Through an examination of current American understandings of what it means to be saved, this dissertation intends to construct a new feminist Christian theology of redemption that is both credible to contemporary audiences and appropriate to the earliest Christian witness. The dissertation will first critique traditional Christian understandings of redemption, and then go on to explore contemporary understandings of the experience of redemption in feminist theology and in three novels: Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Esther Broner’s A Weave of Women. Both feminist theologians and the novelists describe redemption in ways different from and even foreign to traditional Christian theology; their insights will be used to widen and alter the Christian understanding of redemption. The major portion of the dissertation explores the (semi-secular) accounts of the experience of being saved in the novels, and uses these experiences as the starting point for beginning to think about how to construct a credible feminist theology of redemption. The final step, in the concluding chapter of the dissertation, is to construct an appropriate and thus specifically Christian account of redemption that takes into account the insights gained through close reading and literary and theological reflection on the novels.