Thursday, May 20, 2010

To capitalize or not, that is the question!

Current punctuation rules indicate that one should not capitalize pronouns referring to diety. 

Marva Dawn said something so profound about this that I wanted to pass it along:

"As I have pondered the objections of feminists to masculine pronouns for God (because they "oppress women"), I have become convinced that their arguments are given more weight since we stopped capitalizing those pronouns and thereby lost the mystery of God's transcendence that can also be personal.  Therefore, I have returned to capitalizing the pronouns to enphasize that they are meant to signify not gender, but surprising relational intimacy.  Though I grew up in a somewhat patriarchal denomination, still I have always recognized the words He, Him, His and Himself not to signify God's maleness, but to carry a sense of the ineffable, the secret yet revealed wonder of God's immanence. For further discussion see, "He, His, Him, Himself" in part one of my book Talking the Walk: Letting Christian Language Live Again (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2005." 

 I found this in her book My Soul Waits: Solace for the Lonely in the Psalms.  She is an amazing woman who has known rejection, loss, cancer, and loads of other trials, and found God in the dark places.