When I say I have “faith,” should it be lower case?
When I say I share the “faith,” should it be capitalized?
When I say I share my “faith,” should it be lower case?
If I say there is one Church and one “faith,” should that be capitalized?
If any instance of “faith” needs capitalized, is there a reason why the Bible never capitalizes the word, “faith?”
Capitalization is used to indicate the beginning of a sentence, or for the 1st-person singular pronoun “I”, or to indicate the
uniqueness associated with ‘proper nouns’, i.e., the precise names of very specific and unique things, such as people or countries. It is this last which may be involved here.
Usually, one says, “I have faith”, because, in this sentence, faith is a generalized, abstract quality. The same applies when one “shares one’s faith”. It is not capitalized, because it is merely a common noun, much the same as “desk”, or “cat”.
When one talks about “the faith of my ancestors”, this is one particular faith separated out from all of the faiths in the world, and so one prefixes it with the definite article (“the”), but it needs no capitalization because it is not strictly unique, being one separated from others by a particular quality (which, in this case, is the prepositional phrase “of my ancestors”). It is still a common noun.
However, should one wish to talk about “the Faith”, or “one Church and one Faith”, capitals are often used to say, “This is the One and Only True and Unique Faith”. The capitals are then employed as
a form of emphasis. This is a common noun which has been changed into a proper noun.
Regarding
Bible translations, Greek worked differently. First, in the time of the writing of the Scriptures, ‘lower case’ letters had not yet been invented: they were created in about the C7th by monks who needed to save paper (vellum, more precisely) by putting the letters more closely together. As such,
everything in the manuscripts of the
Bible texts is in capitals. Second, Greek used its definite article in a different way from that in which we use ours. E.g., 1 John 5:4 ends, in English, “our faith”, whereas the Greek is η πιστις 'ημων, or ‘the faith of us’. Similarly, where the English says, “God”, the Greek is almost always 'ο θεος, ‘the God’. All of this further complicates deciding when to capitalize expressions in a translation.
If you so wished, you could employ “the Faith” in such locations as in Act 13:8 and 14:22, wherein you might want to say that “faith” is too general and abstract. That, however, brings up the whole messy question of authorial intention, which is always a good way to initiate yelling matches at academic conferences.
-Mystophilus, refugee from English-language teaching
