Am I obligated to capitalize Him and He?

[LilyM]

Well does anyone ever use a lower case ‘g’ when referring to Jesus’ Heavenly Father? Is it god or God? So if Jesus is God with an upper case ‘G’ then I would use upper cases for the letter h.

My two cents.

No-one ever uses a lower-case n when referring to you as Nicea either, nor a lower case l when referring to me as LilyM. That’s because our names, like the name of the deity, are proper nouns and proper nouns are capitalised.

Yet I don’t think people should use a capital H when using pronouns such as ‘him/his’ or ‘her/hers’, if they refer to you or to me (which by your logic should be You and Me)

The word ‘god’ is not the proper name of non-Abrahamic deities, such as Baal, Zeus, Osiris, Vishnu or the like. ‘God’ is a description of who they are, but not a proper noun in their case, they have their own proper names. THAT is why when one uses a lower-case ‘g’ to refer to them.

The God of Abraham, if memory serves, really has no proper name, at least not in English, although terms such as ‘Yahweh’ or ‘Jehovah’ are sometimes used, I don’t think they are intended to be proper names.

 

[didymus]

I think the “rule” being followed in many Bible versions is not to capitalise “he” when it is used in a narrative; “he went up”, “he said”, &c which is reasonable.

I think it should be capitalised when used in a theological sense but the RSV seems to disagree. Notice the inconstency:

1 When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and **him **crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. (1Corinthians (RSV) 2)

 

[patrick457]

This is a very interesting question.

I am somewhat confused about capitals (upper case), e.g. church, gentiles, bible, scripture, biblical etc.

I see recently Jesus being referred to as he.

I look forward to more replies.

This is how I personally do it:

• I capitalize ‘Church’ when referring to an institution (say, the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church), but use the lowercase when referring to a church building.
• I keep ‘gentile’ in lowercase since the Latin gentes, the Greek ethnē or the Hebrew goyim (all meaning “nations”) is actually just a generic term for a foreigner, a stranger, or a non-Jew. Kind of like how the terms ‘American’ or ‘Italian’ or ‘Greek’ are capitalized by some people but not the terms ‘alien’ or ‘foreigner’ or ‘barbarian’. The two terms represent a comparable division of humankind into two categories.
• I generally spell Bible (Biblical) and Scripture (Scriptural) in uppercase.
• I’m a bit inconsistent regarding the divine pronouns, since I usually capitalize third-person pronouns such as ‘Him’ and ‘He’ (‘I’ is out of the question), but keep second-person pronouns such as ‘you’ or ‘your’ lowercase - just for aesthetic reasons (for some reason I feel odd when typing ‘You’ or ‘Your’). My reasons? Well, respect does factor here, but the main reason is that I’m just used to writing it that way. Besides, capitalizing pronouns for God and Jesus helps to clearly distinguish the speaker when the passage in question has “and He said”…