Redeeming Gender

Redeeming Gender argues that the problems about sexuality which continue to sap the churches’ energies are really about gender. The dominant understanding of women’s bodies in the Christian West has been that they are inferior versions of the superior male body. This ‘one-sex theory’ of the human body was replaced during the Enlightenment with a model of two opposite sexes. But both models are inadequate for a theological or a secular understanding of the sexed body. The book envisages relations between women and men no longer blighted by long-term patriarchy, androcentrism, and sexism in church and world, but redeemed from these structural sins by the grace of Jesus Christ. The book has four aims: i) to uncover the one-sex theory and its assumptions, and indicate its presence in early Christian thought; ii) to describe what happened in our social, intellectual, and theological history to leave us thinking that there are two sexes; iii) to expose the reliance of much church and theological teaching about sexuality and gender either on biblical proof texts or on the language and nomenclature of late modernity, rather than upon considerations of theology and Christology; and iv) to indicate how theology and Christology, in the area of gender, envisions the redemption of human relationships. Based firmly on faith in the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, the Body of Christ, and other key doctrines, the book offers a critical but spiritually sensitive theology of gender which envisions a common humanity with many differences, but without gender hierarchy or opposition.

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