This subject in particular is one that arouses strong feelings and prejudices in people who are religious, as well as people who are not. It’s very easy to try to claim our own religion is good for women by comparing it with other religions and making them look worse. But this afternoon I’ll try not to do that, but to look at the question as I have been given it: what is the status of women in Christianity? As we usually do in Christianity, I’ll begin with the Bible. And the Bible contains both bad and good news for women. So I’ll start with the bad news: with Eve.

Unfortunately, Christians have often disregarded the first story of creation, in which women and men are equally made in God’s image, and have focussed instead on Eve, the first woman, made out of Adam’s rib in the second story of creation. Eve’s creation after Adam has two possible interpretations: either she is less important, or she is the perfected human being, after God had a trial run with Adam. But either way, traditionally she has been given the blame for the catastrophic act of human disobedience known in Christian theology as the Fall.

Both Adam and Eve are told by God not to eat the fruit from a particular tree. But the devil, in the form of a serpent, persuades her to try a bite, after which she gives some to Adam. When God calls them to account, Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. The reptile is banished from God’s presence. But the human beings, as well as being expelled from paradise, are given further punishment. Adam is cursed to hard work; Eve to submission to her husband, and to pain in childbirth.

Because Adam and Eve are described as ‘of one flesh’, Christians have often concluded that marriage is a woman’s chief destiny. And though after Eve, other women in the Hebrew Bible have their stories too, tales of heroic women, like Shiphrah and Puah, who fooled the Egyptian king and save the lives of Hebrew babies, or like Deborah, who judges her people, these are rare. Most women are mentioned as wives and mothers: part of the ongoing family story of God’s people, whether they are good, like Hagar and Sarah, wives of Abraham and mothers of Ishmael and Isaac, or evil, like Athaliah, the wicked queen mother who killed almost all the other claimants to the throne of Judah before coming to a bad end. Some women in the Hebrew Bible go through horrific torture or death. But this is seen primarily as damage of property rather than as loss of life, for in the regulations of the Hebrew Bible women are less important than men. For example, it is laid down in the Jewish law that only the husband is allowed to initiate divorce proceedings. And if a woman is raped, she must marry her attacker without even having recourse to divorce, presumably because no other man will want to take on damaged goods.

So from the Hebrew Bible, male Christians could argue that the bad state the world is in was a woman’s fault, and that women, sources of weakness and temptation, should be treated as their husbands’ possession, with few rights of their own. Of course, in Judaism there were always husbands who honoured their wives and women who accomplished great things – but so far the story doesn’t sound like great news for women. What, then, of the New Testament? What were Jesus’ dealings with women?

Well, the woman Jesus first knew well was, of course, his mother. And for Christians Mary is as famous for virtue as Eve is for sin. But that doesn’t help women as much as one might hope. For Mary is unique. Some Christians, particularly Catholics, believe not only that she was a virgin when she conceived Jesus but also that she remained a virgin for the rest of her life after he was born, and they look up to her with very great respect indeed, giving her the name: Queen of heaven. Other Christians find the details of this harder to accept, and see her as a poor Jewish girl whom God honoured. But it is certainly true that no other woman will ever be Jesus’ mother – so whatever people believe of Mary, that is not necessarily a reason to treat other women with respect.

Of course, Jesus’ mother is not the only woman called Mary whom Jesus knew. Two of the other famous Maries in the Gospels are Mary from Magdala and Mary from Bethany. Mary Magdalene was made well by Jesus when she was possessed by demons; after that she followed him round Palestine with his other disciples, most of whom were men. Mary from Bethany and her sister Martha invited Jesus to their house; while Martha cooked for him, Mary listened to his teaching like his male disciples, and though she got into trouble with Martha for not helping in the kitchen, Jesus defended her right to listen.

In these stories we have both positive and negative pictures of women in Jesus’ life. Mary Magdalene was his friend, but she had also been mentally ill, and some Christian men have argued from such stories that women in general are emotionally unstable. Mary from Bethany was his disciple, but in spite of what Jesus said, some men think women should be cooking rather than thinking – the German phrase saying women should be interested in ‘children, kitchen and church’ comes to mind.

As in the Hebrew Bible, there are many women in the Gospel stories whose names we do not know, women whom Jesus treated as human beings rather than sources of temptation. Let us look at a few of them. When the religious leaders dragged before him a woman caught committing adultery, who should, by the Jewish law, have been stoned to death, Jesus invited whoever among them had never done anything wrong to throw the first stone. When they had all refused and left, shamefaced, he did not condemn her, though he did tell her to change her life.

Near the end of his life, when a religious leader had invited Jesus to a meal but not welcomed him with the traditional foot-washing, a prostitute came in, wept over Jesus’ feet and dried them with her hair. The religious man believed Jesus could be no prophet to allow that sort of woman to touch him; but Jesus said the love she showed demonstrated that her sins were forgiven.

And when, as Christians celebrate at Easter, God raised Jesus from death, it was women to whom he first showed himself alive, even though by Jewish practice the testimony of two women in court counted as much as the evidence of one man.

The first Christians believed that there should be no distinction made between Jews and non-Jews, slaves and free people, women and men. And many of the first Christians were women and slaves, drawn to a religion where they were not despised for their status in society. But it was not easy for these Christians to react against the cultural expectations of their time. For example, in one letter to a church in Corinth, one of the most important Christian leaders, Paul, directed both that women should not speak in public worship and also that when women prophesied in church, they should cover their heads – a mixed message! However, if we look more closely at Paul’s letters, we see that in them he sends greetings to women who lead churches as well as to men.

Later letters of the New Testament go back to the subordination of women that was part of Roman culture, directing that wives should always obey their husbands, as slaves obeyed their masters. Ironically, though these parts of the letters get attention, the direction that a husband should always love his wife and sacrifice himself for her good is not so widely taught.

When Christianity first began, Jesus’ disciples thought that the world would be ending very soon, so there was not much attention given to the relationships between men and women – what was the point of getting married, if God’s kingdom was about to come? So for the first few centuries it was thought to be better for both women and men not to marry, so that they could give their attention to God. In the middle of the third century a Christian called Anthony wanted to concentrate on God and went into the desert to live there. Other men joined him and became the first Christian monks; women also, called nuns, made and led their own communities. Because women were not allowed leadership roles in church or in society, being a nun was actually a good career move. If you were married to Jesus you could not also be married to a husband who would take your possessions and status for his own.

In the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, people protested that the church, including monks and nuns, had too much power. Martin Luther, one of the founders of the Reformation, was originally a monk, but he decided that God wanted him to marry. The Reformers laid a lot of stress on Christian marriage, and on bringing up children in God’s ways, so there was pressure on Christian women to marry young, to be obedient to their husbands, to have many children and to make looking after their households their chief concern.

Within the household teaching and practising religion was increasingly seen as the woman’s responsibility; in churches, while men were ministers and studied theology, women organised Sunday schools and the social side of church life, while those women who needed a wider sphere of activity became missionaries, preachers and social reformers.

Was this good or bad news for women? On the one hand, churches were among the few areas of public life where women’s skills and talents could be recognised and used. On the other hand, the way their work with children, poor people or foreigners was often sidelined was still unjust.

What is the position of women in Christianity today? It varies a lot between different churches. My own church, the United Reformed Church, first recognised women as ministers in the 1920s, whereas the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, supported by many faithful women, still do not allow women to be church leaders. The Church of England currently have women as priests, leading one church, but not bishops, leading many churches – though this may change soon.

When it comes to local congregations, if women decided to stop contributing, any of our churches would grind to a halt. The difficulty many churches now have in finding volunteers comes partly from the way women are now working outside the home and bringing up children at the same time, leaving much less time free for voluntary activities, including church work.

In the past, Christian women have had an impossible burden to bear. We have been blamed for Eve’s sin, seen as the source of sexual temptation in men and told to look to the Virgin Mary as our model for virginity and motherhood at the same time – an impossible goal. But Christian women are now reading the Bible themselves, and understanding it through their own experience, rather than being told by men what it means. We have rediscovered stories of women’s heroism and daring as well as valuing stories of motherhood and family life. We have rediscovered the truth that Jesus took women seriously as human beings who think and act and love, even though not all his followers have done the same.

We have even rediscovered the first creation story, which tells us that human beings, men and women, are both made by God in God’s image, and are both made very good. And the rediscovery in the Bible of feminine ways of describing God, who is beyond either male or female, underlines the fact that women are called by God, just as men are called, to many different tasks in life; and that women and men, Christian or not, are both and equally worthy of dignity and respect.