God is neither male nor female. Jesus told the Samaritan woman that God is spirit, and Christian theology has always held that the Creator has no body to be sexed. Calling God Father names a relationship, not an anatomy. The strongest evidence comes from the place most likely to make God look male: the conception of Jesus. Read closely, that narrative shows a God who asks a young woman for her answer, does not act on her sexually, and brings a child from her flesh alone.
Dr. Amy Peeler, who teaches New Testament at Wheaton College, built much of her work around that last point. Her reasoning is simple. If God were secretly male in our imagination, a pregnancy is where it would show. So she went looking there. In her words, the question was this: “And how does God reveal the divine nature to be not male in this very event?”
What kind of word is Father?
Start with what Scripture says plainly. In John 4:24, Jesus says, “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” The verse is a direct statement about God’s nature, made in conversation, not a poetic image. It rules out the idea that God has a body of the kind men and women have.
The same verse also uses “him.” Peeler points out that she does this herself. English, like many languages, forces a pronoun whenever we speak of a person, and God is personal. The words Father, Lord and he then do quiet work in the mind. She does not think this means believers are careless or stubborn. It is how language behaves, and it is why Jewish and Christian theology have had to guard against imagining God as one of us.
So the question is not whether the Bible calls God Father. It does. The question is what kind of claim that word makes. Peeler’s answer: “That’s because God has invited us into the family and God provides for us. But that does not mean that God is male. God is God. God is creator, not a creature.” Lisa Fields drew the practical conclusion: nothing is wrong with saying “him,” as long as the pronoun does not shrink our idea of who God is.
Why does Scripture keep the masculine language?
A fair reader will push back here. If God is not male, why does the Bible so consistently use masculine names, titles and pronouns? And why did the Son become a man rather than a woman? Those are not small objections.
Peeler’s answer to the first is that God has allowed people to speak of him personally, and personal speech needs personal words. An impersonal “it” would protect God from gender only by erasing the relationship Scripture describes. That is why she does not want to lose Father language, even while using masculine pronouns sparingly. The Bible’s masculine terms tell us God relates to us as a person who adopts, provides and protects. They do not tell us God has a sex, any more than calling God a rock tells us he is mineral. Scripture also uses maternal imagery for God’s care, as in Isaiah 66:13, where God compares his comfort to a mother comforting her child. Neither set of images is a description of God’s body.
The second objection is answered by the incarnation itself. Jesus’s maleness is a fact about the human nature the Son took on, not about the divine nature he shares with the Father and the Spirit. Peeler stresses that this embodiment was new: “God is not embodied, and therefore God can’t be sexed or gendered.” Before Bethlehem, God had no body at all. Jesus being male tells us the Son truly became a particular human being. It does not reveal that the Father was male all along. Or, as Peeler put it more bluntly, “God is not a big human”.
What Luke actually narrates
The conception of Jesus appears only in Matthew and Luke. Peeler observes that without those two Gospels we would have no shepherds, no angels, no wise men, and perhaps no Christmas. Two evangelists chose to include this story, and that choice matters.
Luke’s account in Luke 1:26-38 is a short narrative scene. It describes what happened rather than giving a command, and several details stand out.
First, God approaches Mary through a messenger. The angel speaks to her. He does not act upon her.
Second, Mary is allowed to question. Luke 1:34 records her words: “Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” Her objection is about sexual relations. She has had none, so how could she conceive? The angel does not dismiss the question. He answers it.
Third, the answer itself. Luke 1:35 reads: “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.” The vocabulary is coming upon and overshadowing, words of presence and power. Luke uses the same overshadowing language when a cloud covers Jesus and the disciples at the transfiguration (Luke 9:34). Mary asks about sexual relations, and the angel answers with a description of the Spirit’s presence, not a union of bodies.
Fourth, Mary responds. Luke 1:38: “And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.” Only after her answer does the angel leave.
Matthew tells the story from Joseph’s side and agrees on the key point. Matthew 1:20 tells Joseph, “for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.” Neither Gospel explains how. Both leave the mechanism a mystery, and both leave out any sexual act. That is not an incidental omission. A virgin conception and a non-sexual conception are the same claim; the story cannot hold together any other way.
Why the story was a risk to tell
Peeler reads the narrative against the stories its first Gentile readers already knew. The Greek and Roman gods she names, such as Zeus and Apollo, appear in well-known tales of gods forcing themselves on women or deceiving them, with a pregnancy as the result. Her inference is that Luke, writing with Gentile readers in view, would have expected some to hear Mary’s story through that lens. She frames this as what she has to imagine about Luke, not as something Luke says. Her conclusion: “So for Luke and Matthew to tell this story is risky.”
She adds that critics in the second generation of Christianity mocked the virgin birth and hinted that something worse must have happened. That is her summary of the historical record, not something the Gospels themselves report, and readers who want to weigh it would need to look at those ancient critics directly.
The modern version of the suspicion is blunt. Peeler recalls hearing it from a non-Christian: “I remember one gentleman saying, wait, the story of your faith is that God impregnated a 14-year-old”. It is a common question in secular religion courses, and it deserves an answer from the text rather than a dismissal.
Is the text really describing consent?
Peeler’s reading is direct: “Mary was given agency to decide.” And she continues: “God respected her. God invited her. She wanted to accept this, and then the mystery of her conception was not sexualized. That’s good news.”
The strongest objection deserves its full weight. Consent between unequal parties is complicated. Mary is a young woman addressed by an angel on behalf of the Most High. Did she truly have room to say no? Her reply calls herself a handmaid, a servant. Some readers hear that word as submission under pressure rather than free agreement.
Luke does not use modern language of consent, and the scene is not written as a negotiation. A reader cannot claim the passage proves everything our word consent now carries. But it does show several things the pagan tales lack. Mary is addressed before anything happens. She asks a real question and receives a real answer. Her reply is recorded as her own speech, and the narrative moves only after it.
Luke also treats her answer as faith, not mere compliance. When Mary visits Elizabeth, Elizabeth says in Luke 1:45, “And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.” Mary is honored for believing. That only makes sense if her yes was genuinely hers.
The defensible reading, then, is modest but real. The Gospels do not prove they were written as a point-by-point rebuttal of the myths. They do present Mary as a participant who is spoken to, who reasons, and who answers in faith. Placed beside the stories Luke’s readers knew, that difference is hard to miss.
Where God stands in the conception
Peeler adds a second background. The Gospel writers worked within a Jewish world, and Jews believed every child came from a mother and a father while God was present in every birth. God opens the womb. God brings a dangerous pregnancy safely to term. God is involved in every conception, not as a parent’s partner but as Creator and provider.
That changes how Mary’s conception reads. Peeler explains: “So it’s not like God replaces the Father. God is always present and just chooses in this instance, to remove the Father.” God does not step into the role Joseph would have played. God, present at every birth, chooses that this one will have no human father.
Creation offers a useful comparison. God formed Adam from the dust and Eve from Adam’s side, and no reader imagines sexual activity in Genesis 2. As Peeler notes, Adam and Eve are fully human without coming into being through the normal process. The conception of Jesus is sexualized in the popular imagination mainly because people picture God as a man before they read the text.
Why Jesus’s body had to come from Mary
If God is not male, someone might ask whether God simply created a body for Jesus from nothing and placed it in Mary. Peeler says early Christian theologians raised exactly that and rejected it. Their reasoning was about salvation: “if Jesus was this freshly created human, then he really couldn’t redeem us. He would have no connection to humanity, which had become under the power of sin and death.”
Paul says Jesus was “made of a woman” in Galatians 4:4. The church held that Jesus’s flesh and blood truly came from Mary, and that the Holy Spirit worked in her body to do what was otherwise impossible. Peeler is careful about the limits here. Ancient people held competing theories of conception, and theologians have speculated about the biology, but she says we cannot fully know. What can be said is that Jesus’s humanity is Mary’s, and that he is a full human male: “Jesus is male. There’s no questions about that.”
This is where the virgin birth becomes evidence about God rather than only about Jesus. At the one moment when God’s relationship to a woman’s body is most directly in view, God supplies nothing a human father would supply. The child’s entire humanity comes from Mary. The divine side of the event is described only as the Spirit’s presence and power.
What this means for women reading the story
Some women wonder whether they can fully identify with a male Savior. Peeler found that the virgin birth answers the question in an unexpected way. Because Mary alone supplied Jesus’s humanity, there is a real inclusion of female flesh in the body of Christ. Christianity concerns bodies as well as souls, she notes, since God created our bodies and will raise them. A male Savior whose body comes from a woman alone affirms both men and women in his very person.
Peeler also proposes a pattern linking Genesis and the Gospels. Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” When Eve is formed from Adam, the movement is male to female; when Jesus is formed from Mary, it is female to male. She notes that the word the KJV renders “rib” is better understood as side, so Eve is drawn from a substantial part of Adam. This is a typological reading and should be held as interpretation rather than certainty. The argument about God’s nature does not depend on it.
It does depend on Mary. Peeler stresses that God used not only her body but her whole self, by her free choice, and placed her at the center of the Christian story as Jesus’s mother. A God who honored a woman this way cannot coherently be read as preferring men.
Keeping the name Father
None of this asks Christians to stop calling God Father. Peeler respects believers who limit masculine pronouns, but she keeps Father language for a reason drawn from this same narrative. When she hears that God is Father, she knows who God’s Son is and how he came into the world: through Mary. The whole story is folded into that one word. “So I use that with joy, not embarrassment.”
That is the deepest reason the virgin birth matters to this question. Every prayer addressed to the Father implies the Son, and the Son entered the world through a young woman who was spoken to, who asked her question, and who answered for herself. A Christian who calls God Father, read through Luke 1, is naming a God who acted toward Mary the way none of the old gods acted toward the women in their stories.