No doubts, most people, including irreligious ones, would answer the question in the negative: God is not male. That form of the question may not be the most helpful. What if we modify the question slightly and ask instead: Are men more like God than women are? I suspect that this formulation might yield more fruitful results. The matter before us subtly influences other beliefs; some are harmful and dangerous.
I first became aware of this matter in an undergraduate Hebrew Bible Writings class. The ethnically Jewish, non-religious professor made a comment that set off the rabbit hole: The name “Yahweh” in Hebrew is as grammatically masculine as “Richard” is in America. I had not listened closely enough to realize that grammatical and biological genders are separate. My mind immediately went down a long rabbit hole. It seemed to me that whatever it meant to say God was masculine, it could not exactly mean how we ordinarily use the term for humans. The reason seemed simple: God is a spirit. To be a spirit is to be unembodied. I had to admit, on the other hand, that God is consistently called a Father and Jesus was a male human for 33 years. I got out of the hole and pushed the issue aside. Now is the time to carefully address this crucial matter.
Language Matters: What Does it Mean to be Male?
Many of us today use the terms “male/man” and “female/woman” synonymously – and this is more or less the practice I’ll uphold in this entry. However, it is beneficial to be aware of and learn from advancements in Psychology and Gender Studies. In the ancient world and many parts of our world today, biology is assumed to determine one’s gender. In the Greco-Roman world, for instance, women were thought to be irrational, unsuitable for ruling, needing male guidance, and emotional. Amy Peeler notes that because women were generally smaller in body, they were also thought to be smaller in mind and spirit (90). In other words, the assumption was that being female meant manifesting the attributes above. The problem begins when we observe that not all women fit into that box, and some men check some boxes. This observation motivated some scholars to separate biology from sociology and sex from gender. Biology determines sex, but social factors determine gender. This move raises an obvious question: what does being male (or female) mean?
Even the seemingly straightforward formulation above that biology determines sex is complicated. For instance, ordinarily male humans have a Y-chromosome while female humans have X-chromosomes. However, in Swyer syndrome, an XY-chromosome bearing person presents with functional female genitalia. In other words, such a person is genetically male but otherwise female. Labelling such a patient as being intersex merely conveniently evades the question of the person’s sex. In one real-life legal case involving an athlete, the U.S. courts ruled that the person was a female—the sex the athlete had always identified with. Fortunately for our purposes, we do not need to resolve the ambiguous cases. Indeed, we will use the familiar understanding of a male (or man) as the the person presenting with male genitalia at birth. The same standard applies to the woman (or female.)
Is the Holy Spirit Male?
Now we can revisit the central question: is God male? To be comprehensive, I shall assume the Trinitarian conception of God while tackling this question. (See our entries featuring arguments for the Trinitarian view here.) I shall address the question in increasing order of difficulty as it applies to the divine persons, beginning with the Holy Spirit.
The question of biological sex does not apply to the Holy Spirit and all spirit beings because, well, spirits are not the products of biology. Besides, spirits are ordinarily unembodied, and without a body, there cannot be genitalia. However, the question of gender remains live. The Bible portrays the Holy Spirit as being active in the material world in various ways. Sometimes, the Spirit influences humans to perform tasks. This is the mediate mode of the Spirit’s work. The Spirit exerted his influences on people by resting on or indwelling them. The Spirit can also directly or immediately exert his influence. Genesis 1:2 states that the Spirit hovered over the surface of primordial waters. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit caused the pregnancy of Jesus:
Luke 1:35 ESV
[35] And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.
This text is especially relevant for our subject. In the most sexual of all human events – a pregnancy – Luke has the unembodied Spirit coming upon, not into, and overshadowing Mary to cause a pregnancy. Luke paints the pregnancy of Mary as being non-sexual.
In causing Mary’s pregnancy, the Holy Spirit could be seen as playing the male role, but, of course, not exactly as a male human would. Pregnancy among humans is a bodily exercise, but the Holy Spirit is unembodied. Christians have long speculated on whether the Spirit supplied only the Y-chromosome to mix with Mary’s X-chromosome to form the XY-chromosome of the zygote Jesus, or whether he supplied both the X and Y-chromosomes of Jesus. Whatever the case may have been, what is clear is that half of Jesus’ genetic material was not of human origin.
Is the Father Male?
That sounds deceptively redundant: if God is a Father, then he should be male. Christians refer to the first person of the Trinity with such a heavily paternal term, Father. Indeed, many great Christian thinkers have reasoned that maleness is an essential attribute of the Father. For example, C. S. Lewis, in an essay on whether women could serve as priests in the Anglican Communion, reasoned in that way. Using an Anglican liturgical practice, Lewis notes two different roles priests perform:
To us a priest is primarily a representative, a double representative, who represents us to God and God to us. Our very eyes teach us this in church. Sometimes the priest turns his back on us and faces the East – he speaks to God for us: sometimes he faces us and speaks to us for God. We have no objection to a woman doing the first: the whole difficulty is about the second. But why? Why should a woman not in this sense represent God? Certainly not because she is necessarily, or even probably, less holy or less charitable or stupider than a man. In that sense she may be as “God-like” as a man;
So, Lewis believed that women could not represent God to believers, though he granted that women could represent believers before God. But why is that so? Lewis continues:
Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to “Our Mother which art in heaven” as to “Our Father”. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does.
Lewis believed that male humans are more like God than women are, and he seemed to have derived the belief from the facts of the first member of the Trinity being called “Father” and the maleness of Jesus.
He would later explicitly “assert the privilege, or the burden, which Christianity lays upon my own sex.” For the great Christian thinker, there was no doubt that Christianity favored male humans. Using a military metaphor, Lewis further states, “Only one wearing the masculine uniform can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him.” The last idea here refers to the biblical language of the Church being the bride with Jesus as the bridegroom.
There is no need to suppose any sinister intent on the part of Lewis. He seemed to genuinely have believed that the Bible leads in the direction of the position he affirmed. Indeed, Lewis was not alone. Father Maximos Aghiorgoussis of the Orthodox Church writes, “The ordination of women to the Holy Priesthood is untenable since it would disregard the symbolic and iconic value of male priesthood, both as representing Christ’s malehood and the fatherly role of the Father in the Trinity” (Quoted by Peeler, 119). So, this idea is quite pervasive. But are these men correct? I do not think so.
First, John writes:
John 4:23-24 ESV
[23] But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. [24] God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
So, John explicitly identifies the Father as a spirit being. Once again, to be a spirit is not to have a body. If the Father does not have a body, the question of sex becomes irrelevant even if the matter of gender remains live. So, yes, God is a Father, but not in the same way that any male human can be a father. As Peeler stresses, the Father is not male (2).
Sometimes, people are under the impression that God had always been a father even in the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, the Old Testament employs a paternal language for God. Here are a few examples:
Deuteronomy 32:6 ESV
Do you thus repay the Lord, you foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you?
Isaiah 63:16 ESV
For you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us, and Israel does not acknowledge us; you, O Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.
Psalm 68:5 ESV
Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.
Psalm 89:26 ESV
He shall cry to me, ‘You are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation.’
Malachi 1:6 ESV
“A son honors his father, and a servant his master. If then I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear? says the Lord of hosts to you, O priests, who despise my name. But you say, ‘How have we despised your name?’
These uses of the Father language are generally focused on Israel’s national identity, creation, and God’s guidance of the people.
A remarkable observation is that the Hebrew Bible also employs maternal language for God quite graphically. Here are a few examples:
Deuteronomy 32:18 ESV
You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth.
Hosea 11:3-4 ESV
[3] Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them. [4] I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them.
Isaiah 42:14 ESV
For a long time I have held my peace; I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor; I will gasp and pant.
Isaiah 49:15 ESV
“Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.
Isaiah 66:13 ESV
[13] As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.
So, the Hebrew Bible is not hesitant to employ exclusive motherly language to describe Yahweh. It appears that the Hebrew Bible’s use of gendered language for God is balanced. In other words, one cannot construct a doctrine of God’s exclusive maleness from the Hebrew Bible. This point is worth reiterating, especially as there are cultic gatherings that profess the existence of both a Father God and a Mother God. There are no two complementary deities – a Father God and a Mother God. On the contrary, the Bible depicts the same God in both paternal and maternal terms. However, it is true that the New Testament privileges the paternal language for God. The reason for this is explained below.
How God Became a Father
So, why do Christians call God a father, then? Unlike the Old Testament’s uses of the Father language, the New Testament consistently emphasizes that God is the Father of Jesus Christ. He is not merely the father of Israel (which is still true) or the father of creation (also still true). On the contrary, God in the New Testament is specifically referred to as the Father of Jesus Christ of Nazareth (e.g., Matthew 3:17, 17:5, John 20:17). Christians refer to God as Father because this was Jesus’ preferred label for God in the Gospels. This fact is why we call God “Abba, Father” – a phrase that doubly names God as Father. Jesus introduced believers to a God who was a Father, and his followers used that language thereafter to refer to God (1 Corinthians 8:6, Romans 1:3-4, 2 Corinthians 1:3, Hebrews 1:5, 1 John 4:9, Ephesians 1:3).
The question yet remains: How exactly did God become Jesus’s Father? Theologians have spilled much ink on the eternality of God as the Father and of the sonship of Jesus. That’s not my concern here. The simple historical answer is that God became a father through Mary by the Incarnation. The gospels clearly state that Joseph did not father Jesus. They are also consistently clear that Mary was Jesus’s mother. Well, does that make Jesus a fatherless child? No. The New Testament consistently claims that God played the role of a father in the conception of Jesus.
In the Annunciation, when Gabriel came to Mary with the news of motherhood, Matthew and Luke, the two authors who include the birth narrative in their stories, make an extra effort to tell a story of a non-sexualized pregnancy, as we noted earlier. This observation is remarkable because both authors almost certainly were aware of stories of gods impregnating women. The Greeks had plenty of such, and Luke was a Gentile. In the improbable event that they did not know about gods messing around with women, Matthew and Luke surely have read Genesis 6. Yet they told stories of a non-sexual conception.
When Gabriel arrives with the good but terrifying news, Luke depicts Mary as interrogating the angel about his news. Mary was not passive. She considered the news and ultimately decided to invest in God’s plan for humanity. It is vitally important that there were no threats to Mary should she reject the message of Gabriel. Indeed, she raised similar questions as John the Baptist’s father, but she received no punishment, unlike Zechariah. Mary had to be under no threats or coercion, or readers would justifiably suspect a case of divine rape – a theme not uncommon in Greek mythology. Luke writes:
Luke 1:35 ESV
And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.
We addressed this verse earlier. The additional note now is that it seems like the Holy Spirit here does the bidding of the “Most High” – arguably referring to the Father. The Most High played the role of a father, though, again, not as male humans do. For that reason, the child would be called the Son of God. In other words, God became a father, first to Jesus and then to all believers. It is vital to remember that “God the Father is not male” (Peeler, 9). He became a father because Mary was the mother of the child. No child can be born without both a father’s and a mother’s genetic material. The texts say Mary was the mother and God was the father of Jesus.
Here is a noteworthy point worth mentioning. The first woman in the Bible to name God, long before God would self-identify as Yahweh to the descendants of Abraham, was an Egyptian slave woman named Hagar, the young girl whom Abraham and Sarah sexually maltreated:
Genesis 16:13 ESV
So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “You are a God of seeing,” for she said, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.”
So, there is a biblical precedent for women naming God. What’s interesting is that Luke introduces Mary as a slave girl, too:
Luke 1:38 ESV
[38] And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
The word rendered as “servant” here refers to an enslaved woman. True, Mary was not an enslaved person in the same social sense as Hagar was, but she, quite like Hagar, would forever determine God’s name. God became a father because of Mary. It seems like God has always accorded more worth to women than religious men have ever dared to replicate.
The Male Savior: Does the Body of Jesus Tell Us Anything Essential about the Godhead?
We have argued that two members of the Godhead are not male, even if the Holy Spirit immediately (and the Father mediately) functioned as the father of Jesus. What about the third divine person? This is where things get more interesting. There is no denying the maleness of Jesus! The Son of God was embodied for over 30 years on earth and will keep His body even in the age to come. What can we say about the maleness of Jesus – does it imply that the Godhead is somehow male or, perhaps, more male than female?
A good place to start might be to state the obvious: Yes, Jesus is male, but in a way no other human is. He was a male human who received no genetic material from a human father, like the rest of us. Besides, he was also uniquely male in another sense. Paul writes, “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). So, Jesus’s body enveloped divinity. The divinity animated Jesus’s male body. His body enfleshed the “radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). These attributes are not true of any other human, male or female. Jesus is the human we all hope to become, and we are all currently equidistant from that ideal.
But we can say more. Is Jesus’s body essential to his person? The answer is a glaring No. Jesus existed before the Incarnation. John writes:
John 17:5 ESV
And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.
Before the cosmos came to be, there were no physical entities – no matter, energy, or space-time. Indeed, there was no Mary. Without these things, Jesus could not have a body – at least, not the kind he had through the Incarnation. Jesus, like the Father and the Holy Spirit, would be a spirit being—an unembodied entity.
It is true that Daniel saw a vision of a son of man:
Daniel 7:13-14 ESV
[13] “I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. [14] And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
Nothing in this verse requires us to believe that the “son of man” had a male body like we do on earth. Since this vision is heavenly, featuring the clouds of heaven, a divine motif, and the Ancient of Days, it is reasonable to conclude that all these entities were unembodied. If Daniel could see the unembodied Ancient of Days, there is no reason to suppose that the Son of Man had a body in the vision.
So, the maleness of Jesus is not essential to his person. He would still be the eternal Son without a body – just as he forever was before creation. Contrary to what C. S. Lewis and others assumed, maleness is not an essential attribute of Jesus or the Father. However, there is yet a nagging question—one that Lewis touched on as we saw earlier: Could Jesus have been born a girl? In other words, what advantages are there for male humans that Jesus took on a male, but not a female, body? Peeler tackles this question head-on (141):
Could Christ have been female? The beauty of the Incarnation, God becoming human, suggests an answer in the negative. Not because of the sociology of the day, which Jesus and his followers have no trouble pushing against, but because of the most basic biology. To be a human is to be born, born of a woman. The only way it is possible within the system of human procreation for God to involve both sexes in the revelation of divine embodiment is to have the image of God born as a male from the flesh of a female.
This quote deserves a parsing. As we saw earlier, the Incarnation had no male human input whatsoever. This means no male human genetic material contributed to the conception or development of Jesus’s body. His body was entirely constructed by a woman and inside a female body. To use an Aristotelian language, Mary was the material cause of Jesus’s body. So, male humans may not claim any advantage from Jesus’s male body because a female body altogether produced it. It seems like the divine goal was not for humans to rank one body higher but, as Peeler says, “to involve both sexes in the revelation of divine embodiment” (141).
Can a Male Savior Help Women?
Space does not permit me to deep-dive into this vital question. The Gospel accounts consistently answer this question not with abstract theology, but with living, breathing encounters. Jesus lived and moved through a world where women were often silenced, unseen, or shamed. Yet repeatedly, he stopped, noticed, spoke, and restored. He defended a guilty woman caught in adultery from violent men, with a quiet word that sent her accusers away in shame. He healed women society had written off; the bleeding woman, by the social standards of the day, was not even supposed to mingle in a crowd. She broke the norm (and law?) to get to Jesus. Yet, Jesus did not even bring up this norm-breaking fact as he restored not just her body, but also her dignity. Furthermore, Jesus welcomed women into his circle of disciples, allowing them to learn at his feet—a practice unheard of for his time.
The Samaritan woman’s story deserves a special mention. Only the gospel of John covers this story. In John’s narrative world, the story of the Samaritan woman follows right after Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus. As we have argued elsewhere, the main issue revealed in Nicodemus’ exchange with Jesus centered on whether a Jewish ancestry was sufficient for salvation. When Jesus tells Nicodemus that unless one is born again, he cannot see God’s kingdom—a saying he then expanded into being born of water and the Spirit—Jesus tells Nicodemus that his Jewish ancestry is insufficient for salvation.
John narratively contrasted Nicodemus with the Samaritan woman at the well. Whereas Nicodemus went to Jesus in the darkness of night to assess the role of his Jewish ancestry in the grand scheme of things, Jesus seeks out the Samaritan woman in the full brightness of the noonday sun. To the Jews, Samaritans were the worst of humanity. The Faithlife Study Bible says this about how things went wrong for Samaria, the ancient capital city of Israel:
After Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC and deported most of its people, Samaria was inhabited by a mixed population. This included Israelites left behind after the deportation and foreign peoples relocated to the region from other parts of the Assyrian Empire (2 Kgs 17:24–41). Those groups intermarried and thus a distinctly Israelite identity in Samaria was lost, forming the people group the Samaritans. However, like the Jews, Samaritans worshiped Yahweh and used a version of the Pentateuch as their Scripture. Jews and Samaritans typically had a mutual hostility based on ethnic, religious, and political barriers.
From the Jews’ perspective, the Samaritans had adulterated Yahweh’s standards: they intermarried and corrupted the Torah to meet their needs (hence the Jerusalem versus Mount Gerizim conversation, John 4:20). By Jesus’ time, things had so badly deteriorated that “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (John 4:9).
This is a backdrop against which to understand the Samaritan woman’s story. As it turns out, the woman was not the holiest person the Samaritans could have fielded. Indeed, it is generally believed that she drew water at noon to avoid meeting other people at the well, and this is understandable. As it is true even in our day and especially in “honor societies” like the Muslim world, the worth of a woman rapidly depreciates as she has multiple marriages. A second marriage, which may be due to no fault of the woman, is not as good as a first marriage. The Samaritan woman had already been through five marriages by the time Jesus met her. Indeed, she seemed to have either completely given up on the idea of marriage, or no man was willing to take the risk because she had a man living with her whom she was not married to.
This is the profile of the woman Jesus sought out in bright daylight. Unlike Nicodemus, Jesus did not mind being seen with this woman. He spoke hope to the Samaritan woman, crossing ethnic and gender boundaries to reveal himself as the Jewish Messiah for Samaritans and the world.
I have saved the most significant reversal of all for last: it was to women that Jesus first entrusted the news of his resurrection, making them the first witnesses of his victory over death. This is a remarkable detail, and we have addressed it elsewhere. In the first-century world of Rome-occupied Palestine, the testimonies of women were legally worth much less than those of a man. Yet, it is to such persons that Jesus exclusively first entrusted the testimony of the most significant event the earth has ever witnessed! It reads like a divine middle-finger to the social system of the time.
Far from being distant, Jesus was tender with women’s wounds, fierce in their defense, and generous in affirming their worth. He showed that salvation was not a matter of gender but came in a person who saw and cherished women fully. If Jesus, in his humanity, loved women this way, then surely he could heal them—body, heart, and soul. So, yes, a male Savior can help women completely—and men, too.
Works Cited
Barry, John D., Douglas Mangum, Derek R. Brown, Michael S. Heiser, Miles Custis, Elliot Ritzema, Matthew M. Whitehead, Michael R. Grigoni, and David Bomar. 2012, 2016. Faithlife Study Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.
Lewis, C. S. “Priestesses in the Church?” 1948. Episcopal Net, www.episcopalnet.org/TRACTS/priestesses.html. Accessed 20 July 2025.
Peeler, Amy. Women and the Gender of God. Eerdmans, 2022.
