Comment by tdeck
4 days ago
The wiki article I linked goes into it a bit:
> Early English translations of the Bible used the familiar singular form of the second person, which mirrors common usage trends in other languages. The familiar and singular form is used when speaking to God in French (in Protestantism both in past and present, in Catholicism since the post–Vatican II reforms), German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic and many others (all of which maintain the use of an "informal" singular form of the second person in modern speech). In addition, the translators of the King James Version of the Bible attempted to maintain the distinction found in Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek between singular and plural second-person pronouns and verb forms, so they used thou, thee, thy, and thine for singular, and ye, you, your, and yours for plural.
That doesn't really explain why people used a more familiar form with God, literally the most powerful anything, than they would with mere strangers.
I won't claim this as the one true answer, but one potential reason is that it is encouraged by many religions, including Christian denominations, to have a personal relationship with God. To put it another way, it is exactly God's power which enables God to have a personal relationship with each of us while we, constrained by our own humanity, are only capable of maintaining familiarity with a relatively small number of people.
God is omnipotent and omnipresent after all
In English, some prayers came directly from the King James Bible. The singular second-person pronoun in those prayers corresponded with the informal second-person pronoun in the normal spoken or written English of that time. It would have been weird to change the "hallowed be thy name" written in the Bible to "hallowed be your name" when actually praying just to be more formal towards God. Being formal would also not reflect the teaching that Christians have been adopted as sons and daughters of God. I read that "thou" indicated familiarity and affection like between family members and friends and lovers, whereas "ye" indicated distance, and using "ye" towards someone that you'd normally call "thou" would indicate you had a problem with them. So calling God "ye" would require you to rephrase passages in the Bible and might connote that you don't think God has a friendly or familial sort of relationship with Christians, but is far removed from humans or even antagonistic towards them.
It's just a cultural tradition. Not sure what kind of answer you're expecting here.
In his prayer Jesus did not address YHWH as Adonai (“Lord”) as is customary in Judaism, but as “Papa/Dad”, Abba in Aramaic, and taught his disciples this form of address.
Christianity began as an episode of Undercover Boss, so it makes perfect sense.