What’s with “Thee,” “Thou,” “Thine,” and “Ye” in Public Prayer? Isn’t This the 21st Century?

That’s a good question. And, in fact, the most recent Book of Common Prayer—the prayer book used by the Episcopal Church since 1979—is written mostly in contemporary English, though it retains an alternate “Rite 1“ eucharist from earlier prayer books. Prayer books in much of Africa and the Caribbean recently have been updated. And believers are always encouraged to talk to God in their personal prayers as they would speak to a parent or trusted friend. Still, Christians of all stripes continue to use archaic [old, fallen out of use] language in many public prayers: “Our father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name….”

The use of such words as “thee” and “thine” in many Christian prayers is a holdover from the Early Modern English used in the King James version of the Bible (first published in 1611) and early Reformation prayer books. But the use of anachronistic language in sacred texts is not unique to the Anglosphere. In the Russian Orthodox Church, for example, the faithful use a more formal language called Old Church Slavonic. Some Roman Catholics still prefer to say the mass in Latin. And when Christian services were eventually translated into Japanese and Mandarin, the translators made the decision to use an older form of those languages. In Anglican and other English-speaking churches we have the advantage of being able to use a traditional language that is fairly easy for anybody to understand, unlike, say, ecclesiastical Latin. There are a few words that need to be learned, but most Anglophone speakers have little trouble navigating 16th- and early 17th-century English updated with modern spellings. Even Billy Graham chose to use “thee” and “thou” in extemporaneous prayers that he offered up at his famous “Crusades.” He knew his evangelical followers would have no problem understanding him.

OK. But why run the risk of sounding pretentious and perhaps putting some people off?

Well, there are at least three reasons:

• Archaic language conveys an element of the sacred; it sounds more reverent than everyday street English. As such, it raises the level of our conversation with God. Just as you’re careful to use textbook English on your résumé (if you want the job), you raise the bar as high as you can when offering up praise and supplications to heaven. “Thee,” “thou,” and “thine” in English are all part of an “elevated linguistic register.” We use them in prayer for the same reason we generally dress up to go to a wedding: to show respect to the couple and acknowledge the importance of the occasion. Traditional English allows us to do the same thing when we pray.

• Many old biblical and religious texts have a majesty and poetic elegance that modern translations frequently have failed to match. In 1975, the PBS program “Firing Line“ featured a discussion of proposed revisions to The Book of Common Prayer. The moderator, public intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr. (a Roman Catholic), offered the following observation in his introduction: “There is nothing in literature, sacred or profane, that excels the beauty of [the 1928 BCP’s] phrases and verses and certainly nothing that excels the beauty of its thought.”

Compare the following lines from Psalm 42. The first is a 1535 translation by Anglican clergyman Myles Coverdale that has been used in The Book of Common Prayer in the UK since 1662, with some modifications. The second excerpt is taken from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible, first published in 1989.

1) “Like as the hart [deer] desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God.” (modified from “Like as the hert desyreth the water brokes, so longeth my soule after the, o God.”)

2) “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.”

You decide which phrasing is more “felicitous.”

And consider the following traditional prayer for angelic protection:

Visit, we beseech thee, O Lord this house
and drive far from it all evil.
May thy holy angels dwell herein to preserve us in harmony and peace,
and may thy blessing rest upon us always. Amen

Just reading it lowers your blood pressure.

• And finally, the use of some linguistic anachronisms reminds us that the faith is ancient as well as timeless. It is the same faith that sustained, inspired, and consoled our ancestors going back two thousand years, not something a committee concocted yesterday. And it reminds us that the faith is something much more substantial and glorious than anybody’s personal imagination can fathom. Language is just one way the Church can try to convey that.

†

In the for-what-it’s-worth department: “ye” the pronoun vs. “ye” the definite article.
Everybody has seen a sign that reads something like “Ye Olde Chocolate Shoppe.” And most people think you pronounce the “ye” as “yee.” Even the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which aims to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, says it’s “yee,” because that’s how just about everybody pronounces it nowadays. But that “y” is not really a “y.” It’s a typographic corruption of an old North European runic letter called a “thorn,” originally written like this: “þ,” and pronounced “th.” (After movable-type printing presses arrived on the scene in the 15th century, many continental printers didn’t have thorns in their collection of letters because the “th” phoneme doesn’t exist in most other languages. That’s why you hear non-native speakers of English struggle with it—they say ”zee,” or “zuh”—and why it’s therefore not surprising that printers in, say, France, Germany, and the Netherlands would not have had thorn type pieces. They often chose to substitute a “y” instead. Close enough.) So, to circle back around, “ye,” when used as a definite article, was in fact pronounced “the,” the same way we pronounce it today. When used as a second-person plural pronoun (“Ye watchers and ye holy ones,” for example), the “y” was, and still is, the 25th letter of the basic Latin alphabet and pronounced like it.