One way to get a Nobel prize in something, you've got to break some new ground or discover something no one has ever seen. In the world, the invention of a printing press or light bulb changes everything. People are still out there trying to invent a better mousetrap. It happens. The phone replaced the telegraph and now our mobile devices.
Everyone can learn something new from scripture. You might even change or tweak a doctrine you've always believed. On the whole, you really don't want to teach something from the Bible no one has ever heard before. The goal is the original intent and understanding of the Author.
From the left comes progressivism. The U. S. Constitution, just over two hundred years old, means something different than it did when it was written. Loosely constructed, it has a flexible interpretation into which are read new meanings. Hegelian dialectics say a new thesis comes from synthesis of antithesis and the old thesis. Everything can be improved.
Early after the inspiration and then propagation of the Bible, men began finding new things in scripture no one ever saw. Many of these "finds" started a new movement. People have their fathers, the father of this or that teaching, contradictory to the other, causing division and new factions and denominations. Some of these changes become quite significant, a majority supplanting the constituents of the original teaching.
At the time of the Reformation, it was as if the world first found sole fide and sole scriptura. Justification is often called the Reformation doctrine of justification. This opened a big proverbial can of worms. Everyone could read his own Bible, many times in his own language, and now dig into his own copy of the original languages of scripture. A certain skepticism grew. "If we didn't know this before, what else have they not been telling us." It was a time ripe for religious shysters and this practice hasn't stopped since then.
The Italian, Laelius Socinus, was born in 1525 into a distinguished family of jurists and he was trained at Padua. Early Socinus's attention turned to scripture research instead of law, which led to his doubt in the teachings of Roman Catholicism. Socinus moved in 1548 to Zurich to study Greek and Hebrew. His questioning of established doctrine didn't stop. He also doubted the Reformers and wrote his own confession of faith that introduced different, conflicting beliefs that took hold in his nephew, Faustus Socinus, born in 1539.
Faustus rejected orthodox Roman Catholic doctrines, was denounced by the Inquisition in 1559, and fled to Zurich himself in 1562, where he acquired his uncle's writings that same year his uncle died. Catholicism was wrong and the doubt turned anti-Trinitarian. The Reformation did not go far enough for Socinus and in his first published work in 1562 on the prologue of John, he rejected the essential deity of Jesus Christ.
Socinus's journeys ended in Poland, where he became the leader of the Minor Reformed Church, called the Polish Brethren. His writings in the form of the Racovian Catechism survived in Polish and Latin through the press of the Racovian Academy of Rakow, Poland. His and his uncle's beliefs took on the name of Socinianism, which also became a catch-all for any type of dissenting beliefs.
Socinianism held that Jesus did not exist until his physical conception. He was adopted by God as His Son at conception and became the Son of God when he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, a Gnostic view called "adoptionism." It rejected the doctrine of original sin. It denies the omniscience of God, introducing the first well developed concept of what is called "open theism," which said that man couldn't have free will under a traditional (and scriptural) understanding of omniscience. It also taught the moral example theory of atonement, teaching that Jesus sacrificed himself to motivate people to repent and believe. His death gave men the ability to be saved by their own works, who weren't sinners by nature anyway.
The work of Socinus lived on in the belief of early English Unitarians, Henry Hedworth and John Biddle. Socinian belief was helped along also by its position of conscientious objection, a practice of refusing to perform military service. This principle was very popular with many and made Socinianism much more attractive to potential adherents. The First Unitarian Church, which followed Socianism as passed down through its leaders in England, was started in 1774 on Essex Street in London, where British Unitarian headquarters are still today.
As the Puritans of colonial America apostatized through various means, Unitarianism, a modern iteration of Socinianism took hold in the Congregational Church in America. After 1820, Congregationalists took Unitarianism as their established doctrine. The doctrine of Christ diminished to Jesus a good man and perhaps a prophet of God and in a sense the Son of God, but not God Himself.
I write all of this mainly as an example of the diversity in the history of Christian doctrine and why it takes place. When you read the beliefs of Socinians, you can easily see them in modern liberal Christianity and an influence on religious cults that deny the deity of Jesus Christ. A limited amount of skepticism wards away the acceptance of false doctrine. Better is a Berean attitude (Acts 17:11), searching the scripture to see if these things are so, and what Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:21, proving all things, holding fast to that which is good.
As I grew up in fundamentalism and among independent Baptists, I witnessed a strong and regular desire among leaders to find something new in the Bible. Many sermons I heard espoused interpretations I had never heard and didn't see in the text being preached. A preacher often would say that "God had given it to him." You could know that God was using the man because God was giving him insights into scripture never seen before. He was "inspired." It continues today in many evangelical churches, the same practice that led Joseph Smith in his founding of Mormonism. Many cults arose in 19th century America under the same spirit of skepticism of established historical doctrines of scripture.
Anyone could be prey to the temptation of novel teaching, a unique take on the Bible. Faustus Socinus accepted many orthodox doctrines of his day, but he rejected Christ as fully God and fully human because it was contrary to sound reason (ratio sana). This steered Socinians toward Enlightenment thinking, where human reason took the highest role as the arbiter of truth.
Warren Wiersbe wrote that it was H.A. Ironside, longtime pastor of Chicago's Moody Church, who said, "If it's new, it's not true, and if it's true, it's not new." Somewhere else I read that it was Spurgeon who first said that. I don't know. It's true though that it has been through clever new interpretations, teachings, and takes on and from scripture that actual scriptural, saving doctrines have been corrupted and overturned in the hearts of men, condemning them through all eternity.
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