318 - Her Image of Salvation: Female Saviors and Formative Christianity

Her Image of Salvation:
Female Saviors and Formative Christianity
By Gail Paterson Corrington
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. 224 pp. $19.99.

"The image of the savior is the image of the saved," suggests Gail Paterson Corrington. What does this suggestion imply for women whose experiences of salvation are shaped by images of a male savior? Put simply: Can a male savior save women? Corrington, a scholar of Christian antiquity, joins such notable feminist theologians as Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether in voicing her doubts: "A male savior can save women only if they become men, that is, if they pattern their behavior after a dominant male model that does not partake of their own experience." The need for Christian women to develop female images of their savior appears pressing, and historian Corrington's implicit theological agenda is constructive as well as critical as she turns to Hellenistic antiquity to identify possible resources for a feminist re-imaging of Christ.

The resulting study succeeds admirably in disrupting our sense of the historical inevitability of the savior's gender. Corrington begins by detailing the particular syncretism of Jewish and Greco-Roman religious cultures that produced the enduring Christian paradigms of redemption and salvation. She then argues that, precisely within this Hellenistic matrix, we find not only male but also female images of the dominant ancient Christian soteriological models. The figure of the universal savior is represented by Isis; the figure of the mediator between divine and human realms is represented by Jewish Wisdom, or Sophia; and the figure of the incarnate redeemer is represented by Mary of Nazareth. Corrington devotes a chapter to each female savior figure, developing the images in their historical contexts with attentiveness to their connection to ancient women's experience, while also contrasting them with contemporaneous male images of Christ and tracing the processes by which male images ultimately subverted and supplanted female images. Her treatment of the Mary traditions is particularly intriguing, if necessarily also far more speculative. The book closes with a very brief epilogue, and readers may find themselves wishing that the author had supplied a more detailed concluding summary while also pushing ahead on both historical and theological fronts; some discussion, for example, of how submerged female imagery continued to influence and even subvert the interpretation of dominant male soteriological models in antiquity might have helped to link Corrington's reconstructed "Golden Age" of female-imaged christology with the present. But Corrington has already given us plenty to think about, and her book will be of interest to a broad audience reaching well beyond specialists in the New Testament and

320 - Her Image of Salvation: Female Saviors and Formative Christianity

ancient Christianity. It is not, however, easy reading. The roughly one hundred and sixty pages of actual text are densely packed and rich in allusions and citations that give evidence of the impressively broad range of the author's reading.

Virginia Burrus
Drew University
Madison, NJ