Hope for Calvinists

[andrewlittle]

From MLP (More Light Presbyterians) website http://www.mlp.org/article.php?story=Heidelberg:

The Community of Reconciliation and the East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are leading the way to restore the Heidelberg Catechism to its historic form in their petitions to Pittsburgh Presbytery to overture the General Assembly to begin this solemn process of amending the Book of Confessions. It has been known for some time that the 1962 translation of the Heidelberg Catechism is flawed in several ways.

The most egregious mistake appears to be dealt with in this section:

5. 4.087: two elements in the answer to question 87 are supplied by the translators and do not appear in the original text (nor in any translations produced prior to 1962).
Neither the original German nor the Latin have texts corresponding to the following phrases:
“‘Surely you know that the unjust will never come into possession of the kingdom of God. Make no mistake:”
and
“or of homosexual perversion.”
The remaining items in the vice list supplied in the answer to question 87 have equivalents or rough equivalents in the original text (although some singular nouns have been rendered as plural nouns). This innovation was created by the translators’ decision to ignore a portion of the Heidelberg Catechism answer 87 and instead to replace it with the New English Bible translation of 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. In 1997, one of the translators, Professor Eugene Osterhaven, disclosed that this replacement was entirely intentional. In light of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, “it would be well to be more specific [about sexual practice]… than [the author of the Heidelberg Catechism] had been in his day.”3 This “amendment” to a traditional Reformed document was the creation of two translators and was never deliberated upon by a body of the church before The Book of Confessions was adopted.