the Spanish, preserving the nuanced dynamics of the relationships he was trying to paint. This, along with his literal translations of idioms and his quirky approach to censoring ("I obscenity in the milk"), make for an interestingly odd reading experience which I *think* I enjoyed. It certainly helped fuel my appreciation for the challenge of translation in a world where lexicons themselves are shaped by differing assumptions and priorities.
The Bible is another setting in which "you" don't really cut it. Ancient Hebrew and Greek both distinguish between plural and singular forms, which were preserved in earlier English translations such as the seventeenth century KJV. But nowadays that distinction is lost. How much does this honestly matter? It's just a little pronoun; aren't there more critical words to agonise over, such as the ones that turn up in the lists of sins, or the ones that explain the technicalities of salvation?
Having spent nearly two hours, part way through writing this, talking to my favourite pair of kind but (I believe) doctrinally misled Jehovah's Witnesses, I am profoundly reminded that the translation and interpretation of many of the words (not to mention the numbers!) in the Bible can have a strikingly divergent impact on the conclusions that we reach. But I reckon this little one is worth some attention on its own precisely because of how prevalent it is and how surreptitiously it can impact on a Christian worldview.
According to this website about the KJV, the singular words thou and thee appear 4,563 + 3,162 = 7,725 times, while the plural words you and ye appear 2,145 + 3,058 = 5,203. This means that, of all the modern-day "yous", about 5,203 / (5,203 + 7,725) = 40% correspond to groups of people rather than to individuals. That's not to mention the Bible's extensive use of eponymy – the coining of names (and singular pronouns) to reference whole people groups ("But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine." (Isaiah 43:1, KJV)).
I guess word counts don't tell you much. What matters to me is whether or not, and in what ways, this hidden distinction might be distorting my (already at best a work-in-progress) understanding of what the Bible means and what it means to "live by" it.
Take Jeremiah 29:11-13, for example; a popular favourite, often shared or recalled by Christians as a source of encouragement in moments of uncertainty or difficulty:
That's not to suggest that this passage has nothing to say to me (or you). Pretty much the whole of the Bible (candidate exceptions being, e.g., John 17:20-21, Acts 2:38-39) was originally written to and about people very much other than me, and that has never stopped me from reading and learning and (I believe) hearing God speaking to me through it before. Jeremiah 29 tells me about God's character of faithfulness, God's heart for liberation, God's love and justice and awesomeness; it tells me about God's commitment to the community of God's people, God's desire for them and others through them to flourish. So as someone seeking to know God and to be a part of the community of God's people as it is today, I find plenty to be encouraged by in this letter to Jewish exiles in 6th century BC Babylon. But I'm on shaky ground if I want to make it about my personal fulfilment in life – the achievement of my ambitions, the fruit of my ministry, the minimisation of my discomfort or suffering: we flourish (or suffer) together, not independently of one another, and God's picture (and time frame; the promise to the exiles was of restoration in seventy years) is bigger than ours. And if that feels like a consolation prize, perhaps we need a renewed appreciation for just how profoundly, counter-culturally beautiful a fundamentally relational rather than self-centering notion of human well-being really is.
Sticking with the theme of letters, the New Testament, of course, contains a whole bunch of them – 21 to be precise, all but 6 of which were written to groups of Christians rather than to individuals. Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians (ascribed to Paul) are named for the churches they were sent to; Hebrews (authorship unknown) addresses a group of Jewish converts to Christianity; James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1 John and Jude (named for their ascribed authors) are all written to the church at large.
The second (and first) person plural abounds in these letters (see, e.g., their KJV translations), which were intended to be read out loud in the hearing of whole congregations (Col 4:16). Since they together form the basis of so much of Christian doctrine, they still get regularly brought out in churches today, but usually in small, selected chunks rather than all in one go. Depending on the particular chunk, the context can be more or less obscured; it can be easy to miss the fact that we're reading bits of (one side of) someone's correspondence, or to overlook the collective identity of the original audience. Quoted verses take on the tenor of standalone statements, encouragements and instructions – often gratifyingly directed to me.
"Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you" (1 Cor 1:19, ESVUK) – only, "your" and "you" are plural; the church together is a temple (singular). And just a little further down, "You" (plural) "are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body." (1 Cor 1:20, ESVUK) God's work of redemption is something that Christians receive in community together; our glorifying of God is something we do together.
Similarly, Paul's confidence "that he who began a good work in you" (plural) "will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil 1:6, NIVUK) pertains to the church in Philippi; God is committed to transforming not just individuals but individuals in relationship with one another.
Meanwhile, the plural "yous" in Ephesians 1:17-19 suggest to me that wisdom, revelation and knowledge of God are things that Christian communities grow in together; that hope is something we are called to together. 1 John 2:24 implies that hearing, remembering and holding on to the good news is a corporate act, and that it is together with one another that Christians are made one with God. And 1 Corinthians 10:13 seems to promise collective help to Christians engaged together in resisting temptation.
None of which is to deny the importance of personal responsibility (see, e.g., 2 Cor 5:10, Gal 6:5 [1]), or to diminish the paradigm-shifting impact of personal repentance and forgiveness and salvation in individual lives (e.g. Romans 10:8-11). But transformed relationship with one another is not an optional extra on top of the "main event" of transformed relationship with God; the two are so inseparable that, when asked for "The" greatest commandment, Jesus conspicuously gives a double answer: "“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’" (Matt 22:37-40, NIVUK).
I feel like we Christians urgently need to 'get' this – not just to assent to it on an intellectual level but to absorb it at a worldview level; to allow it to "renew our minds" in a Romans 12:2 kind of way. Individualism and consumerism are so ingrained in the "pattern of this world" that most people take them for given inevitabilities rather than ideologies that have been chosen (and can be unchosen). And I too often see church go cheerfully along with the flow, more eager to package faith in Jesus as an effective and appealing program for self-fulfilment than to embrace and model the fundamentally counter-cultural alternative that it presents. (For example, I am really glad that the Alpha course has given so many people the opportunity to find out about Jesus ... but those adverts? ... hmm.) Moreover, when we centre personal forgiveness as though the only consequence of sin is the perpetrator's separation from God, we do injustice (literally!) to those people, also made and loved by God, who have been sinned against and damaged by it. For example, I've been appalled at some of the stories circulating during or because of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo social media campaigns: stories of abusers and enablers being fast-tracked through the process of repentance, rehabilitation and very often reinstatement into positions of ministry and authority; stories of abuse victims being shamed, silenced, pressured to forgive (or even repent!) themselves – all typically at the invocation of a painfully glib and shortsighted theology of 'grace'. YES celebrate the free availability of God's mercy when one repents of sin; NO that's not at all the same thing as an instant undoing or trivialising of the effects of that sin. (Though God is faithful and able to work for healing and hope in the lives of those hurt, even when that remains a long and painful journey). And lastly (for now) we need to 'get' it because the narratives of individualistic Christianity struggle to accommodate ideas of structural injustice and corporate guilt (however biblical they seem to me – see, e.g., the book of Nehemiah), putting Christians all too often among those most disturbingly resolute in denying racism, sexism and other patterns of oppression, and actively resisting movements to end them. But more on that another time, or at least that's the plan. Meanwhile,
[1] Galatians 6:2-5 provides a striking example of the Bible's resistance to oversimplified categorising, as this recent section from my daily reading notes reflects upon: "At the center of Paul's pastoral council is a tension (contradiction?) On the one hand, "Bear one another's burdens." [...] On the other hand, Paul insists, "All must carry their own loads." The letter is a summons to responsibility in order to fend off dependence. Both interdependence and personal responsibility are urged. Such trusting, committed relationality refuses to reduces the tension to a formula or to a foolproof calculation. [...] What lies behind the tension for Paul is a lively, committed community that devotes energy, time and money to the well-being of the community." (Walter Brueggemann, Gift and Task, reading for Friday after Proper 5).
[Thumbnail image cc by Arne Hendriks on Flickr.]
Other languages have better options. The embarrassingly small handful of 'foreign words' I learned in school included the French tu (informal singular) and vous (formal singular, formal or informal plural), and the Spanish tú (informal singular), usted (formal singular), vosotros (informal plural) and ustedes (formal plural).
Olden-times English disambiguated too: thou and thee for (subject, object) singular, and you and ye for (subject, object) plural. The latter could also be used in the formal singular case, just to confuse things (if anything we think of thee and thou as highfalutin now, at least in the south of the UK). But somewhere along the line we decided that we had suffered under the tyranny of common sense grammar rules for long enough and broke away from our European neighbours.
The consequence being that second person subtleties are lost in modern English rendering, with interpretation now relying wholly on context. Unless you're Hemingway, who refused to allow the shortfallings of his mother tongue to constrain the dialogue of his Spanish-speaking characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls. His solution was to make use of archaisms such as "thou" in order to more directly approximate the Spanish, preserving the nuanced dynamics of the relationships he was trying to paint. This, along with his literal translations of idioms and his quirky approach to censoring ("I obscenity in the milk"), make for an interestingly odd reading experience which I *think* I enjoyed. It certainly helped fuel my appreciation for the challenge of translation in a world where lexicons themselves are shaped by differing assumptions and priorities.
The Bible is another setting in which "you" don't really cut it. Ancient Hebrew and Greek both distinguish between plural and singular forms, which were preserved in earlier English translations such as the seventeenth century KJV. But nowadays that distinction is lost. How much does this honestly matter? It's just a little pronoun; aren't there more critical words to agonise over, such as the ones that turn up in the lists of sins, or the ones that explain the technicalities of salvation?
Having spent nearly two hours, part way through writing this, talking to my favourite pair of kind but (I believe) doctrinally misled Jehovah's Witnesses, I am profoundly reminded that the translation and interpretation of many of the words (not to mention the numbers!) in the Bible can have a strikingly divergent impact on the conclusions that we reach. But I reckon this little one is worth some attention on its own precisely because of how prevalent it is and how surreptitiously it can impact on a Christian worldview.
According to this website about the KJV, the singular words thou and thee appear 4,563 + 3,162 = 7,725 times, while the plural words you and ye appear 2,145 + 3,058 = 5,203. This means that, of all the modern-day "yous", about 5,203 / (5,203 + 7,725) = 40% correspond to groups of people rather than to individuals. That's not to mention the Bible's extensive use of eponymy – the coining of names (and singular pronouns) to reference whole people groups ("But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine." (Isaiah 43:1, KJV)).
I guess word counts don't tell you much. What matters to me is whether or not, and in what ways, this hidden distinction might be distorting my (already at best a work-in-progress) understanding of what the Bible means and what it means to "live by" it.
Take Jeremiah 29:11-13, for example; a popular favourite, often shared or recalled by Christians as a source of encouragement in moments of uncertainty or difficulty:
"For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." (Jeremiah 29:11-13, NIVUK)But, as the pronouns in the KJV version make clear, the "you"' in these verses is plural; the prophet is addressing a community, and a specific one at that. Read in context, there is no danger of ambiguity even with modern pronouns: it is part of a letter "to the surviving elders among the exiles and to the priests, the prophets and all the other people Nebuchadnezzar had carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon." (Jeremiah 29:1, NIVUK) The trouble is, favourite Bible verses hardly ever get read in context – because we Christians, like the rest of the world, love a soundbite, and shy away from extra brain work. And since another tendency we Christians share with the rest of the world (at least in the global north) is an under-examined embrace of individualism, we are strongly predisposed to take "you" personally rather than corporately unless it is spelled out otherwise.
That's not to suggest that this passage has nothing to say to me (or you). Pretty much the whole of the Bible (candidate exceptions being, e.g., John 17:20-21, Acts 2:38-39) was originally written to and about people very much other than me, and that has never stopped me from reading and learning and (I believe) hearing God speaking to me through it before. Jeremiah 29 tells me about God's character of faithfulness, God's heart for liberation, God's love and justice and awesomeness; it tells me about God's commitment to the community of God's people, God's desire for them and others through them to flourish. So as someone seeking to know God and to be a part of the community of God's people as it is today, I find plenty to be encouraged by in this letter to Jewish exiles in 6th century BC Babylon. But I'm on shaky ground if I want to make it about my personal fulfilment in life – the achievement of my ambitions, the fruit of my ministry, the minimisation of my discomfort or suffering: we flourish (or suffer) together, not independently of one another, and God's picture (and time frame; the promise to the exiles was of restoration in seventy years) is bigger than ours. And if that feels like a consolation prize, perhaps we need a renewed appreciation for just how profoundly, counter-culturally beautiful a fundamentally relational rather than self-centering notion of human well-being really is.
Sticking with the theme of letters, the New Testament, of course, contains a whole bunch of them – 21 to be precise, all but 6 of which were written to groups of Christians rather than to individuals. Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians (ascribed to Paul) are named for the churches they were sent to; Hebrews (authorship unknown) addresses a group of Jewish converts to Christianity; James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1 John and Jude (named for their ascribed authors) are all written to the church at large.
The second (and first) person plural abounds in these letters (see, e.g., their KJV translations), which were intended to be read out loud in the hearing of whole congregations (Col 4:16). Since they together form the basis of so much of Christian doctrine, they still get regularly brought out in churches today, but usually in small, selected chunks rather than all in one go. Depending on the particular chunk, the context can be more or less obscured; it can be easy to miss the fact that we're reading bits of (one side of) someone's correspondence, or to overlook the collective identity of the original audience. Quoted verses take on the tenor of standalone statements, encouragements and instructions – often gratifyingly directed to me.
"Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you" (1 Cor 1:19, ESVUK) – only, "your" and "you" are plural; the church together is a temple (singular). And just a little further down, "You" (plural) "are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body." (1 Cor 1:20, ESVUK) God's work of redemption is something that Christians receive in community together; our glorifying of God is something we do together.
Similarly, Paul's confidence "that he who began a good work in you" (plural) "will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil 1:6, NIVUK) pertains to the church in Philippi; God is committed to transforming not just individuals but individuals in relationship with one another.
None of which is to deny the importance of personal responsibility (see, e.g., 2 Cor 5:10, Gal 6:5 [1]), or to diminish the paradigm-shifting impact of personal repentance and forgiveness and salvation in individual lives (e.g. Romans 10:8-11). But transformed relationship with one another is not an optional extra on top of the "main event" of transformed relationship with God; the two are so inseparable that, when asked for "The" greatest commandment, Jesus conspicuously gives a double answer: "“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’" (Matt 22:37-40, NIVUK).
I feel like we Christians urgently need to 'get' this – not just to assent to it on an intellectual level but to absorb it at a worldview level; to allow it to "renew our minds" in a Romans 12:2 kind of way. Individualism and consumerism are so ingrained in the "pattern of this world" that most people take them for given inevitabilities rather than ideologies that have been chosen (and can be unchosen). And I too often see church go cheerfully along with the flow, more eager to package faith in Jesus as an effective and appealing program for self-fulfilment than to embrace and model the fundamentally counter-cultural alternative that it presents. (For example, I am really glad that the Alpha course has given so many people the opportunity to find out about Jesus ... but those adverts? ... hmm.) Moreover, when we centre personal forgiveness as though the only consequence of sin is the perpetrator's separation from God, we do injustice (literally!) to those people, also made and loved by God, who have been sinned against and damaged by it. For example, I've been appalled at some of the stories circulating during or because of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo social media campaigns: stories of abusers and enablers being fast-tracked through the process of repentance, rehabilitation and very often reinstatement into positions of ministry and authority; stories of abuse victims being shamed, silenced, pressured to forgive (or even repent!) themselves – all typically at the invocation of a painfully glib and shortsighted theology of 'grace'. YES celebrate the free availability of God's mercy when one repents of sin; NO that's not at all the same thing as an instant undoing or trivialising of the effects of that sin. (Though God is faithful and able to work for healing and hope in the lives of those hurt, even when that remains a long and painful journey). And lastly (for now) we need to 'get' it because the narratives of individualistic Christianity struggle to accommodate ideas of structural injustice and corporate guilt (however biblical they seem to me – see, e.g., the book of Nehemiah), putting Christians all too often among those most disturbingly resolute in denying racism, sexism and other patterns of oppression, and actively resisting movements to end them. But more on that another time, or at least that's the plan. Meanwhile,
...this is my prayer: that y’all’s love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that y’all may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. (Philippians 1:9-11, Texas Version via the NIV).
[1] Galatians 6:2-5 provides a striking example of the Bible's resistance to oversimplified categorising, as this recent section from my daily reading notes reflects upon: "At the center of Paul's pastoral council is a tension (contradiction?) On the one hand, "Bear one another's burdens." [...] On the other hand, Paul insists, "All must carry their own loads." The letter is a summons to responsibility in order to fend off dependence. Both interdependence and personal responsibility are urged. Such trusting, committed relationality refuses to reduces the tension to a formula or to a foolproof calculation. [...] What lies behind the tension for Paul is a lively, committed community that devotes energy, time and money to the well-being of the community." (Walter Brueggemann, Gift and Task, reading for Friday after Proper 5).
[Thumbnail image cc by Arne Hendriks on Flickr.]
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