Women and redemption

How did women become identified with sin, and what forces struggled in Christianity's deep ambivalences toward women? In this magisterial work of historical theology, renowned theologian Rosemary Ruether traces a crucial development and shift in the foundational paradigm of Christian understanding of the person, especially in regard to gender and redemption.

Although several paradigms competed for acceptance in the first two centuries of Christianity, Ruether demonstrates, by the fourth century the dominant paradigm defined women as created subordinate by nature to men. This subordination was to be reinforced due to punishment for sin. By contrast, belief in original equality was spiritualized. It referred to a future in heaven beyond gender and sexuality.

It was in the Quaker tradition, Ruether finds, that original equality was reclaimed for this worldly life, to be developed further in nineteenth-century feminist theology. Her work thus discloses the roots of today's Euroamerican and Third World feminist theologies.