I am on holiday at the moment asked trying to do this on my mobile phone so bear with me.
fsck recently made a comment on a thread which included:
I don’t suppose that cultural relativism is true. I believe that the law was an imperfect tool, limited by man’s hardness of heart.
The two testaments are so different in moral proclamation that the Christian has to jump through some serious post hoc rationalisation hoops.
The idea is that the Christian has to argue that there has to be some kind of moral progression, that humanity was too morally inept in order to be able to understand a moral decree as explicit as “don’t rape or keep slaves”. This is a pretty damning indictment of a supposedly complex people!
I simply don’t buy the moral progression claim and that it had to be that way. The rules of the OT were shite, and there is no coherent way of explaining then in terms of an OmniGod. Perhaps if the people were cavemen, then you could get a with claiming that adulterers should be stoned to death… perhaps.
In reality, fsck’s claims are poor, but not at all unusual.