Women and Redemption: A Theological History provides the reader with a survey of the attitudes toward women and their redemption that can be found in Christian documents from the New Testament through the patristic, medieval, and early modern eras. The first chapters set the stage for Rosemary Ruether's discussion of contemporary feminist Christian theology regarding women, the nature of redemption, and, most importantly, the ways that women participate in the process of redemption. She points to two crucial paradigm shifts in Christian discourse about redemption that laid the foundation for later feminist theologies. The first occurred when people such as the sixteenth-century humanist Agrippa von Nettesheim and seventeenth-century Quaker communities rejected the definition of woman as “created subordinate in the original creation and subjected to servitude due to her priority in sin” and instead “affirmed a complete original equality” for women (251). The second shift, occurring from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, was a recovery of the “Hebraic hope for a this-worldly transformation of unjust relationships that would bring about a time of justice and peace within history” (251–52) and a rejection of the notion that salvation consists only in an otherworldly process that is completed after death.
The second part of the book outlines the various strands of feminist thought that developed around the globe during the twentieth century. Ruether's concise commentaries on the work of European and American feminist theologians, as well as on the work of feminist theologians from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, make the book an invaluable introduction to feminist theological discourse. The surveys in these chapters provide a good cross-section of the various strands of feminist work and make it abundantly clear that feminist theology is not a monolithic enterprise. The last chapter of the book, new for this edition, adds an important discussion of the ways that postcolonial thought has begun to influence feminist theologies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, highlighting the work of new feminist voices from the Fourth World of indigenous and other marginalized peoples. These new voices seek to recover the religious symbols and values of their suppressed native traditions. The resulting syntheses, Ruether writes, give rise to “multireligious contextualizations” where Christian symbols become one cultural resource among many in the struggle for liberation that is rooted in many local contexts (257).
The first edition of Women and Redemption was a valuable resource for the classroom, providing concise and quite readable summaries of important developments in feminist theology. The second edition will be an even better resource. The larger pages with double columns of text make the book more pleasing visually, which is quite important for engaging students who are accustomed to a world filled with videos and Instagram photos. Text boxes that highlight important ideas throughout the book and bold section headings make finding particular topics quite easy. Each chapter begins with a time line placing the discussion within the wider context of Western Christian history, and each chapter ends with a set of research questions, along with suggestions for further reading that include both primary and secondary sources. In addition, there is a fairly comprehensive index, an essential tool for any book used in the classroom. In a time when women's struggle for equality and liberation in other parts of the world occasionally makes the evening news, Women and Redemption: A Theological History provides a historical context that widens a student's perspective and makes it apparent that women's struggle for liberation and justice is not confined to places governed by radical religious fundamentalists.
