The Femininity of God

Introduction

God behaves in feminine ways.

Why is it that a statement like the above can sound so controversial? Long traditions of doctrinal teaching on the Trinity, the order of creation, and headship in Scripture have often portrayed a one-sided message about God and gender. This message is incomplete at best, and a mischaracterization of Scripture at worst, and it lacks relevance to our culture. We need honest and open dialogue about God and gender in Scripture.

Gender is an undeniably prominent theme in Scripture, and is foundational to God’s relationship with people. Therefore, we can, and should, draw certain conclusions about the gender of God. As part of the discovery process, we should be willing to ask questions such as these:

• Does God exhibit femininity and/or masculinity?
• Is God a male being, or a female being? Can God be both, or neither?
• Is God a man, or a woman? Can God be both, or neither?
• Does God have physiological features that resemble human gender?
• What can we learn about God through the female gender that we would otherwise not be able to ascertain through the male gender, and vice versa?

We should start by stating a couple of obvious truths about God in Scripture:

• Scripture refers to God through the use of male pronouns exclusively, when speaking non-figuratively.
• Jesus was a man while living among us.

These are helpful starting points but we cannot limit our discussion to these two statements. Scripture portrays gender characteristics in four key ways, and God is revealed using all of them:

1. Personal pronouns (he/she/him/her/etc)
2. Imageries, which include human personifications as well as zoomorphism
3. Physiological characteristics, specifically reproductive organs
4. Social constructs, which are arguably the most complicated, as these are divine behaviors as presented within the context of the nearest gender comparatives:
1. Masculinity is compared to strength, bravery, autonomy over community, protectiveness, and a will to kill.
2. Femininity is compared to nurturing, tenderness, compassion, community over autonomy, beauty, safety, security, and sensitivity.

The Image of God

God is not human. This may seem like an overly obvious statement but any endeavor which evaluates the human-like aspects of God should start here to avoid confining God to something akin to a greater version of ourselves. According to a text found in the book of Numbers, God is not a man or born of man,(1) and while the author of Numbers was likely not attempting to make a polemic statement about God’s gender,  it is nonetheless a statement borne out by the whole of Scripture that God is spirit, and his existence is outside of the normal confines of human (and gender) categorizations.(2) 

God created human beings in his own image, so whether male or female, humanity was made to resemble their creator in some fashion. In the creation account, the image of God is immediately likened to the act of ruling, as he puts man(3) in charge as God’s regent over all the other living beings on earth. There is no distinction here between genders, and in fact God’s statement is delivered twice, the second time very explicitly to both male and female as if to make clear their shared responsibility:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, so that they(4) may rule over the fish, birds, livestock and wild animals, and all creatures.’ So God created man(5) in his image, in the image of God he created him(6); male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish, the birds, and every living creature on the ground.’”(7)

As is commonly the style in the book of Genesis, this very broad account of the creation of humans is later repeated with a more specific focus:

“The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living thing. Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.’ So he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.”(8)

In the first, less detailed account, God gives mankind a twofold purpose:

1. To multiply (procreate)
2. To rule over God’s creatures

In the second, more detailed version of creation found in Genesis 2, God created Adam first and alone. This initial creative power begs the questions: 

• Did God short-sightedly intend Adam as the consummate human being? 
• Was Adam intended to be the fullness of God’s image?

As we read on in Genesis, these questions find rather convincing answers, albeit in narrative fashion. For it seems that either the story was told from a primarily dramatic perspective that was intended all along to show the need of the one human for the other, or it was, in fact, an oversight of God’s to create just a single man for companionship with himself (i.e., no original plan for procreation). As the story of Genesis unfolds, we rather doubt the latter. Or, perhaps God wanted his people (the readers of this account) to see how purposefully the man came first in order to communicate both order as well as the inherent deficiency without a woman. 

On the other hand, in the second more detailed re-telling of the creation of man and woman, there is no mention of multiplication, and while there is the command to work the garden of Eden where the man was placed (v.15), this command is secondary to the very purposeful story of the fall of man. It’s worth noting that God’s command to avoid eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was given to the man prior to the woman being created. While not explicit, one could imagine why God held the man first and foremost responsible for the original sin because the command was specifically given to him, and it was very likely his responsibility to relay the command to the woman.(9)

Not surprisingly, in the fall, Eve’s curse for her sin included pain in the very responsibility God gave to humans: childbirth (multiplication). He also cursed relations with her husband. Adam’s curse was difficulty in working the ground for food (also one of God’s directives for mankind). 

Procreation and Birth

At creation, God told his image-bearers to “be fruitful and increase in number”(10) - a clear command of procreation. Throughout Scripture, God is often personified in a reproductive sense, commonly in an agender way,(11) but also very specifically female:

“Praise the greatness of our God! He is the rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.

They are corrupt and not his children; to their shame they are a warped and crooked generation. Is this the way you repay the Lord, you foolish and unwise people? Is he not your father, your creator, who made you and formed you?

They abandoned the God who made them and rejected the rock their savior. You deserted the rock, who fathered you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.”(12)

“The Lord will march out like a champion, like a warrior he will stir up his zeal; with a shout he will raise the battle cry and will triumph over his enemies. For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and held myself back. But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out, I gasp and pant.”(13)

“Jesus replied, ‘Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.’ 

‘How can someone be born when they are old?’ Nicodemus asked. ‘Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!’ 

Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.’”(14)

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”(15)

In uniquely analogous ways, these texts describe God to be in the process of birthing, a distinctly female function. (Especially interesting is how the spirit of God gives birth to the spirit beings of kingdom children.) To be clear, these texts are saying nothing about the gender of God, nor should they be construed to deduce that from them. Instead, the question should be asked, What does God want the reader to understand about God in this imagery? Whatever the answer may be, the point should not be overlooked that God is not afraid of the parallels between himself (towards his people) and mothers (towards their children).

Whether in the paternal tone of Deuteronomy 3 above or the maternal tones elsewhere, God portrays himself in very natural, parental roles that communicate his character and his relational position towards his people.

Comfort and Compassion

Scripture frequently portrays God as a compassionate being, and one who comforts his people. In order to demonstrate these qualities of his character, vivid parental imagery is again employed to help the reader understand first of all the traits themselves, and secondly God’s relational position towards his people:

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort.”(16)

“The Lord crowns you with love and compassion. The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.”(17)

In both texts above, compassion is a paternal trait, which would lead us to believe that God doesn’t view certain qualities (i.e., compassion) that may otherwise be construed as more of a feminine trait to be exclusively feminine. Again, the roles of mother and father are being exploited here to further our understanding of the type of person God is. Both roles are important, in complementary ways, to more fully understand God’s intended relationship with his people.

“The Lord comforts his people, and will have compassion on his afflicted ones. Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will never forget you!”(18)

Isaiah draws on the image of a mother with baby at her breast, one of the nearest human comparisons to compassion, and yet while even humans sometimes fail in that nearest comparison, God will never fail in his compassion towards his people. Additionally, the theme of God comforting his people is recurring in Isaiah:

“As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you (people of God), and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.”(19)

Zoomorphism

A recurring imagery employed in Scripture to describe God is zoomorphism - drawing on characteristics of animals to help his people understand more about his relationship towards them. God is frequently cast as a female animal in relation to her young,(20) characterizing his protectiveness and jealousy towards his people. These zoomorphistic images cast God as both male animals and female animals, including eagles, hens, other birds, lions, bears, and leopards. These images are most often used to show a kind of vicious jealousy that God has for the love and devotion of his people. The images are frequently employed as a kind of poetic literary device, but not always, and there seems to be no significance attributed to the gender of the animal, other than the author appealing to these images for a richer understanding of God’s concerns for his people.

Masters and Slaves

Another form that Scripture uses to compare God’s relationship towards his people is a master who treats his slaves mercifully, and likewise a mistress who treats her female slaves mercifully.(21) The point of the image of slavery is that the slaves have nowhere else to go, and that they are dependent upon the master/mistress showing mercy. Interestingly, there is no particular reason to emphasize both male and female slaves, or male and female masters, yet they’re included together as a poetic picture of our position before God. We once again note the fact that God is pleased with comparisons that draw a likeness between him and both genders.

Personification of Wisdom

Perhaps no treatment of God’s femininity would be complete without discussing “Lady Wisdom” in Proverbs.(22) These texts are written from the first-person perspective of “wisdom” and “understanding”. Through the use of personifying wisdom, the author reveals how foundational wisdom and understanding are to God’s purposes for human existence, and how Wisdom undergirded everything that the Lord did from the very beginning of creation. There was nothing that God did without “her”.

There are a few common ways to interpret the person of Wisdom in this text, and our goal here is not to choose a winning interpretation but to appreciate the perspectives on this beautiful poetry. Here are three ways this text can be interpreted:

1. Wisdom in Proverbs is to some degree a personification of Jesus himself. When Jesus came to earth as the son of Mary and Joseph, he came as a male human being, but the gender of Jesus is not confined to, or defined by, the life he lived on earth, and we would even venture to say he is both masculine and feminine in various ways (or perhaps neither, for that matter).
2. Jesus is distinct from Wisdom in Proverbs. Wisdom here cannot be Jesus because female pronouns are used, and Jesus was male. Therefore, we cannot accept Wisdom as a personification of Jesus.
3. The Hebrew word for “wisdom” is grammatically feminine. Therefore, nothing about Jesus (or God) should be imposed upon (or deduced from) Wisdom in Proverbs other than it being a poetic personification of God’s wisdom from a grammatically-correct sense.

All three arguments could be reasonably persuaded, and our point here is not to conclude on any single argument. We can gain an appreciation for God’s wisdom as we read these texts, without “picking sides”. If nothing else, we can confidently say that there is significance in the fact that such an important text in Scripture lauds God’s wisdom through the use of female personification. There is a celebration of the supremacy and desirability of Wisdom, and the female personification within that celebration is undeniable. If God intended that the authors of Scripture should portray him only in a masculine sense so as not to be understood with any type of feminine qualities, he certainly would have excluded (or repurposed) the Wisdom texts in Proverbs.

Similar to the texts above on compassion, Isaiah very effectively uses the role of a mother to instruct God’s people on the type of comfort God provides. It might be interesting to contemplate whether God created both male and female roles in the natural order to provide a more complete understanding of his nature, or whether he simply just picked the nearest natural comparisons. But either way, God is certainly pleased to align himself with qualities or behaviors that are commonly feminine in nature.

Jesus' Parable of the Woman's Lost Coin

“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”(23)

Take a deeper look at this parable and we will notice that the moment of reveal in the story is not how God rejoices like the woman who gathers all her friends and neighbors, but how there is rejoicing in the presence of his angels when a sinner repents. That is, the woman is the subject of the parable, but when the comparison is drawn to the kingdom of God, the angels suddenly become the focal point of the story. Nevertheless, here is a case where God, at the very least, is clearly comfortable being even loosely associated as the woman figure of the story. Jesus certainly could’ve avoided such proximity if it was demeaning or offensive to identify God in terms of female personification but no such discomfort exists here.

Marriage

From the very beginning, God created man and woman as his image-bearers.(24) After creating the first man and placing him in the Garden of Eden, the first time God said something he created was not good was when he conceded, “It is not good for the man to be alone”,(25) and he proceeded to create the first woman. As pointed out above, it is hardly fathomable to think that God initially intended man to be created alone and that he somehow had an “oops” moment when realizing that he then needed to “make a helper suitable for him”. So it stands to reason that he intended all along for man to need woman, and vice versa.

The first time that man is recorded to have spoken is when giving names to all the creatures of creation, both on the ground and in the sky.(26) But the man’s first recorded words come later after God created woman alongside him, and these words specifically reference the union of a man with a woman.(27) Oddly, the author of this text immediately jumps to conclude, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh”.(28) There is something very intrinsic about marriage in the way God created man and woman.

Perhaps marriage was instituted in part because of how God sees himself in a marriage with his people, even though in the Prophets, the personification of God as husband to his people is seemingly exclusively a husband chasing after a distressed or wayward wife.(29) In his husbandly imagery, God at times is depicted to have abandoned his wife because of her unfaithfulness or her unfitness, but there is always redemption on the other side - God the husband, coming to the rescue of his wife, even though she seems to deserve no sort of kindness because of what she has done. 

There does not seem to be an agenda to these recurring themes in terms of villainizing wives or women, but the consistent and exclusive references to God as the husband and not the wife is striking. In later references, the person of Jesus fulfills the role of husband towards God’s people,(30) and again never is depicted as the wife. The church (the community of God’s people) is instead always characterized as the bride or the wife who is redeemed or washed clean of her ways by the mercy and kindness of her husband.

Husbands, in this regard, undoubtedly have a significant responsibility. If the husband’s role was created by God to show the kind of dedicated love that he has for his people, man himself was created with the intention that when he marries, he would care for his wife with a cleansing, redemptive, and sacrificial love. Looking back again at our earlier discussion of the original sin, we can see this same theme of responsibility there as well, only in the creation story, it was the failure of the man to provide this redemptive and sacrificial love.

So what can we say about the role of gender within the structure of marriage? First of all, obviously God is the husband, therefore assuming the male role. Ironically, however, all of God’s people are pictured together as the role of wife so both men and women assume the female role, and Scripture never once addresses this peculiar inference of men taking on the otherwise female role of wife. What would we then say about the men who follow God? Is their masculinity subservient to some kind of ultimate femininity? Certainly not. So our focus on the roles in the marriage between God and his people must not be on gender but on other aspects. There are a few possibilities:

1. There is an important lesson about the roles of husband and wife in marriage that are modeled by God as the husband, and God’s people as the wife. This can be seen in Ephesians 5. There might seem to be a redeeming and cleansing role for the husband, who would be responsible for pursuing his wife, and sacrificing for her. Perhaps these things are what Paul alludes to as the components of the headship role of a husband. It deserves to be said that the role of a wife is not the role of a servant, or the Lord would not have declared that his wife will no longer call him master.(31)
2. The specific roles of husband and wife are not as important as the themes of redemption and love. This can be seen in Jeremiah 3, Ezekiel 16, and Hosea 2 above. In fact, God’s role as a husband has many elements of a man at the mercy of the waywardness of his wife, which is not necessarily an attractive light to shed on God, while at the same time, he is always eager for his wife to return to him.
3. The focus is on the complementary aspect of marriage between a man and a woman rather than which role has which function or significance.

We may not answer which of these possibilities is more likely, and perhaps they all have a part in explaining various aspects of God’s relationship towards his people. Strangely, there is practically nothing explained in all of Scripture about the significance of why God is pictured as the husband to his people Israel. However, when Paul, in his letters to the churches of Ephesus, Colossae and Corinth, evokes similar imagery of Jesus as the husband to the church, there is undeniably an order of responsibility that is intrinsic to Jesus with the church, and a husband with his wife.(32)

The consummation of this picture of God as husband to his people, the bride, is at the end of Revelation, where the new Jerusalem, full of God’s people, is presented as a bride to her husband.(33) This final picture, however, describes nothing more about the roles of husband and wife, does not even mention Jesus, and ironically, the bride’s purity is stated not as the redemptive or cleansing love of the husband but rather her own righteous acts.(34)

Conclusion

If God created woman in his image, one conclusion we ought to draw about God is that he bears the characteristics of the female gender. God unashamedly behaves in feminine ways.

We often think of God in terms of a singularity; one nature with a singular will, a singular purpose, a singular motivation, and a singular type of being. But God, often like the nature of a woman, does not have a singular will, or a singular motivation, and this is indeed borne out in numerous Scriptural texts as noted above. God created woman alongside man so that we could see the part of God that can only be seen through the female gender. 

God wants to be wanted, yet not out of weakness or deficiency. God wants to be valued. God wants to be adored. God wants to be listened to. God wants to be constantly re-discovered in new, relational experiences. God is compassionate and merciful towards his people when they are most desperate in need, and he comforts them in their moments of trouble. He is emotional when he restores those who are lost.   And God is jealous for the love of his people. 

This is the femininity of God.

Endnotes

1) Numbers 23, Balaam’s message to Balak the king of Moab; see verse 19
2) John 4, Jesus’ discussion with the woman at the well; see verse 24
3) Or “mankind”
4) The plural here may be indicative of the making “man” in our image to be a reference to the “mankind” aspect of the word.
5) This is the same word as earlier in the verse, which can indicate “mankind” in this context.
6) The contrast here between “him” and the following “them” is both fantastic and bewildering.
7) Genesis 1:26-28
8) Genesis 2:7,15,18,21,22
9) Read the sequence of events in Genesis 1:8-18 and 2:8-12
10) Genesis 1:26-28
11) Deuteronomy 32:18, Job 38:28-29
12) Deuteronomy 3:6,15,18
13) Isaiah 42:13-14
14) John 3:3-8
15) 1 John 4:7
16) 2 Corinthians 1:3
17) Psalm 103:4,8,13
18) Isaiah 49:13,15
19) Isaiah 66:13
20) Deuteronomy 32:3-11, specifically verse 11 where the eagle hovers over its young; Matthew 23:37 / Luke 13:34, where Jesus compares himself to a hen gathering her chicks (Jerusalem); Hosea 13:4-8, where a bear is robbed of her cubs; and Isaiah 31:4-5 where a bird hovers over its nest
21) Psalm 123:2-4
22) Proverbs 4:13 and Proverbs 8; of special note are 8:1-3, and 8:22-31
23) Luke 15:8-10
24) Genesis 1:26-30
25) Genesis 2:18
26) Genesis 2:19-20
27) Genesis 2:21-25
28) Genesis 2:24
29) Isaiah 54:5-8; Jeremiah 3:14; Ezekiel 16:8,32; Hosea 2:16
30) Matthew 9:15; 25:1-13; John 3:29; Ephesaisn 5:25-33; Revelation 19:7-8
31) Hosea 2:16
32) Ephesians 1:15-23 & 5:21-33, 1 Corinthians 11:1-16, Colossians 1:15-20
33) Revelation 21, also see 19:6-8
34) Revelation 19:6-8