The committee’s request was approved on Monday by the Theological Issues and Institutions Committee by a vote of 51-4 and was sent to the full GA’s consideration later this week

The 2008 Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly formed a special committee to “correct translation problems” in questions 19, 33, 55, 74 and 87 of the Heidelberg Catechism, the fourth confession in the Book of Confessions.

That committee of 15, including seven members fluent in German and Latin (the original languages of the 1562 confession), has asked this year’s assembly to allow it to present a new translation of the entire document in 2012.

The committee reported that it found a number of inaccuracies throughout the catechism that warrant a new translation, about which they have been in consultation with a similar group from the Christian Reformed Church of North America and the Reformed Church of America working on a “retranslation” to go to their national governing bodies in 2011.

The committee’s request was approved on Monday by the Theological Issues and Institutions Committee by a vote of 51-4 and was sent to the full GA’s consideration later this week

If the GA approves the request, the new translation would have to be approved by the 2012 GA, be approved by a 2/3 vote among the presbyteries and be approved again by the 2014 GA.

A second expansion of the special committee’s authority is to consider adding Scriptural references to each article of the catechism, lacking in the original document. That may be difficult to do so accurately, they said, because a number of different Bible translations in German and Latin were in the wide use at the time Heidelberg was published in 1563. Furthermore, none of those had been divided into verses, only chapters