God is not male. Scripture says God is spirit, which means God has no body that could be male or female. Christians call God Father because the name describes how God relates to his people and to his Son, not what God is made of. The clearest proof sits where most people expect the opposite: the conception of Jesus, where God supplies nothing a human father would supply.
Most confusion on this question comes from taking the steps out of order. People start with the word Father, picture a man, and then try to fit the rest of the Bible around that picture. This guide builds the explanation in three steps instead: what kind of being God is, what the name Father does, and what the virgin birth shows. Each step has a passage to read and something to notice before you move on. After the three steps comes a practice: you put the whole explanation into your own words and test it against real objections.
Alone, give yourself about 45 minutes with a Bible and a pen. In a group, plan on an hour or a little more, with time for the practice in pairs. The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Amy Peeler, a professor at Wheaton College.
Before you begin
Finish this sentence in writing, without editing it: When I pray, I picture God as… Keep what you wrote. You will come back to it at the end.
If your sentence includes a face, a beard or a male figure, you are not unusual. Dr. Amy Peeler explains that English forces us to use pronouns for persons, and God is a person, so Father, Lord and he do their work on the imagination without anyone deciding it. In her words, “this is not like we’re dumb or we’re being willful, we just automatically imagine God as male.” The aim here is to replace that picture with something you can actually defend. Nobody is grading the picture you started with.
Step one: God is spirit, and a body came later
Read John 4:19-24. Jesus is talking with a Samaritan woman about where God should be worshiped, on her people’s mountain or in Jerusalem. He answers by saying something about God himself. John 4:24 reads: “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”
Notice: the argument runs from God’s nature to the place of worship. Because God is not bounded by a body, God is not bounded by a mountain or a city. That is the first building block. God has no physical form, so the categories that belong to bodies, including male and female, do not describe God’s nature.
Notice also that the same verse says “him.” The pronoun and the statement about spirit sit side by side, and the pronoun does not cancel the statement. Peeler draws the lesson that Jewish and Christian theology have had to be careful from the start: “we have to be careful that we don’t bring God down and imagine God as just like us, for God is infinitely different than us as Creator.”
Now read John 1:14: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” The phrase was made flesh describes an event. Something happened that had not happened before. Peeler puts it directly: “God never had a body before this moment.” She then states the consequence: “God is not embodied, and therefore God can’t be sexed or gendered.”
Here is the distinction that heads off the most common mistake. The Son truly took on a male human body. Peeler is plain about this: “Jesus is male. There’s no questions about that.” But the maleness belongs to the human nature the Son took on at a point in history. It is not a fact about God’s nature from eternity, and it cannot be read backward onto the Father or the Spirit.
Step two: Father is a name for a relationship
Read Matthew 6:9: “After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.” Then read Romans 8:15: “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”
Notice: in both passages the name Father comes with a relationship attached. Jesus gives it to his disciples as the way to address God. Paul ties it to adoption, the act by which God brings outsiders into his family. Neither passage says anything about what God looks like.
Peeler explains the name the same way. Christians call God Father, she says, and “That’s because God has invited us into the family and God provides for us.” She continues: “But that does not mean that God is male. God is God. God is creator, not a creature.”
One comparison can help here, if you hold it loosely. When a student calls someone her teacher, the word tells you what that person does for her and what kind of trust exists between them. It tells you nothing about the teacher’s height or sex. Father works like that in one respect: it names a relationship of care and belonging. The comparison breaks quickly, though. A student chooses a teacher, and the title can pass to someone else. Father is the name God gives himself, and Jesus uses it for his own unique relation to God. It is not a job title we are free to swap out. Keep the first half of the comparison and drop the rest.
That leads to a second predictable mistake: if Father does not mean male, maybe Christians should stop saying it. Peeler takes the opposite view. She uses masculine pronouns for God sparingly, and she respects Christians who choose not to use them, but she keeps Father language because of what it carries: “when I hear God is Father, I know who’s God’s son.” The name points to Jesus, and Jesus points to how he came into the world, through Mary. As she says, “The whole story is incorporated in that term, father.”
Lisa Fields summarized the practical point about pronouns in the conversation. Using “him” is not the problem. Her caution was this: “don’t let the use of the word him make you diminish who God is.”
For some readers the word Father is painful because of a human father who was absent or harmful. Peeler sees that as a reason to keep the name, because “God can be the kind of father that maybe we didn’t have.” If that is your situation, take the time you need with this section. You do not have to resolve it today.
Step three: the virgin birth as the hardest test
If God were secretly male, a pregnancy is where it would show. That makes the conception of Jesus the place to test everything in steps one and two.
Read Luke 1:26-38, then slow down at two verses. Luke 1:34: “Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” Luke 1:35: “And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”
Two pieces of KJV wording need explaining. I know not a man means Mary has had no sexual relations. The Holy Ghost is the older English name for the Holy Spirit. With that in place, look at the shape of the exchange. Mary asks a question about sex. The angel answers with the Spirit’s presence and the power of God. The answer does not put God where a husband would be.
Peeler adds a piece of Jewish background that sharpens this. Jews believed every child came from a mother and a father, and also that God was at work in every pregnancy, opening the womb and bringing the child safely to birth. “So they saw God involved in every pregnancy in that kind of providential directive providing way.” Read against that background, Mary’s conception is not God taking Joseph’s role. God is present as God always is at a birth, and in this one case there is no human father.
A third mistake often hides here, and Lisa Fields raised it honestly in the conversation: does Jesus’s blood come from the Father? Peeler explains that the most prominent ancient theory held that the woman supplied the material and the man supplied the life of the child. If you carry that assumption, you will slot God into the man’s part without noticing. Peeler is careful about how much anyone can know of the mechanism, but she is firm on one point: “But all that we do know is that Jesus’s humanity is Mary’s.” Paul says the same in Galatians 4:4: “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law.” His body, blood and flesh came from her. The Holy Spirit enabled her body to do what it could not do alone.
Lisa Fields offered a comparison that helps the whole step land. God formed Adam from the dust and Eve from Adam, and no reader imagines anything sexual in those accounts. The conception of Jesus is also a creative act of God, and it belongs with those accounts rather than with the myths of gods and women. Luke also shows Mary answering in her own voice before the angel leaves (Luke 1:38), which is why Peeler can say, “Mary was given agency to decide.”
Practice: build the explanation, then test it
This is the heart of the guide. Give it at least 20 minutes.
- Write three sentences, one for each step, in order. Each sentence must name one verse from this guide. Keep each sentence under 25 words.
- Read them aloud. Check the order: does sentence two depend on sentence one, and does sentence three depend on both? If you could shuffle them without losing anything, the steps are not yet connected. Revise until they are.
- Test your three sentences against each objection below. For each one, decide which step answers it, and say the answer in two sentences of your own.
- Jesus called God Father, and Jesus was a man, so God must be male.
- Your faith says God got a teenager pregnant.
- If Father is not about sex, the word should not matter, so why keep it?
In a group, do the third part in pairs. One person reads an objection as a real questioner would. The other answers using only the three sentences and the verses. Then switch. Afterward, each pair names the objection that was hardest and which step it pressed on.
Pay attention to tone as well as content. Peeler describes the posture she hopes believers can take with a skeptical friend or colleague: “yeah, that’s not a crazy question. I hear you. Here’s how I’ve thought about it.”
Lisa Fields gave the reason this preparation matters, especially for college students who hear these challenges in class: “we need to present them and even know them so we won’t dismiss them because they’re actually grappling with this.”
Discussion questions
- In John 4, Jesus moves from God’s nature to the question of where to worship. What else in your own faith might change if you took God being spirit as seriously as that conversation does?
- Which of the three steps did you find hardest to put into one sentence? What made it hard?
- The comparison with a teacher helped in one respect and failed in another. Where else have you seen a helpful image of God become misleading when pushed too far?
- Peeler keeps Father language because it points to the Son and to Mary. Some faithful Christians limit masculine pronouns for God. What would you want to understand about the other practice before forming a view of your own?
- Mary’s question in Luke 1:34 is about sex, and the answer in 1:35 is about the Spirit. How does seeing that exchange change the way you would answer the blunt objection in the practice?
- Look again at the sentence you wrote before you began. What in it would you now keep, and what would you change? What would it take to change the picture as well as the sentence?
If you are leading a group
Do the three steps briskly so the practice gets its full time; the learning happens when people try to say it themselves. The second objection in the practice is blunt on purpose, because it is how the question actually arrives. Peeler herself noted that this is not a conversation for a Sunday morning with young children present, so choose the setting accordingly. Some participants may find the word Father difficult for personal reasons. Do not ask anyone to explain why, and let people pass on any question. The goal of the session is a clear explanation, not a group verdict on how each person uses pronouns in prayer.
To carry with you
Keep your three sentences somewhere you will see them this week, and try them once on someone who asks. The order is the point. God is spirit. Father names a relationship. And in the one event where God’s relationship to a woman’s body is in view, God acts as Creator, not as a man. Peeler states where that leaves us: “God is spirit and is creator distinct from us, and yet graciously has chosen to be involved with us when that’s not necessary.”