The major changes made by American Presbyterians to the Westminster Confession in 1788 concerned statements about the relationship between the church and the civil government in Chapters 23 and 31. The original Confession of 1647 allows some secular authority over and interference in church affairs, which the American Presbyterians were unwilling to grant.
After the great division of the church into the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) and the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) at the conclusion of the Civil War, both PCUSA and PCUS wrote new chapters on marriage. The Evangelical Presbyterian Church has adopted what was the PCUS version of Chapter 24.
The EPC has also adopted the new, American Chapters 34 and 35. These were added by PCUSA in 1903, and subsequently by PCUS and the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. The original wording of these two chapters included deliberately archaic expressions (“doth,” “hath,” etc.), which have been modernized here.
The EPC has amended the Confession at three points. The word “ordinarily” has been added to Chapter 27, Section 4, and to Chapter 28, Section 2. The phrase, “so that the marriage dies at the heart and the union becomes,” has been deleted from the second sentence of Section 5 of Chapter 24. For the Larger Catechism, “only” has been replaced with “ordinarily” in A 176.
The editors are: Dr. Philip Rollinson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and Dr. Douglas F. Kelly, Jordon Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, NC. They have been joined by Dr. Hugh W. McClure, III, a retired Presbyterian minister, for the Confession, and by Dr. S. Donald Fortson, III, Assistant Professor of Church History and Practical Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, NC, for the Larger Catechism.
For the Shorter Catechism, Drs. Kelly and Rollinson were joined by a translation team from the Westshor Group of Jackson, Mississippi: Rev. Frederick T. Marsh, Thomas I. Rice, III, A. Jerry Sheldon, Dr. Luder G. Whitlock, Jr., and Rev. William K. Wymond. The Westshor Group was comprised of a group of lay members of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, who conceived of modernizing the Shorter Catechism in the 1980s after the example of the modern language Confession of Faith and who subsidized the project.