Hard Questions: Does God Have a Gender?

The question makes some people uncomfortable, which is usually a sign it's worth asking.

We've been calling God "he" for so long that it feels less like a linguistic choice and more like a biological fact. But it isn't. It's a metaphor — one so deeply embedded in Christian practice that most people have stopped noticing it's a metaphor at all. And when that happens, something gets lost.

The dominant pronoun for God in Scripture is masculine. Hebrew, like all Semitic languages, assigns grammatical gender to nouns, and God — Yahweh — is grammatically masculine in Hebrew. The primary images for God in the Old Testament are mostly male: Father, King, Warrior, Shepherd. Anyone who tells you the Bible is gender-neutral about God is not reading carefully.

But the same Bible reaches, in some of its most striking passages, for something else entirely.

Isaiah is the most persistent of the biblical writers in this direction. In Isaiah 49:15, God asks: Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. In Isaiah 66:13, God says directly: As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you. In Isaiah 42:14, God is compared to a woman in labor, crying out and gasping. These are not incidental images. They are deliberate theological moves by a writer who reached for maternal language because it said something true that the other images couldn't quite reach.

Jesus does the same thing. In Matthew 23:37, he describes himself gathering his people as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings — not a rooster, not a shepherd, a mother hen. In Luke 15, the parable of the lost coin places a woman searching for something precious directly alongside a father running to meet his returning son. Both images, side by side, are telling us something about who God is.

Deuteronomy 32:18 tells Israel it has forgotten the God who gave birth to it. The Hebrew word used for that act of creation is yaladh — the same word used for a woman in labor.

The biblical writers did not seem to find maternal imagery for God theologically dangerous. They reached for it when it said something the male images couldn't.

The church fathers did the same, though this is less often taught.

Clement of Alexandria, writing around 200 AD, said: In his ineffable essence he is father; in his compassion to us he became mother. Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century theologian, described the divine nature in feminine terms as a tender mother joining in the inarticulate cries of her infant. Augustine used the image of God as nursing mother to describe how God sustains the faithful.

Then there is Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century English mystic and theologian whose Revelations of Divine Love is one of the most significant works of Christian spirituality ever written in English. Julian developed, across multiple chapters, a sustained theological account of Jesus as mother — not a passing metaphor but a carefully worked argument. She wrote: God is as really our Mother as he is our Father. She described Jesus bearing us into life as a mother bears a child, sustaining us as a mother nurses her infant, receiving us back when we fail as a mother receives a frightened child. She knew full well who Jesus was historically. She was saying something precise about the nature of divine love — that it contains and exceeds all human categories, including this one.

Julian is a recognized saint in the Episcopal Church. Her feast day is May 8.

The Episcopal Church has been in a sustained theological conversation about the language we use for God for decades. The 2018 General Convention authorized Enriching Our Worship, a collection of supplemental liturgies that expand the imagery for God beyond exclusively masculine pronouns — drawing directly on the biblical and theological resources described above. The 80th and 81st General Conventions in 2022 and 2024 continued this work, establishing a constitutional framework for liturgical development that specifically calls for inclusive and expansive language and imagery for divinity.

This is a recovery, not an invention. The tradition has always contained more than we've been using.

The 39 Articles of Religion, foundational to Anglican doctrine, affirm that God is without body, parts, or passions — incorporeal, beyond physical form. A being without a body does not have biological sex. The question of God's gender is, at root, a question about the adequacy of our language for a reality that exceeds it.

So why does the language matter?

Because what we can say shapes what we can see. If the only images available for God are male — Father, King, Lord — then women and girls spend their lives with a God who looks like something they are not. The creation account in Genesis 1:27 says that both women and men are made in the image of God. When our language for God contracts to the exclusively male, that claim quietly loses its footing.

Feminist theologian Judith Plaskow put it plainly: when our images for God become inadequate, they stop pointing toward God and start blocking the experience of God.

The Episcopal Church's move toward expansive language is not about replacing the Father with a Mother. It's about using the full range of what Scripture and the tradition have always offered — a God who is, as Julian of Norwich wrote seven hundred years ago, as really our Mother as our Father, and who exceeds both images entirely.

Where are you with this today? Maybe the exclusively male language for God has always created a small distance you couldn't quite name — a sense that the God being described was somehow not entirely for you. Or maybe this conversation feels like something precious is being pulled away. Both of those feelings are real and worth sitting with. The question underneath all of this is the same for everyone: is the God you carry around with you big enough for who God actually is? The tradition's wisest voices have never stopped asking that question. You're in good company.

Sources and further reading: Genesis 1:27; Deuteronomy 32:18; Isaiah 42:14; Isaiah 49:15; Isaiah 66:13; Matthew 23:37; Luke 15:8-10 (NRSV). Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Chapters 59-60 (trans. Elizabeth Spearing, Penguin Classics, 1998). Clement of Alexandria, "Salvation to the Rich Man" and "Christ the Educator" (c. 200 AD). Gregory of Nyssa, homilies (c. 380 AD). The 39 Articles of Religion, Article I. Episcopal Church General Convention, Resolution 2018-D078; Resolution 2022-A059; Resolution 2024-A072. Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (Harper & Row, 1990).