In Madeleine L’Engle’s book, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, she talks a lot about language. One thing she discusses is the changes that were made in the Book of Common Prayer. I was not raised with this, but we do have a copy in our home, so I went to browse it one day. It has prayers and Psalms in it. The Psalms I am familiar with.
Engle said, “Where language is weak, theology is weakened” and went on to give a few examples of places where the original language was more detailed and poetic. Such as: The pelican in the wilderness has become vulture; praise him dragons and all deeps has become sea monsters.
But in this next example, the words make a big difference in the impact of the original message: “Be ye sure that the Lord He is God; it I He that has made us and not we ourselves” now reads: “For the Lord Himself has made us and we are His.”
To make the language contemporary we could just cut out the thees and thous, the giveths and takeths, and keep the rest as it is.
