Sue’s comment on T.C. Robinson’s post on biblical race relations:
“Ontological equality” is one of the most cruel and callous doctrines ever held in Christianity. It simply means that a white man can acknowledge that a black man or a woman is intellectually equal and still treat a slave as a slave and a woman as a subordinate. It has been flaunted in my face more times than I could count. If some man says that I am ontologically equal to him this is not exactly news. But when he continues with his belief that a wife has no right to make decisions, to chose who to vote for, to earn money, to save money, to have a retirement income, to care for the children, when a wife is deprived of the right to make the tiniest decision for herself, the acknowledgement of ontological equality is simply too painful to discuss. It is the final turn of the knife in her heart.
The fact that this Christianity we are aware of, whatever one may call it, divorces ontological equality from being a “neighbour” from being a fellow human being, is despicable.
The truth is that I was already 50 years old before I thought that a woman could ever be included in the word “neighbour” in the Bible. I had never once ever thought that a Christian man could ever treat a woman as a fellow human being. I don’t think most Christian men do.
