"God only reveals Himself in masculine and fatherly terms in Scripture."

I hear this a lot. It gets stated with such confidence, like it's obvious, like anyone who suggests otherwise is importing some progressive agenda into Scripture.

But it's just not true. If you want to be a biblical literalist, you should at least venture to be consistent about this.

Let's start with the Hebrew word for Spirit: ruach, a feminine noun. When translating from Hebrew to English, when you use a pronoun for a feminine noun, particular if the noun is in reference to a Person, best practice dictates that you need to use "she" to make clear what the referent is. That's not creative interpretation but grammatical clarity.

Dr. Wil Gafney—one of the most important Hebrew Bible scholars working today—puts it bluntly:

"Feminine language for God occurs in the text repeatedly. This means that feminists and womanists advocating for inclusive and explicitly feminine God-language are not changing but restoring the text and could be considered biblical literalists."

So why don't our English Bibles reflect this? Because translators—almost exclusively male for most of history—systematically removed feminine pronouns. They replaced them with proper nouns or switched to masculine forms when texts moved into Latin and then English. Gafney calls it "a conspiracy in biblical translation." That might sound dramatic, but when you see what was lost, the word fits.

"The Spirit of God, She fluttered over the face of the waters." Genesis 1:2.

"The Spirit of Yahweh, She rushed upon David from that day forward." That's 1 Samuel 16:13.

"The Spirit of Yahweh, She spoke through me." 2 Samuel 23:2.

"The Spirit of the Lord, She will rest on the Branch of Jesse." Isaiah 11:2.

"As the Lord spoke to me, the Spirit, She entered me and set me on my feet." Ezekiel 2:2

"Let Your good Spirit, let Her lead me on level ground." Psalm 143:10

I could keep going.

Then there's Wisdom.

In Hebrew, Wisdom is Chokmah. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, Wisdom is Sophia. Both are feminine nouns. And in Proverbs, Wisdom isn't just an abstract quality or divine attribute. She's a person. A woman.

"Wisdom cries out atop the heights... at the crossroads, She takes Her stand." Proverbs 8:1.

And She was present at creation:

"Yahweh possessed me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old. From eternity I was established, from the beginning, before the earth was... I was beside Him as a master architect. And I was His delight daily, playing always before Him." Proverbs 8:22-30.

Lady Wisdom, at God's side, participating in the creation of the world.

This Wisdom tradition deeply shaped the New Testament. When John 1 calls Jesus "the Word" (Logos), he's drawing on the same creation theology as Proverbs 8. Many scholars see Logos and Sophia as essentially synonymous—both present at creation, both agents of divine work in the world. Yes, the historical Jesus is male, but the eternal Christ—the Word of God, through Whom all creation come into being—transcends gender categories, embodying both the feminine Logos and the Sophia traditions.

Beyond Spirit and Wisdom, Scripture overflows with explicitly maternal imagery for God.

Deuteronomy 32:11 describes God as a mother eagle protecting her nest, hovering over her young.

A few verses later, Deuteronomy 32:18 speaks of God giving birth in labor.

Job 38:8 refers to God's womb birthing the seas.

Isaiah 42:14 has God Herself saying, "Like a woman in labor I will moan, I will pant, I will gasp."

Isaiah 49:15 compares God to a nursing mother who cannot forget the infant at her breast.

Isaiah 66:13 promises that God will comfort us "as a mother comforts her child."

Psalm 131:2 and Hosea 11:3-4 compare God's love to a mother's love.

Isaiah 66:9 depicts God as a midwife.

Luke 15:8-10 compares God to a woman searching for a lost coin.

And Jesus himself, in Matthew 23:37, laments over Jerusalem: "How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings."

This is not handful of obscure verses but a consistent biblical pattern.

In fact, the Hebrew word for compassion—rechem—shares its root with the word for womb. So whenever Scripture speaks of God's compassion, it's literally God's womb-love. Motherly love is baked into the vocabulary itself.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. "But Jesus called God 'Father'!"

Yes, he did. As a metaphor. Not a biological description.

And in his first-century context, "father" primarily meant provider—the householder ensuring everyone has daily bread. It was economic language, not gendered ontology. When Jesus taught us to pray "Our Father," he was making a claim about God's intimate care and provision, not making a statement about divine anatomy.

Jesus also compared God to a woman searching for coins, a baker kneading dough, a mother hen, a woman in labor. Those metaphors are equally biblical and equally metaphorical. However, they just didn't get institutionalized in the same masculine language did because they didn't serve the interests of an increasingly patriarchal church structure.

The deeper theological problem with male-only God language is that exclusive masculine language doesn't just reflect patriarchy—it perpetuates it. It shapes how we see men, women, leadership, and power itself. It limits our capacity to imagine women as leaders, creators, and authorities. It tells half the human race that they're a step further from the divine image than the other half.

Genesis 1:27 says God created humanity in God's image—"male and female, God created them." If women equally bear the divine image, but God can only be imagined as male, then men become more godlike than women by default.

Mary Daly put it provocatively: "If God is male, then the male is God."

When God is only Father, never Mother, we're not only using incomplete language. We're doing theological and cultural damage.

To be clear about, all theological language is analogical. Our finite words can never fully capture infinite being. "Father" is analogy. "King" is analogy. "Shepherd" is analogy. "Rock" is analogy.

The problem isn't metaphor. The problem is when one metaphor gets treated as literal while equally biblical ones get suppressed.

Michael Bird puts it well: "While God reveals himself as Father, and that image has positive meaning, it is not part of God's essence. Fatherhood is an analogy for God's operation as the sovereign one and for our relationship with God as his children."

The same is true for Mother.

This isn't about replacing Father with Mother. It's about recovering what's already there. If you want to take Scripture seriously, you have to reckon with a God who fathers and mothers creation. Who is revealed through masculine and feminine imagery. Whose Spirit is grammatically She.

For those of us who had absent or abusive fathers, God as Mother may be the only way they can experience divine love. For those who had wonderful fathers, God as Father resonates deeply. Both are biblical. Both are needed. Neither exhausts the mystery.

Some might want to skip straight to gender-neutral language—just call God "God" and move on. But after millennia of exclusively masculine language, neutral terms don't actually disrupt our learned patterns. "God" still lands as male in most of our bodies and imaginations because that's what centuries of conditioning have taught us.

As Herb Montgomery puts it: "We don't get to non-gender God after two millennia of male gendering. We need a couple millennia of female gendering of God—we can't skip this step."

So no—God doesn't only reveal Themselves in masculine terms. If you think so, you are engaging in selective reading shaped by centuries of patriarchal translation choices.

The feminine Divine is already in the text. She always has been.

We just have to stop suppressing Her.

Anticipated Rebuttals

Q: Jesus only ever called God "Father," never "Mother." Shouldn't we follow his example and prioritize masculine language?

A: A few things here.

First, Jesus used lots of metaphors for God that we don't treat as definitive. He compared God to a woman searching for a lost coin, a baker kneading dough, a mother hen. Those are just as much "Jesus's language for God" as Father is. We've just selectively elevated one metaphor above the others.

Second, the frequency of "Abba" in the Gospels actually increases dramatically as the texts get chronologically later. Mark (written ~40 years after Jesus) uses it 4 times. John (written 80-90 years after Jesus) uses it over 100 times. This suggests the emphasis on "Father" language grew as church tradition developed—it's not necessarily a direct transcript of how often Jesus actually used the term.

Third, and most importantly: Jesus calling God "Father" doesn't mean God is male any more than Jesus calling himself the "door" means God is made of wood. Father is a metaphor—a powerful, intimate, radical one for his context—but still a metaphor. It tells us something true about God's character (provision, protection, intimacy) without being a biological description.

And finally, Jesus was a first-century Jewish man operating within a patriarchal culture. He pushed against that culture in remarkable ways—how he treated women, who he included, what he valued—but he also worked within it. The question isn't "Did Jesus use masculine language?" (yes, mostly) but "Does that mean God is only masculine?" (no, Scripture itself says otherwise).

Q: You're talking about implied feminine pronouns based on grammatical gender, but the text uses explicit masculine pronouns for God. Isn't explicit language more authoritative than implied grammar?

A: This gets the history backwards.

The feminine pronouns aren't "implied"—they're required by Hebrew grammar. When you have a feminine noun like ruach (Spirit), you use feminine pronouns. That's not interpretation; that's just how the language works. A Hebrew speaker hearing these texts would hear "she."

What happened is that translators actively removed those pronouns. They replaced "she" with the proper noun "Spirit" or switched to masculine forms when translating into Latin and English. The masculine pronouns in our English Bibles are the addition—the interpretive choice—not the feminine ones.

So the question isn't "explicit vs. implied." It's "Why did translators suppress what was explicitly there in the original language?"

Q: Even if there's some feminine imagery, masculine language for God vastly outnumbers it. Shouldn't the preponderance of evidence guide our practice?

A: I'd push back on the framing here.

Yes, masculine language appears more frequently—but that's partly because we've been trained to see it. We notice every "Father" and "King" and "Lord" while skating past the maternal imagery, the feminine Spirit, Lady Wisdom, God's womb-love. When you actually catalog the feminine references, there's more there than most people realize.

But more fundamentally: frequency isn't the same as exclusivity. If Scripture uses feminine imagery for God at all—and it clearly does, repeatedly—then the claim that "God only reveals Himself in masculine terms" is simply false. The question becomes: why have we suppressed the minority witness?

The answer, historically, is patriarchy. Male translators, male church leaders, male theologians had obvious reasons (conscious or not) to emphasize masculine God-language. That doesn't make the feminine texts less biblical. It means we have recovery work to do.

I'd also gently point out that we don't apply this "preponderance" logic elsewhere. The Bible mentions slavery far more often than it condemns it—but we don't conclude that slavery is therefore biblical. We weigh texts theologically, not just numerically. The same principle applies here.

Q: The feminine language you're citing is metaphorical—"like a mother hen," "as a mother comforts." But God is directly called Father, not "like a father." Isn't direct language more significant than simile?

A: This is a clever argument, but it doesn't hold up.

First, all language about God is metaphorical. When we call God "Father," we don't mean God has a Y chromosome or produces sperm. We mean God relates to us with qualities we associate with good fatherhood—provision, protection, authority, love. That's metaphor. "Father" isn't more literal than "mother hen"; it's just more familiar.

Second, God is directly described in maternal terms, not just compared to them. Deuteronomy 32:18 says God "gave you birth." Isaiah 42:14 has God speaking in first person: "Like a woman in labor I will moan, I will pant, I will gasp." Job 38:29 refers to God's womb. These aren't similes about what God is like—they're direct statements about what God does.

Third, the Hebrew word for compassion (rechem) shares its root with womb (rechem). So every time Scripture says God is compassionate, it's linguistically invoking maternal imagery. That's not simile—it's embedded in the vocabulary.

The real issue is that we've trained ourselves to read "Father" as literal and "Mother" as merely metaphorical. But that's a theological choice we've made, not something the text demands.

Q: Isn't this just reading modern feminism back into ancient texts? The biblical authors weren't thinking about gender politics.

A: I'd flip this around: isn't insisting on exclusively masculine God-language reading patriarchy into the text?

The biblical authors lived in patriarchal cultures, yes. But they still used feminine imagery for God—which suggests they saw something true about God that transcended their cultural assumptions. Lady Wisdom in Proverbs, the maternal imagery in Isaiah, the feminine grammar of ruach—these aren't modern inventions. They're ancient witnesses that got suppressed.

What's "modern" isn't noticing the feminine in Scripture. What's modern is recovering it after centuries of suppression. The feminism isn't in the observation; it's in finally paying attention to what was always there.

And honestly, if the argument is "we should read Scripture the way the original audience would have," then Hebrew speakers would have heard the Spirit as "she." That's not feminist interpretation. That's just... Hebrew.

Q: The church has used masculine language for God for two thousand years. Doesn't tradition carry weight? Who are we to overturn it?

A: Tradition carries weight, but it's not infallible. The church also defended slavery for centuries, denied women's humanity and leadership, and burned people for translating Scripture into common languages. "We've always done it this way" isn't automatically an argument for continuing.

More importantly, the tradition isn't as monolithic as people assume. The Syriac church used feminine pronouns for the Spirit into the fifth century. Many early church fathers—Clement, Augustine, others—spoke of God's compassion in maternal terms. Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century mystic and saint, wrote: "As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother." Even Pope John Paul I said, "God is our Father; even more God is our Mother."

The question isn't whether the tradition has ever made room for feminine God-language. It has. The question is why one strand of tradition got elevated and another got buried—and whether we want to keep burying it.

Q: Jesus was literally male. Doesn't the incarnation tell us something about God's gender?

A: Jesus's maleness is historically real but theologically complex.

Yes, the historical Jesus was a Jewish man. He had to be something—some ethnicity, some gender, some height, some eye color. The incarnation required particularity. But we don't conclude that God is ethnically Jewish, or that God is 5'5", or that God has brown eyes. Why would we conclude that God is essentially male?

The incarnation tells us that God entered fully into human experience—including the experience of having a body, a gender, a culture. But the eternal Christ isn't confined to those particularities. As Paul puts it, in Christ "there is neither male nor female" (Galatians 3:28). The risen, cosmic Christ transcends the categories that applied to the historical Jesus.

If anything, the incarnation should expand our sense of how God relates to embodied human experience—all of it, not just the male half.

Q: If we start calling God "Mother" and "She," where does it end? Isn't this a slippery slope toward abandoning biblical authority altogether?

A: I'd argue the opposite: this is biblical authority.

The claim isn't "let's make up new names for God that feel good to us." The claim is "let's actually translate what's in the text." The feminine is already there—in the grammar, in the imagery, in the theological tradition. Recovering it isn't abandoning Scripture; it's taking Scripture more seriously than our English translations have.

The slippery slope argument assumes that any change leads to chaos. But some changes are corrections. Some changes are faithfulness. The church changed its position on slavery, on Galileo, on whether laypeople could read the Bible. Were those slippery slopes, or were they the church catching up to what Scripture actually taught?

If the slope leads us toward a fuller, more biblical picture of God—one that includes the feminine witness Scripture already contains—I'm fine sliding down it.

Q: This seems divisive. Why make an issue of it when it just causes conflict?

A: Because it matters.

Language shapes imagination. Imagination shapes theology. Theology shapes culture. When God is exclusively male for generation after generation, we internalize that masculinity is closer to divinity. That has consequences—for how we see women, for how we structure leadership, for how we treat bodies and power and authority.

For people who've experienced abuse from male authority figures, exclusively masculine God-language can be a genuine barrier to experiencing divine love. For women who've been told they're somehow less-than, hearing God as "She" can be healing in ways that are hard to overstate. For all of us, expanding our God-language expands our capacity to encounter the divine.

Yes, it causes conflict. So did every reformation. So did including Gentiles. So did abolition. "It's divisive" isn't an argument against truth—it's often a sign that truth is disrupting comfortable assumptions.

Q: Okay, but grammatical gender isn't the same as actual gender. In French, a table is feminine—that doesn't mean tables are women. Why treat Hebrew any differently?

A: Fair point—grammatical gender doesn't automatically mean anything about actual gender. A Hebrew table isn't female any more than a French one is.

But here's the difference: we're not talking about tables. We're talking about how the biblical authors chose to describe God.

They could have used different words. They could have employed masculine terms for Spirit (and sometimes did, in different contexts). But when speaking of God's Spirit, they consistently used ruach—a feminine noun—and paired it with feminine verbs and pronouns. That's a theological choice, not just a grammatical accident.

More importantly, the feminine grammar intersects with feminine imagery. The Spirit who hovers (rachaph—a term used for a bird brooding over her nest) over the waters in Genesis 1:2 is grammatically feminine and described with maternal imagery. Lady Wisdom in Proverbs is grammatically feminine and personified as a woman. The pattern is consistent.

So no, grammatical gender alone doesn't prove anything. But grammatical gender plus sustained feminine personification plus explicit maternal imagery plus the womb-root of "compassion"? That's a cumulative case that's hard to dismiss as mere linguistic coincidence.

Q: I've never had a problem with masculine God-language. This seems like making an issue where there isn't one.

A: I'm genuinely glad it hasn't been a barrier for you. That's a grace.

But here's the thing: your experience isn't universal. I've sat with people who couldn't pray to "Father" because their father was abusive or absent. I've watched women weep the first time they heard God referred to as "She"—not because it was novel, but because something they'd never been allowed to imagine suddenly had permission to exist.

Just because something isn't a problem for you doesn't mean it isn't a problem. Part of Christian community is holding space for experiences different from our own. And part of theological honesty is reckoning with the ways our language has excluded people from a God who never excluded them.

The feminine imagery is in Scripture whether we emphasize it or not. The question is whether we'll keep suppressing it because some of us are comfortable without it, or whether we'll recover it for the sake of those who need it.