While formal equality just means fighting and conflict in practice,  stable authority can lead to practical informal equality.  Call it “peerage.”  Peerage is one of the sweetest states of human existence.  In fact, one might say that it is the ultimately reality of all existence.  It is the nature of the Godhead.

So it’s worth considering why stable authority doesn’t always lead to peerage. The most obvious case is when the potential peer refuses to accept the stable authority.  This is pointless, by definition, since the authority is stable.  It just leads to lots of kicking against the pricks.  Satan is the exemplar here, the eternal fruitless rebel against an unassailable authority.

But more interesting are the cases where the authority itself refuses to relax into peerage. Why would an authority, assured of its authority, still  need to make a point of rubbing it in?  This does happen, as we all know from experience.

Sometimes a leader is secure with his subordinates, but isn’t secure with outsiders.  So he oppresses his subordinates to make himself look better to those outsiders.  Imagine if King Arthur had some fellow kings he was wanting to impress.  He might boss his knights around to show off to the other royals.    The sin here is to see the authority as a form of property ownership instead of as a form of relationship.  Property is means you can use to an end, but relationships are ends in themselves.  Following this line of thought quickly leads you in the direction of apparent paradoxes like the Proclamation’s declaration that men preside but husbands and wives are equal partners.  Presiding is authority but the relationship, the sense of joint enterprise and joint purpose, is peerage.

But the biggest threat that stable but oppressive authorities face is from within themselves.  They don’t feel secure or confident, so they don’t *feel* stable.  They then act the same way that unstable authorities do.  They bear down hard to maintain their position and, above all, to soothe their threatened ego.  Satan is again the premiere exemplar of this.  He had the leadership paradigm reversed.  Instead of feeling secure in himself and then leading on the strength of it, he sought leadership so he could achieve glory.  Christ already  had glory, so he was free to offer to lead.

So a peerage can fail even if the followers are willing to follow, because the leader isn’t internally ready to lead.  The true path to authority is self-improvement and betterment of soul.  In this life, that will always to a greater or lesser degree take the form of the leader in turn submitting himself to God, so the leader knows his leadership is in utterly reliable hands.