Can Women Be Saved?

It All Depends

It has often been stated that the Gospel of Christ, flowing as a healing stream to Gentiles, brought deliverance and salvation to women in particular.  That proposition, however, has come under sustained attack in recent decades by the Commentariat which attempts to obliterate any, but the most superficial, distinctions and differences between men and women.  The Christian faith has consequently been slurred as misogynistic.  Women becoming like men, functioning like men in society, has been labelled a "liberation" for women. 

But the reality was that  in the early centuries of the Gentile in-gathering women flocked into the Church--for good reason.  The truth of Christ set them free.  In the new society being forged by the Spirit and the Word they moved from a culture where they were subservient and degraded to one of respect and honour. 

David Bentley Hart paints the actual historical picture:

. . . (T)here can be little question regarding the benefits that the new faith conferred upon ordinary women--women, that is, who were neither rich nor socially exalted--literally from birth to death.  Christianity both forbade the ancient pagan practice of the exposure of unwanted infants--which is almost certainly to say, in the great majority of cases, girls--and insisted upon communal provision for the needs of widows--than whom no class of persons in ancient society was typically more disadvantaged or helpless. Not only did the church demand that females be allowed, not less than males, to live; it provided the means for them to live out the full span of their lives with dignity and material security. 

Christian husbands, moreover, could not force their wives to submit to abortions or to consent to infanticide; and while many pagan women may have been perfectly content to commit their newborn daughters to rubbish heaps or deserted roadsides, to become carrion for dogs and birds of (if fortunate) to become foundlings, we can assume a very great many women were not. 

Christian husbands were even commanded to remain as faithful to their wives as they expected their wives to be to them; they were forbidden to treat their wives with cruelty; they could not abandon or divorce their wives; their wives were not chattels but their sisters in Christ. . . . Christians had been instructed by Paul that a man's body belonged to his wife no less than her body belonged to him, and that in Christ a difference in dignity between male and female did not exist.  . . .

It should also probably not go unremarked that the legal reforms instituted by a number of Christian emperors, in their attempts to bring the law into closer conformity with the precepts of their faith, betray a solicitude for the welfare and rights of women often absent from pagan legislation. [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.160f.] 

It should also not go unremarked that the more modern Western paganism attempts to make men and women androgynous the more women are subjected to a culture which treats them as chattels and objects for both use, abuse, and abandonment.   The pagan gods are returning, with the inevitable human cruelty, brutality, and degradation in their wake.  Women and children are once again bearing the brunt of it all.