If religious knowledge, like any other form of knowledge, develops through a process of falsification, then an immutable religious tradition is unattainable. Cultural continuity, on the other hand, allows a given religion to develop with time–and even acknowledge past mistakes–without forsaking the tradition at hand.

To put it bluntly, classical Christianity is itself now our Old Testament… We have to use traditional Christianity in the same way as Christianity itself has always used the Old Testament. In both cases there is a great gulf but there is also continuity of spirit and religious values… When a Christian sings a psalm he knows there is a religion-gap and a culture-gap, but it does not worry him because he believes his faith to be the legitimate successor of the faith of the psalmist. Similarly, since the Enlightenment there has developed a religion-gap and a culture-gap between us and traditional Christianity, but we may still be justified in using the old words if we can plausibly argue that our present faith and spiritual values are the legitimate heirs of the old.

–Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (HT: Exploring Our Matrix)

Present-day fundamentalist theology makes a position of cultural continuity nearly impossible, though strangely enough almost no fundamentalist position (perhaps none at all) has remained constant with time.