A Bible full of errors?

episode 5 of "Fighting Free of God?"

What might be called 'liberal theology' can be traced back to the late seventeenth century, when Christian ideas began to be subjected to rationalist critiques. And, as we saw in the second episode of this series, such critiques became a lot sharper during the following century, under the assaults of the philosophes.

But what we call 'biblical criticism' — the undermining of biblical credibility as to dating, authorship, historical reliability etc. — really took off during the nineteenth century. And, though these discussions were largely confined to academia, in the long run they had profoundly secularising effects. For the students went on to become pastors. Some of them taught the new ideas from the pulpits; others, more cautious, merely remained silent about key Christian doctrines in which they no longer believed. But where either route was followed, the eventual result was a greatly watered down faith among ordinary believers — with zero motivation for evangelism.

It bears pointing out that, until well into the twentieth century, this was a specifically Protestant problem. It was precisely the (relative!) obscurantism of the Catholic and Orthodox churches (which had problems of their own) that shielded their flocks from these new ways of thinking. We explore the story — just in outline, of course — in this episode!