Women and redemption: a theological history

Abstract

Women and Redemption: A Theological History. By Rosemary Radford Ruether. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998. xi + 366 pp. $19.00 (paper). Are women created in the image of God? Are women redeemed by Christ? Is this redemption otherworldly, or does it belong to this life? If in Christ there is no more male and female (Gal. 3:28), why has the Christian church and its doctrine continually reinforced gender inequity in society and in the church? In Women and Redemption, Rosemary Radford Ruether seeks to address these questions by tracing historically' the changing paradigms of gender, male and female, in relation to the Christian claim of a universal and inclusive redemption in Christ (p.l). She accomplishes this task in many, though not all, of her treatments by examining the given understandings of 1) creation in God's image, 2) original paradise and pre-sin gender relations, 3) the fall with its penalties for both men and women, and 4) the projected image of redemptive glory. Ruether frames her survey with an introduction and brief conclusion. If readers take careful note of the comments in both these sections, Ruether's choices (both her historical selections and omissions), as well as the reasoning behind the focus of her treatments in the body of the text will become clear. This survey is not intended to be an objective, comprehensive and inclusive treatment of the diverse ways in which the questions Ruether poses have been answered over the last 2000 years (note, for instance, the fifteen pages on Hildegard of Bingen relative to the five pages on Thomas Aquinas). This is a survey which argues for several crucial paradigm shifts since the sixteenth century and builds towards the this-worldly view of redemption discerned in much contemporary feminist theology. The complete original equality of both men and women created in the image of God is first affirmed in the sixteenth century. A second key shift took place from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century with a turn from an otherworldly to a this-worldly view of redemption (p. 273). Suggested, but not highlighted, is a third, late twentieth-century transition from theological views in which humans need an outside divine mediator in order to approach God, to an anthropology which emphasizes human possession of an original divine goodness and views Christ not as an otherworldly savior, but as an exemplar of the redemptive process in which we must all be engaged. While there were touchstones in the early Jesus movement that can fuel contemporary feminist visions of gender equity (p. 280), and periodic signs of female presence and participation throughout Christian history, contemporary women cannot, nor should they want to, accept a paradigm of Christian redemption which is expressed within cosmologies radically different from their own. This book therefore argues for a theological methodology which rejects both the basic Protestant theological move of returning to the originating sources in order to discover a pure and authentic Christianity and the classic Catholic view of a gradual unfolding of doctrine implicit in the originating events. …