Shepherd's Pie: The Idol of Equality

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

- Alexis de Tocqueville

The past few years I have found myself wondering which hatred takes precedence in the minds of moderns-the hatred of the limits God, our Creator, has placed on His gift of sexuality; or the limits He has placed on us through His gifts of leadership and authority? No matter how much the modern hates chastity; modesty, fertility, masculinity, femininity, monogamy, and heterosexuality, he hates distinction, particularity, and submission even more. Thus the real opposition to Scripture's teaching concerning male leadership is, in fact, not rooted in feminism, but egalitarianism.

Returning from taking a national standardized test a year ago, our son Joseph told us he thought he had done well. We asked him why and he responded, "A lot of it was vocabulary and I knew many of the words from our dinner table conversations." We asked for an example; laughing, he replied, "Egalitarian."

The New Pandora's Box

I was reminded of that exchange while reading the lead article in the April, 2000, issue of Wired, the magazine at the epicenter of the information technology business. The piece, written by Bill Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, warns of the danger posed by certain technological advances: "The new Pandora's boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are almost open, yet we seem hardly to have noticed. Ideas can't be put back in a box; unlike uranium or plutonium, they don't need to be mined and refined, and they can be freely copied. Once they are out, they are out.

To my surprise, Joy went on to make the case that a proper response to these dangers would require loosening our culture's grip on two aspects of the utopian vision we inherited from the French Revolution-Liberty and Equality. How ironic to read, here in the pages of Wired, a prophetic exhortation to rethink the place held by Liberty and Equality in our utopian vision!

What God-fearer today needs the world to teach him the terrible cost paid the past two centuries by the unfettered pursuit of these two ideological utopias? Think of the fifty to seventy-five million souls dead at the hands of the radically materialistic egalitarianism of Communist leaders; or the fifty to sixty million unborn sons and daughters killed each year on the altar of a woman's freedom to choose: it's hard to imagine better candidates for ideas needing to be put back in the box.

It was a fateful moment when, at the close of the enlightenment period, the Jacobins in France led the charge from eternity to modernity; from God's Moral Law to man's ideological idols; from Moses, Paul, and Augustine to Paine, Marx, and Jerry Garcia. Of course, unlike the contents of Pandora's box, neither liberty nor equality are intrinsically evil.

Radical Christianity

There is a sense in which Christianity is radically libertarian and egalitarian. It was Jesus, after all, Who announced, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4:18, 19). And it was the Apostle Paul who wrote that thunderclap of egalitarianism, cursing the ethnic pride corrupting the church in Galatia: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

Yet these Scriptural proclamations of liberty and equality have a context within which they must be interpreted, and here lies the rub. Whether one considers political theory, biblical exegesis, or the op-ed pages of the local paper, modern man refuses to observe the proper limits God has placed on liberty and equality and they have become idols for destruction.

Rebelling against God's Word

Speaking incessantly about equality while studiously avoiding all God has revealed concerning authority, leadership, church government, and the proper roles of men and women, is not submitting to God's Word, but rebelling against it. Yet many pastors and biblical scholars seem incapable of knowing anything about manhood and womanhood except Galatians 3:28. Incessantly they rehearse this "glorious paean to the progressive trajectory of the Apostle Paul," giving no indication of familiarity with other complementary biblical texts on sexuality. One is reminded of Spurgeon's reproof, "My how a harp often thousand strings can harp on one string so long." Few thoughtful people observing the rhetoric of equality as it annihilates all distinctions and leadership can fail to see the wisdom of Aristotle's words, "The worst form of equality is to try to make unequal things equal."

It is not due to any fondness she has for women, as a class, nor any diffidence in her relationship with men, which causes the evangelical church to reject complementarity between the sexes-Scripture's patriarchy. Rather, this rejection is grounded in the radical egalitarianism which has taken residence deep in her heart. Any role or office which threatens the nativistic democratic vision by which evangelicals have been possessed for at least two centuries, now, must be removed.

Our Great Levelling Instinct

Read evangelical articles and books, listen to evangelical sermons, and you will find them sprinkled with appeals to the masses calculated to massage the egalitarian cultural vision we have inherited. The great levelling instinct appropriates to every church member, for instance, delegations of authority given to the officers of the church, never acknowledging the primary application of those texts to those men Jesus called to serve in the authoritative apostolic office, and their successors today-pastors, elders, and deacons. How many sermons have been given proclaiming to entire congregations the command of our Lord to, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:18-20), with no mention of this duty principally being carried out to this day by those men called and set apart by the church to the ministry of the Word and Sacrament?

Yet even this levelling instinct has, ironically, not been applied with any degree of consistency. In the past few years as I have spoken on issues of biblical manhood and womanhood, I've often observed that, in the midst of the egalitarian fervor which has taken the Church, seeking to establish "full equality" between the sexes, we hear no parallel cries for full equality between professors and their students or parents and their children.

Somehow those mothers who are levellers in marriage have yet to become levellers in parenthood; rather, mothers fighting for the right to say ‘no' to their husbands continue to expect their sons and daughters to say ‘yes' to them, and to snap to it clearing off the table, mowing the lawn, and taking out the trash. Similarly, professors who deny the authority of husbands over their wives have yet to initiate a reform movement in the academy, stripping themselves of the perquisites of their Ph.D. or full professorship. Seemingly blind to the whole cloth of various forms of authority, they blithely carry on, grading their students' papers and processing to commencement exercises in full academic regalia.

Dubious Claims to Authority

But once we stop and ask ourselves the question, "By what authority does the Bible professor pronounce the exegesis of 1 Timothy 2:11-13 ‘terribly difficult,"' the gig is up because his authority is quickly revealed to be even more of a self-protective meritocracy than any ecclesiastical polity alive today. Samuel Johnson had it right: "Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves, but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves."

Evangelicals carefully guard the right of egalitarians to voice their contrarian positions in our colleges, theological societies, and seminaries not because of the strength of their Biblical exegesis, but because this esteemed professor holds the Ph.D. from a top-drawer university, has published in the best journals, has authored a number of seminal works in New Testament studies, and is reputed to be at the top of the list of those seeking to inherit Elijah's mantle.

But if these are not claims for authority, what are they? And if we are expected to defer to this sort of authority, why not the authority Scripture delegates to husbands, particularly when the authority of husbands is explicitly commended in the Word of God, and grounded-not in the institutions of man-but God's Created Order?

Reformers have never been immune to hypocrisy. Emblazoned on my mind is that classic line from "Won't Get Pooled Again" by the Who: "Meet the new boss; same as the old boss." So we buy into the radical reformation preached by pastors and scholars who have a dream that, one day, our sons and daughters will no longer be judged by the depth of their voices or the curves of their bodies, but by the nature of their gifts.

But when victory has been declared, the monster will roll on because the enemy he seeks ultimately to destroy is neither male leadership nor sexual particularity; rather, he has in his sights all distinctions and authority. In truth, the drive toward liberty and equality at the heart of our culture will not stop until the authority of God, Himself, has been silenced, and man the creature has raised himself into the throne room of Heaven.