True Equality

Part of the great cry, the unspoken religion, of our modern age is the thrust for ‘equality’. Held aloft the marchers with the great banners of ‘tolerance’ and other misunderstood and applied words, much of what passes for public discourse these days is centred on an understanding of ‘equality’ that is at its core essentially rotten. 

It is absolutely right and proper to say that all people are equal. Definitely. But what that means is quite important. Equal how? In terms of justice to be applied? In terms of rights to property? Consider a petty crime, the theft of a pair of reasonably nice headphones from one person by another. Person A has committed a crime, and now has the headphones. Person B does not. Though they owned them, bought them, and did until recently have them. Whose claim is more equal, Person A or Person B? Who ‘owns’ these headphones? To say that they have an equal claim to the headphones would be a nonsense. 

True Equality, then, is something else.

One of the most surprising things about Christian teaching is the creation Doctrine that we are all children of God, made in his image. From Paul’s letter to the Galatians, we see something amazing about the way God sees people;

“there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, you are all one in Jesus Christ”

Paul is talking to the church - and it would be wrong to misapply the passage in a salvific or covenantal sense to those who are not part of the Church - but it is clear that there is something radical here. He is echoing the fact that there is in fact absolutely equality between us because we are all made in the image of our Father, God. We are equally valuable. Yes, we are also all equally bad - the Bible calls this Sin - and this bad-ness leads us to be all equally morally corrupt. And yet, in our equal corruption, God’s love comes unconditionally through no merit of our own. 

Our modern culture says everything is equal, in Christian terms we can agree, but only because we can go further, and talk about something much bigger and better than the ‘equality’ of a culture in time. The Christian understanding of the worth and equality of human beings is a timeless truth. The modern (or is it postmodern, do keep an eye on the time...) notion of ‘equality’ is predicated on a fundamental relativism. Its an idea whose genesis is years old, but is only now crystalised and defined. And at its heart, there is a flaw. There is no distinction between ‘being’ and ‘doing’. The modern version of equality, talking about a human, labels as an ‘x’, and assumes that this person can thus only do ‘x’. 

The Christian worldview is more complicated, but more beautiful. Any person can be an ‘x’. But that does not define them. In God’s Grace, people are not bound by the labels society puts on people. God has a bigger plan. In modern ‘equality’, the person who stole the aforementioned headphones has the same ‘equal’ rights as the person from whom they were stolen. If equality means sameness, there is no basis for distinction. The Christian worldview, the grand biblical narrative, comes up with something rather better. The victim is right, and has rights to their property. The thief can be forgiven. The two humans in our hypothetical drama are not alone, there is something else going on. Equality alone is useless practically.

I believe in the God of the Bible, the God who expresses himself as Trinity, and who walked on the Earth as Jesus Christ, over 2000 years ago. I believe in a transcendant God from whom all moral life, all meaning, everything, flows. I can’t believe in an equality for equality’s sake. But I can rejoice in an equality that makes sense. And a hope that out of that equality, something can happen that lasts forever. If man is the measure of all things, the arbiter of reality and morality, then we are in for a sorry time treating each other with ‘respect’, ‘tolerance’, in the name of ‘equality’. But if, as the Easter story seems to demonstrate through history, there is something greater than us, then the call to love equally despite our differences is a compelling glimpse of a world I would love to live in.

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