The OPC’s New Modern Version of the Westminster Standards

I’ve written before about the EPC’s modern language edition of the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, and noted several years ago that the OPC had in 2018 created a study to modernize all of the Standards. Well, the OPC finally finished this work — in summer 2025! The OPC never does anything quickly. True presbyterians are they.

The OPC had previously in 1993 published a modern language, study version of the Westminster Confession, and I had thought that perhaps this new effort would change their actual constitutional documents. The changes were limited to morphological adjustments, replacing archaic pronouns, replacing obsolete and/or archaic words, substituting a modern translation of the Scriptures for the text of the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and doing all in a way that preserved the cadence, memorability and dignified style of the standards. Like the previous study version, these are very conservative changes that don’t touch the substance of the Standards’ grammar, much less its doctrine. My hope was that if the OPC formally made such a modernized constitutional change, that not only would there be a new, solid modern language version (rather than a modernized version that also lowers the reading level of the documents, as in the EPC), but also something could be pointed to as a future constitutional option for the EPC and other churches. Such an update could be a solid ecumenical foundation for modernized confessionalism. If the conservative OPC did it, why not us?…