Which edition am I reading?

Why this site publishes the historic text

Every confessional text on this site comes from a documented public-domain edition, named on the document's own page and linked to the source it was taken from. That rule is not a preference about which English a reader ought to like best. It is what makes the site checkable: you can hold what we publish against the edition we say we took it from, and where the two disagree, we are wrong and you can prove it.

The rule has a cost, and this page is where we pay it. The texts these churches confess today are, in a few places, not the texts printed here. Some were revised by synods. Others exist in modern translations that are under copyright and are not ours to reproduce. So a reader can come to the Westminster Confession on this site, read what chapter 25 says about the pope of Rome, and reasonably conclude that this is what an OPC or a PCA minister vowed to uphold. It is not.

The alternative would be to harmonize quietly — print the historic text, patch the places where the churches have since moved, and say nothing about it. That would leave a reader unable to tell which document they were holding, which is a worse failure than the one it fixes. So instead: here is every difference we are aware of, document by document, with a link to each church's own wording. Where we have missed one, we would rather be told than left tidy.

The Westminster Standards: the American revisions

The Westminster Confession printed here is the original British text of 1646. The American Presbyterian churches — among them the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America — hold a revised text. When the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America was constituted in 1788 it adopted the Confession with revisions taking the civil magistrate out of the church's affairs, and it made further changes before the end of the century. The OPC's own published comparison, linked from the Westminster row above, sets the two texts side by side and puts the whole difference at about 145 words out of some 12,000. The United Reformed Churches do not confess the Westminster Standards, so none of this bears on them.

By that comparison the Confession differs in six places. Chapter 20.4 drops “and by the power of the civil magistrate,” leaving the church's censures to the church. Chapter 22.3 loses the sentence making it a sin to refuse a lawfully imposed oath. Chapter 23.3, which as printed here gives the magistrate authority that “all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed” and power “to call synods,” is rewritten altogether, forbidding the magistrate to meddle in matters of faith and requiring him to protect every denomination alike. Chapter 24.4 loses the sentence on marrying a wife's kindred. Chapter 25.6 drops the words naming the pope of Rome “that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition.” And chapter 31 is changed twice: 31.1 gains language allowing church officers to convene assemblies by virtue of their office, and 31.2, which has magistrates lawfully calling a synod, is omitted entirely.

That last omission has a consequence a reader will meet before they meet the doctrine. Because the American text drops a whole paragraph from chapter 31, its paragraph numbers from that point run one behind ours. If you are checking a citation from an OPC or PCA source against chapter 31 or later on this site, expect the numbers to be off by one, and count rather than trust them.

The Larger Catechism differs in one place. The American churches hold a text with the phrase “tolerating a false religion” deleted from answer 109, on the sins forbidden by the second commandment. Answer 109 is printed here whole, and this site's treatment of worship sends readers to it, which is why it is named rather than left to be found. The Shorter Catechism has no entry on this page because it needs none: apart from spelling, the American churches adopted it unrevised.

Nothing on this site has been edited to match any of this. The 1646 text stands as it is, and the links in the Westminster rows above go to each church's own adopted wording, which is the authority on what that church actually confesses.

The Belgic Confession: Articles 36 and 4

Article 36, on the civil government, is the one article of the Belgic Confession that the churches confessing it have amended for doctrinal reasons. As printed here — Schaff's 1877 English of the historic text — it charges the government not only with the welfare of the state but with protecting the sacred ministry so as to “remove and prevent all idolatry and false worship; that the kingdom of antichrist may be thus destroyed.” The churches that hold this confession today do not confess that clause.

The General Synod of the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland deleted it at Utrecht in 1905, and the Christian Reformed Church made the corresponding change in its own text. The United Reformed Churches in North America, which came out of the CRC in 1996, publish the article with three paragraphs standing in place of the original one. In them the civil rulers have the task, subject to God's law, of “removing every obstacle to the preaching of the gospel and to every aspect of divine worship,” while refraining from every tendency toward exercising absolute authority.

What they do with the displaced paragraph is worth a reader's attention, because it is the same thing this site does. They do not drop it. They print it in a footnote, under a line saying that the three paragraphs are a substitution for an original paragraph “various Reformed Synods have judged to be unbiblical.” A church that has moved can either hide the fact or show it, and the URCNA shows it.

There is a second amendment, smaller and easy to miss. Synod 2016 of the URCNA revised Article 4, the list of canonical books, to modernize the names of the books and to reflect the uncertain authorship of the letter to the Hebrews. Their text counts thirteen letters of Paul and names Hebrews on its own; the text printed here counts fourteen and includes Hebrews among them. Nothing turns on it doctrinally, and we list it because this page promised every difference we are aware of, not every difference we found interesting.

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America do not confess the Belgic Confession at all, so neither article is theirs to have revised.

We publish the historic wording because this site's warrant is documented public-domain editions, and we name the differences here rather than harmonizing quietly. The link in the Belgic row above goes to the text a URCNA congregation actually reads, and on a question of what a church confesses, that text is the authority and this page is not.

The Heidelberg Catechism: Question 80

Question 80, on the difference between the Lord's Supper and the Mass, is the sharpest thing this catechism says, and it is the question readers most often arrive expecting to find softened. It has not been softened here, and it has not been softened by the churches this site covers. The United Reformed Churches confess the Heidelberg Catechism with Question 80 entire. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America do not confess the Heidelberg at all; their standards are the Westminster Standards. So this is a Three Forms question, and among the Three Forms churches it is not a revision case.

There is a genuine edition fact underneath it, and it belongs on this page even though it changes nothing about what is confessed. Question 80 was absent from the first edition of the catechism in 1563, appeared in a shortened form in the second, and reached its full length in the third. That third edition is the one printed here and the one the churches use: the URCNA says of its own translation that it “follows the third German edition of the catechism,” the edition carried in the Palatinate Church Order of November 15, 1563, and that this is the received text used throughout the world. Schaff marks the material added in that edition with brackets. Those clauses were written while the Council of Trent's decree on the sacrifice of the Mass was fresh. This is a sixteenth-century church answering a specific sixteenth-century claim about what happens at an altar.

Readers who have heard that Question 80 was set aside are usually thinking of the Christian Reformed Church, which after study in the years from 2004 took the step of bracketing the closing paragraphs and declaring them not binding on its members. That is the CRC's act, taken after the United Reformed Churches had already separated from it, and it does not reach the URCNA's text. We record it here because a reader who has heard of it deserves to know whose decision it was rather than to be left guessing whether ours is out of date.

What the answer denies is a repeated propitiatory sacrifice offered by priests for the living and the dead — the doctrine the paragraph names, and the thing the Reformed churches reject. Where Rome's own later formulations are read differently, that is a conversation between the churches and Rome, and this site does not settle it.

What this page does not track

This page tracks differences in the text of these documents: places where a church confesses words other than the words printed here. It does not track differences of translation, and there are many. Every church on this site uses modern English editions of the creeds and confessions, and those editions differ from our public-domain ones sentence by sentence without differing in a single point of doctrine. Listing them would bury the handful of differences that actually matter.

It also does not track subscription, which is a further question and a more consequential one than most readers expect. What a church requires of an officer when he subscribes a confession — how much he must hold, what he may take exception to, and who judges it — differs among the URCNA, the OPC and the PCA. That belongs to each church's own order and its own courts, and we send readers to those rather than characterize them here.

And where a defect turns out to be ours — a transcription that dropped a word, a paragraph broken in the wrong place — it is ours, not the churches'. We repair it and say so. A repair is not a revision, and it never appears on this page.