Updated July 22, 2004 (first published April 2, 1996) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The Unitarian Review for September 1883 made this bold proclamation: “According to Unitarianism man judges the Bible. According to Orthodoxy the Bible judges man. On this point everything turns.”

The Unitarians were one the first groups of professing Christians who openly denied the verbal-plenary inspiration of Scripture. (Unitarians had a prominent role in the development of modern textual criticism in the 19th century; they produced many of the textbooks in this field and worked on some of the early versions, including the English Revised of 1881 and the American Revised of 1901.)

In the more than one hundred years since the Unitarian Review made its bold challenge, its heretical view of the Bible has permeated the "Christian" world. Even a great many who claim even to be evangelicals have adopted views of the Bible which deny its verbal-plenary inspiration and which assume that the Bible contains some historical and "scientific" errors, which approach the Gospels in a naturalistic fashion through form criticism, etc.

The explosion of modern versions has encourages the student to pick and choose his own preferred readings and has created a tendency to treat every Bible lightly and to look upon none as the final Word.

This approach to the Bible is more than one hundred years old. Man must judge the Bible. I don't care who espouses it, whether such a one claims to be a Unitarian or a Modernist or a Neo-orthodox or a Neo-Evangelical or a Fundamentalist. It is destructive wherever is found.