Anonymous Asks (262)

“Why do you consistently use an initial capital on ‘Bible’ but not ‘scripture’?”

Good question. Most older Christian writers tend to use Scripture rather than scripture. So why am I an outlier in this regard?

My general preference is typically that of modern editors, which is to use as few initial caps as possible, only where setting a word in all lower case would obscure the intended meaning.

The B-I-B-L-E

The word “Bible” originally just meant “book”. It came into English from Greek by way of Medieval Latin and Old French. I have three reasons for capitalizing it here:

1. While each English translation of the Bible has its own branding, as in Holy Bible: American Standard Version or The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, it is understood that the thing each of these publications has in common with one another is that with few exceptions they are translations of exactly the same Greek and Hebrew content. “Bible” serves as a short version of its title, and, being effectively a proper name, requires an initial capital.
2. English writers use the word in a generic sense to refer to any book that may considered the definitive guide to a particular knowledge base or discipline, as in the sentence, “Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style is the editor’s bible”, or as in the actual title of Harold Hoffman’s 2000 Gunsmithing and Toolmaking Bible. As you might imagine, Hoffman’s compilation holds itself out as the “complete library of books on gun work and tool making”. Because this generic sense remains common in English, I use a capital ‘B’ to make sure there is no ambiguity.
3. Secularists occasionally like to tweak Christians by rendering it bible, either a deliberate trivialization or obfuscation. I like to tweak them back.

Sola Scriptura

On the other hand, the word “scripture” comes from the Latin scriptus and scriptura, originally meaning any product of writing. In the fourteenth century, it began to be used in English to describe either the collected books of the Bible or any Bible passage. Over centuries, the religious sense became the dominant meaning of the word, and it is now used exclusively this way; the generic sense has effectively dropped out of the English language. Nobody refers to even the greatest literary classic as “scripture”, and the so-called holy writings of other religions all require a clarifying adjective to correctly identify them, as in “The Bhagavad Gita is the Hindu scripture.”

Because there is no ambiguity about the meaning of the word today, especially in the current context, I feel no need to capitalize it.

The Reverential Sense

Some writers feel most comfortable capitalizing Scripture for the same reason they capitalize all pronouns referring to God: they feel it is irreverent not to. I don’t. You can find arguments for and against that position here.