Woman

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by Tina Beattie

Continuum Publishing

Due/Published January 2004, 156 pages, paper

ISBN 0826457037

This theological investigation explores the significance of woman in the Christian tradition from various perspectives. It is written as an open-ended quest for meaning in the form of a 'theopoetics' rather than as a systematically developed argument.

Weaving and circling around the Christian idea of woman, the book offers an unfolding vision of the problems and possibilities inherent in the story of Christ and the Church, with its historical legacy of silencing and exclusion and its unfulfilled promise of freedom and flourishing. Is it possible that the Church might become a life-giving and inclusive community capable of responding to the challenges that women pose to religion and society at the beginning of the third millennium, or is it, as some feminists suggest, an anachronistic and irredeemably patriarchal institution?

Tina Beattie concludes that woman is not a form of being but a way of becoming, a dynamic and unfolding discovery of self in relation to God, humanity and nature which is always in process, never completed. From a Christian perspective, this project of becoming a sexed human being - man or woman - needs to be understood as part of a larger and more encompassing human vocation to become divine according to the orthodox concept of 'theosis', through the ongoing incarnation of God in Christ, the Church and the world.