Starting with the Renaissance, more or less, there was a new kind of critical thought. I’m not claiming that everyone before that was completely naive, nor that people didn’t try to be objective. But critical method, which led into the Enlightenment, led to a very different attitude towards both traditions and texts such as the Bible.
As far as I can tell from my readings in church history, for most of the history of the Church, people assumed that the traditions going back to Christ were true, not distinguishing between Bible, church fathers, and the developing tradition. There wasn’t the kind of insistence on absolute propositional truth that you’ll find in modern conservative Protestants, because that developed in opposition to the Enlightenment, but there was a general assumption that the Bible, along with other aspects of the tradition were true. There also wasn’t the kind of evidence from science and archaeology that we have today that might require people to rethink that.
Starting with the 16th Cent, Western culture started to develop a self-critical attitude, spurred perhaps by the conclusion that some key Christian texts (e.g. the Donation of Constantine) were frauds, that there were problems with the Vulgate translation, and key theological elements had been based on those errors, and that supposedly unchanging tradition had actually changed a fair amount over time.
Over the next few centuries, we came to be much more critical of our own traditions, and to appreciate more explicitly that although the Church came from Christ, that didn’t mean that he would necessarily approve of everything currently taught. The scientific method actually started in medieval times, but it became more explicit during this time, and scientists became accustomed to finding out that things people had always believed turned out to be wrong.
Outside of science, it’s harder to come up with tests for truth that everyone can agree on. But there was the same realization that things Christians have always believed might well be wrong, and attempts to develop approaches to allow for that.
The Reformation occurred very early in this process. Luther and Calvin fully understood the issues with tradition, but they tried replace problems with the tradition by using Scripture as an authority. This was not a new approach: everyone before the 16th Cent had assumed that Scripture was the teachings of the Apostles, and they were true. But that had also been thought about tradition.
To take a critical view of tradition and elevate Scripture to God’s direct teaching was a novel approach. It did allow them to deal with many of the obvious theological and pastoral problems of the day, but it left the Protestant tradition in a kind of limbo, understanding fully the problems with tradition, but unwilling to apply the same methods to Scripture.
At this point the Protestant tradition has split, with parts continuing the critical program of the Reformers, and extending that to Scripture, and parts unwilling to change the traditional view of Scripture.
You can’t look at questions of Genesis outside this perspective. Certainly people have tried compromises, e.g. day-age approaches that claim to reconcile some scientific insights with Genesis, or limited understandings that say the first 11 chapters aren’t historical, but the rest is. But understanding the creation story as non-historical is really part of the critical understanding of Scripture.
I’m not convinced that the compromises are going to work in the long run:
- Archaeologists have problems with later parts of the Bible
- It’s become increasingly obvious that on key moral issues, such as gender and sex, the Bible reflects a culture that today we would consider unacceptable, and that there is evidence that it rests on misunderstandings
- If you look at the Bible without preconceptions, it’s obvious that there are NT authors that have differing viewpoints
- A lot of modern theology, while claiming to be “Biblical,” really is based on later tradition, and the proof texts cited really have little to do with the final theology.
Whether Christianity can actually survive a critical approach to Scripture is less clear. Certainly liberal theology hasn't done well in keeping members active in church. But if it fails, I think the US is going to split into two completely separate cultures, engaged in a continuing cold war.