Chapter 34: Equality Is Not a Christian Ideal
EQUALITY IS NOT A CHRISTIAN IDEAL
IF WE accept the idea of hierarchy we need to know where the lines are drawn.
A dean of a small church-related college was asked to relax some of the rules a little to make them more “relevant,” more “realistic,” more “acceptable to today’s students.” But this dean had been in the business long enough to know that this request would come every year. Every year the student newspaper would carry editorials on the cut system, dormitory regulations, the grading system, and compulsory chapel. (You already know that this was some years ago —students today have hardly heard of any of those things.) You could compare copies from 1926 and 1956 and find similar complaints.
“Wherever you draw the lines,” the dean told them, “is where the battle will be.”
In the short ten months of your life before your father died he had to draw only one line for you that I can recall. He made it quite clear that you were not to touch his books. You had pulled one from the bottom shelf and torn a page and got a spanking from him, and from then on you understood perfectly (a baby’s understanding is usually way ahead of his parents’ estimate) that you were not to go near them. But I can still see that little face, quizzical, self-assertive, mischievous, and plainly defiant, as you crawled slowly toward the bookcase, peeping back over your shoulder at us, testing the line. We watched silently, also testing. You kept on. A tiny finger was raised from the floor and inched toward the books. “Valerie.” Pause. The finger poised in midair, the look still defiant. Silence. Then the finger moved, ever so slightly. “No.” The finger stopped, the expression relaxed, changed suddenly to purposefulness, and you crawled away as though you had urgent business elsewhere.
Lines must be drawn. The universe is run by laws which can be relied on. Not only do college deans and parents draw lines in order to control students and children. Any business has to be run by certain clearly defined principles. A job description is given to an applicant, and if he qualifies for the job and accepts it, he accepts also the boundaries set for him and the responsibilities that go with it.
But the great question for us women is, where have the lines been drawn? Is a woman required to be subject to her husband? May a woman be ordained to the ministry of the church? Is she subordinate to men in all areas of life? Many women readily accept the notion of created order but consider men and women to have been created “equal.”
Equality is not really a Christian ideal. It is, in the first place, very hard to get at what people mean when they speak of equality. Surely they can’t mean that men and women are like two halves of an hourglass or an orange. Jacques Barzun in his House of Intellect says, “Superior and inferior can be determined only with respect to a single quality for a single purpose. . . . Men are incommensurable and must be deemed equal. . . . Equality is but one of man’s qualities and among the most dispensable.”
Men and women are equal, we may say, in having been created by God. Both male and female are created in His image. They bear the divine stamp. They are equally called to obedience and responsibility, but there are differences in the responsibilities. But Adam and Even sinned and are equally guilty. Therefore both are equally the objects of God’s grace.
The statement “All men are created equal” is a political one, referring to a single quality for a single purpose. C. S. Lewis called this a “legal fiction,” useful, necessary, but not by any means always desirable. Marriage is one place where it doesn’t belong at all. Marriage is not a political arena. It is a union of two opposites. It is a confusion to speak of “separate but equal,” or “opposite but equal” in referring to this unique union of two people who have become, because they were made different in order that they might thus become, one flesh.