God in Feminine Form
Feminine Divine by Annelie Solis
By Daneen Akers
Our God-language matters
Our God language matters because it is how we conceptualize that which we hold as ideal. And in Western culture, which is deeply tied to Empire types of Christianity, Christian metaphors for God have been mired for centuries in tradition, sexism, and power. The pervasive idea that God equals male turned into male equals God. It has damaged us all at every level from personal to societal, and it needs to change.
This is not a new movement—for decades, womanist and feminist scholars have pointed out the harm done by male-centric God talk. Feminine images and language for God are found in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, which include references to God as a compassionate mother, a midwife, a woman in labor, and many more. She bakes bread to feed the hungry, shelters Her baby chicks, and nurses Her babies. Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century female theologian and saint wrote: “As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother.” In the 20th century, Pope John Paul I echoed Julian when he said, “God is our Father; even more God is our Mother.”
But our texts and traditions have named and imagined divinity as “He” for so often and for so long that many of us have started to think God is actually masculine and male. This has enormous implications for how children of all genders grow up imagining (or not) their essence as part of the Image of God. Masculine language for God contributes to a world in which women and girls remain marginalized and seen as less than, and the mothering and feminine qualities in all genders are undervalued. Feminine God-language is liberating for us all.
One of the womanist scholars doing crucial work today is Dr. Rev. Wil Gafney, professor of Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School. Rev. Gafney teaches that often the feminine aspects of the divine were repressed in the translations; however, in the very grammar of the original languages, God is also our "Mother" and "She." She believes that it’s high time we recovered God in feminine form in our texts and metaphors for the sake of all genders. “As long as a masculine God remains at the top of the pyramid,” Rev. Gafney says, “nothing else we do matters.”
And in actuality, She is actually already in the texts that many people consider sacred scripture. Rev. Gafney, says, there’s been a conspiracy in biblical translation. Here’s Rev. Gafney’s translation of Job 33:4 with the oft-repressed feminine grammar restored (used by permission).
Why We Need Explicitly Feminine God-language
I was in my 30s before I first heard God referred to as She in a church service. It was actually during a song. Just one verse had been revised to include feminine pronouns.
I have a Maker
She formed my heart
Before even time began
My life was in Her hand
She knows my name
She knows my every thought
She sees each tear that falls
And She hears me when I call
But that one verse was enough. Singing those familiar words to She broke open a dam inside of me. I began to weep in my seat. I didn’t realize how much I had felt excluded as a woman from the concept that we are all “created in the image of God” until that moment amid my tears.
Sure, I’d been around many people who talked about how every person was part of the image of God, and technically the sacred text I was raised with says right there in Genesis 1 that God created earthlings/humans in God’s image, “male and female, God created them.”
However, despite this lip service to an inclusive Imago Dei, every song, every prayer, every work of art, every metaphor for God that any leader ever used in my presence as a child and young adult was decidedly and intentionally male. As a child, I internalized that God was male because that was the stronger, better option.
That pervasive, patriarchal idea of God equals male, which then has turned into male equals God has damaged us all at every level from personal to societal, and it needs to change. Children (and adults) of all genders need to know that God is also Mother, Mama and She.
As Cindy Wang Brandt, author of Parenting Forward says, “When God is woman, girls see the divine in themselves and boys embrace their feminine traits as holy.”
She Is Already in Our Sacred Texts
God our Mother is not a new concept, and scripture has our backs on this—really. Many early Christian texts refer to the Holy Spirit in particular as She. Many of the early church fathers (including Clement and Augustine) spoke of God’s compassion in maternal terms. For those who need Biblical affirmation that God is also our loving Mother, there are actually abundant scriptural references to the maternal, feminine aspects of divinity—we’ve just repressed them or overlooked them. Here are just a few:
God is said to gather Her people like a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings (Matt 23:37)
God is the rock that bore us (Dt. 32:18)
God is a woman in labor bringing forth a new creation (Is 42:14)
God is a compassionate mother (Jer 31:20)
God gives birth and nurses us at Her breast (Hosea 11:3–4 and Isaiah 49:15). In fact, one of the titles for God is “El Shaddai,” which can be translated as, “The Many- Breasted One,” a reference to God nourishing and sustaining Her people like a mother nursing her baby.
The spirit of God that resides with the children of Israel in the tabernacle in the wilderness is called Shekinah; She-Who-Dwells. She is feminine.
The Greek word for God’s Wisdom or Spirit is Sophia. Many early Christians spoke of the Holy Spirit as feminine and as our Mother.
The Hebrew word for compassion, rechem, is the same root word as womb. So whenever we read of God’s compassionate love, we should read this as God’s womb-love.
Wisdom, the main character in the book of Proverbs, is clearly a clearly feminine persona who is said to have been at the creation of the world (many scholars believe Wisdom is simply the Holy Spirit’s other name). In Greek, Wisdom is Sophia (which we still use as a feminine name).
In Syriac Christianity, one of the very early communities of Jesus-followers, the Spirit is depicted as a mother bird. This connects with the hovering, pulsing presence of the Spirit depicted in Genesis 1:2.
And in the very grammar of the texts so many hold as Scripture itself, God is also She. (More on this below…)
All We Ever Get is Metaphor
The language we have for divinity is, by necessity, symbolic. We only have images and metaphors to gesture towards God. All language is too small to encapsulate the reality of the thing being named. For example, when I say or write a word like “chair,” the image in the mind of my listener or reader is likely of a different shape, size, or color of chair than the one in my mind. This gap exists for all language, but it’s an especially wide gap for God-language because all we ever get is metaphor.
Dr. Christena Cleveland author God is a Black Woman, writes about how she has moved away what she now terms whitemalegod (a pervasive metaphor in dominant parts of Christianity that has justified enormous harm through racism and patriarchy), to the Sacred Black Feminine who is unapologetically Black and female. When Dr. Cleveland is asked if she literally believes that God is a Black woman, she affirms mystery and metaphor:
“I don’t tend to think literally when it comes to the Divine. I think metaphor is all we have, and that is mysteriously plenty.”
Madonna and Child by Harmonia Rosales
Stuck Metaphors Harm Us All
Even if metaphor is all we ever get for the Source of All, our metaphors have gotten stuck. Due to a combination of tradition, sexism, power, and the limitations of language, our God-language and ideas used in our art, music, and liturgies have become almost exclusively masculine, so much so that many of us have forgotten that these words and images were only ever metaphors hinting at a mystery. This harms all of us.
The problem right now is that our texts and traditions have named and imagined divinity as He for so often and for so long that many of us have started to think God is actually masculine and male. This has enormous implications for how children of all genders grow up imagining (or not) their essence as part of the Image of God.
Our stuck God-language contributes to a world in which women and girls remain marginalized and seen as less than, and the mothering and feminine qualities in all genders are undervalued. How could they not when our narratives and language about God are so imbalanced?
Even for those who don’t ascribe to a religious tradition, the overwhelmingly masculine language choices for God/Ultimate Reality become the waters in which we all swim. Our world remains sexist in no small part to the predominantly masculine words and images ascribed to divinity.
We need equity for the Divine Feminine in our language, music, art, and metaphors, even if any Ultimate Reality transcends form and gender. Unless we explicitly use feminine pronouns, titles, and symbols for God, the idea of the feminine as part of the image of God will remain unimaginable, and we will be limiting the ways in which the sacred mystery we call God can interact in our lives and in the world.
Dear Mama God
I now pray to Mother God with my children (or Mama God, which is the term my youngest started using when she was four). I do this to help both them and myself imagine God in the female form. Hearing my children pray to Mama God and Mother God has been healing and transformative, and I want to share this expansive and life-affirming concept that God is also a mother, also She, with others.
Addressing God as She felt awkward at first. But we cannot skip over explicitly feminine forms and names, even though many people would prefer jumping to gender-neutral terms. But after thousands of years of exclusively masculine god-language, simply using gender-neutral ones are not disruptive—they won’t work because the word “God” still lands in our bodies as masculine due to the weight of history and the ingrained ideas we’ve all absorbed.
Why Gender-neutral Titles Are Not Enough
In her spiritual memoir, Dance of the Dissident Daughter, author Sue Monk Kidd writes of waking up to the pervasive patriarchy in our culture and in her Southern Baptist faith. She makes a compelling argument for an explicitly feminine form for the formless. She asks herself what’s the bother with feminine pronouns and imagery if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless? She writes: “The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It’s the language the soul understands. And yet...the images that have pervaded our speech, thought, and feeling about the Divine have told us the Divine is exclusively male.”
We Must Have a Feminine Form for the Formless.
In She Who Is (now in its 25th anniversary addition), Dr. Elizabeth Johnson says we must have female symbols for God even though many people would like to move directly to a neutral term. But Dr. Johnson says this is “not ultimately satisfactory.” Besides not doing enough to disrupt the ingrained god-concepts centuries of patriarchy have taught all of us, she also says we need the insights that would follow should female symbols and metaphors be freed to describe “holy mystery.”
She writes: “Besides employing uncritically a term long associated with the patriarchal ordering of the world, its consistent use causes the personal or transpersonal character of holy mystery to recede. It prevents the insight into holy mystery that might occur were female symbols set free to give rise to thought. Most serious of all, it papers over the problem of the implied inadequacy of women’s reality to represent God.”
This does not mean that non-binary titles for God and the experience of non-binary people do not also matter; however, it does mean we cannot skip over explicitly feminine God-language though.
I do also enjoy the recent move to use “They/Them” pronouns for God which also helps disrupt patterns. God can be She/They in our household for a few millennia as we work on some equity for the feminine Divine!
A spread from the new picture book, Dear Mama God.
We Need to Disrupt the Learned Gender Patterns
Dr. Gafney also writes in the introductory materials to A Woman’s Lectionary for the Whole Church about why explicitly feminine language is preferable to gender-neutral language for the lectionary’s goals. She writes: “Explicitly feminine language is preferable to inclusive and neuter language which obscures and erases woman and girls. In addition, singular neuter gender and inclusive plurals do not disrupt the learned gender patters, as many readers and hearers interpret them through their previously learned gender pattern and experience them as male.”
In short, “God” just lands in our bodies and souls as male due to a few thousand years of stuck metaphors (undergirded by patriarchal power systems).
Memoirist and podcaster Glennon Doyle stated this idea simply on social media when someone asked her why she referred to God as “Her.” Did Glennon really think God was female? She answered: “I think it’s ridiculous to think of God as anything that could possibly be gendered. But as long as the expression of God as female is unimaginable to many while the expression of God as male feels perfectly acceptable—and as long as women continue to be undervalued and abused and controlled here on earth—I’ll keep using it.”
As another modern-day holy troublemaker and social Jesus teacher put 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.”
“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.”
But, didn’t Jesus say to pray to God as Father?
One of the biggest pushbacks those of us call God Mother face is the argument that Jesus prayed to God as a father, so doesn’t that mean God is masculine?
But Jesus’s reference to God as a father isn’t meant to be a physical or biological description. Father is Jesus’s metaphor. And for his time, it’s a radically intimate metaphor. For some a father metaphor is a comforting one, but for others, it’s a barrier.
Like all of the metaphors and symbols we have for God, a father metaphor isn’t the entirety of the mystery—it’s just one image. But over time, this one paternal metaphor has become the only valid one for many people.
In actuality, the Gospels show Jesus using rich and varied metaphors for God, but we’ve minimized the others as church tradition and doctrine got more cemented.
Dr. Johnson addresses this extensively in She Who Is. She says that Jesus’ language about God is “diverse and colorful,” but only the male parent one became the lasting one, and that is likely a political choice.
There are many other motifs Jesus used in the Gospels that have not gotten stuck as literally in our thinking about God metaphors. Jesus also says that God is a woman searching for lost coins, a shepherd looking for a lost sheep, a baker-woman kneading dough, a generous employer, a wind that blows freely, a mother birthing new life, but those metaphors have not gotten stuck, probably because they didn’t coincide with the growing patriarchy and tradition in the emerging Christian church as the New Testament texts were being written.
Dr. Johnson points out that the frequency that Jesus uses “Abba” or “Father” goes up dramatically as the chronological dates of the Gospel texts go on. So, there are four mentions of “Abba” in the earliest one, Mark, which was written approximately 40 years after Jesus’s death. By the time John is written at least 40 or 50 years later than Mark (so 80 or 90 years after Jesus’s death), the number of “Abba” uses has increased to over 100 times.
Basically, as church tradition gets further codified, the writers depict more and more often Jesus using a male, paternal address and metaphor. “It is a matter of theological development in the early church rather than abundant use by the actual Jesus who lived,” writes Dr. Johnson.
Herb Montgomery writes extensively about the economic implications of the upside-down, the first-shall-be-last kind of society Jesus envisioned and taught about and says that we also have to be cautious in applying our modern-day concepts of a father to a text that is 2,000 years old. At that time and context, a father was first a provider. He writes: “The term ‘Father’ was about the provider in that culture making sure everyone in the family had enough. It was a patriarchal culture. It was an economic statement. It wasn’t a definitive statement on the gender of God but on God being the householder to make sure there was enough daily bread for everyone.”
Note: If the metaphor of God as a father is a life-giving one for you, please be blessed with it; just don’t insist it be the only metaphor available for others.
The new picture book, Dear Mama God, a simple child’s prayer of wonder and gratitude addressed to God as a Mama is now available.
“A Conspiracy in Biblical Translation”
God is already She right in our texts, but the suppression of God in the feminine gender has been a “conspiracy in biblical translation,” according to Rev. Dr. Gafney. (This TheoEd lecture by Dr. Gafney is a marvelous introduction to this scholarship.) One way in which biblical translators (almost certainly all men given who was allowed to learn to read and write) kept God in the feminine gender out of our sacred texts is by using a proper noun instead of a pronoun.
Rev. Gafney explains that the word for God’s Spirit in Hebrew is ruach, and it is always a feminine noun. In many languages, nouns have a feminine or masculine gender, but English grammar does not have gendered nouns. Centuries of all-male translators left out the feminine from the language about God by simply removing pronouns. Because Rev. Gafney goes back to the original languages and finds the feminine grammar that has been overlooked for centuries, she sometimes calls herself a literalist. She writes: “Feminine language for God occurs in the text repeatedly. This means that feminists and womanists advocating for inclusive and explicit feminine God-language are not changing but restoring the text and could be considered biblical literalists.”
Rev. Gafney asks us to imagine hearing scripture with the feminine gender of God’s Spirit still present in the words. Some examples include, “She rested on them” and “She made me.”
This last phrase is in the Hebrew Scriptures more than 30 times, usually when describing God’s Spirit urging someone to take action. Or, back to Rev. Gafney’s translation of Job 33:4 with the feminine grammar restored—
“The Spirit of God, She has made me, and the breath of the nursing God, She gives me life.”
Imagine what it would do for children (and adults) of all genders to hear that scripture proclaimed?
Sophia with Dove by Ellen Sue Parkinson
We Need Mama God
This is why we need books—and art, music, and liturgies—with an explicitly feminine God. Until God can be pictured, imagined, preached, taught, and honored as Mother and as She, we will be leaving out a crucial aspect of the Divine, limiting the holy mystery, and contributing to a society in which women and girls are seen as less than. Feminine God-language is liberating for us all.
Further reading recommendations:
Akers, D. (2019). Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints. Watchfire Media. (For content related to God in feminine form, see especially chapters on Rev. Wil Gafney, Leslie Foster, and Kate Christensen-Martin.)
Cleveland, Chistena (2022). God is a Black Woman. Harper One.
Gafney, Wilda (2021). A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year W (and Year A). Church Publishing.
Gafney, Wilda (2017). Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne. Westminster John Knox Press.
Johnson, E. A. (2017). She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. (3rd ed.). Herder & Herder.
Monk Kidd, S. (2016). Dance of the Dissident Daughter (2nd ed.). HarperOne.
Rae Rothus, Kyndall. (2021). Thy Queendom Come. Broadleaf Books.
Starr, Mirabai. (2019) Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics. Sounds True
Stone, Merlin (1978). When God Was a Woman. Mariner Books.
Wyckoff, Mallory (2021). God Is. Eerdmans.
Children’s Books
Akers, Daneen (author) and Gamble, Gillian (illustrator). Dear Mama God. 2023. Watchfire Media.
Held Evans, Rachel & Turner, Matthew Paul (authors) and Tan, Ying Hui (illustrator). What is God Like?. 2021. Convergent Books.
Meehan, Bridget Mary (author) and Susan Sawyer (illustrator). (1995) Heart Talks with Mother God. Liturgical Press.
Pecinovsky, Teresa Kim (author) and Khoa Le (illustrator). (2022). Mother God. Beaming Books.
Sasso, Sandy (author) and Phoebe Stone (illustrator.) (2004). In God’s Name. Jewish Lights.
Weiss, David. (2015). When God Was a Little Girl. St. Mary’s Press.
Other:
Christianity Today: “A New Lectionary that Centers Women”
Catholic News Agency: “Even More God is our Mother”
Christian Feminism Today: “My Life Was Transformed by a Children’s Book: Heart Talks with Mother God”
Rev. Jacquie Lewis: “She Is Love”
Richard Rohr: “God Is Our True Mother”
TheoEd Talk by Dr. Wil Gafney: “Biblical Language for a God who Transcends Gender”
Washington Post: “Is God male?”
Daneen Akers is the author of Dear Mama God, a new picture book with a child’s wonder-filled prayer of gratitude addressed to God as a Mother. She’s also the author of Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints, an illustrated children’s storybook about people of diverse faiths who rocked the religious boat on behalf of love and justice.
