My Testimony: The Fruit of Knowing God as Father and Mother

I have spent this section making a biblical case that God is not only our Father, but that the Holy Spirit is also our divine Mother.

I do not believe a doctrine becomes true because I like its consequences.

If Scripture does not support this understanding of God, then the positive fruit I describe below cannot make it true.

But Jesus tells us that fruit matters:

“You will know them by their fruits.” — Matthew 7:16

And Paul describes the fruit of the Spirit as:

“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control.” — Galatians 5:22–23

Once a biblical argument has been made, I therefore think it is reasonable to ask another question:

What kind of fruit grows from this understanding of God?

For me, the answer has been profound.

The Fruit in My Own Life

I grew up Christian.

I knew Genesis says that both male and female were created in God's image.

I did not believe God was biologically male.

But practically, every personal divine identity I knew was masculine.

God was Father.

God was He.

Jesus was the Son.

Jesus was He.

Jesus was also God.

The Father and Son were divine persons.

The Holy Spirit was technically a divine person too, but the Spirit was far less concrete to me.

I did not understand who the Spirit was.

I did not really know how to relate to the Spirit.

And, if I am being candid, I did not have much desire to know the Spirit personally.

The Spirit seemed mysterious and confusing.

So although Christianity taught me that God transcends human sex, the God I was taught about was overwhelmingly masculine.

At First, I Resisted the Divine Feminine

When I first encountered evidence that some early Christians spoke of the Holy Spirit in feminine and even maternal terms, my instinct was resistance.

Jewish-Christian and Syriac Christian sources preserve striking examples. The Gospel according to the Hebrews, for example, said that Jesus said, “my Mother, the Holy Spirit,” and feminine and maternal language for the Spirit continued within parts of Syriac Christianity (van Oort).

Then I began seeing biblical evidence that seemed to point in the same direction.

And something strange happened.

Even while the evidence increasingly seemed convincing to me, part of me still thought:

This sounds weird.

This feels wrong.

God as Mother?

Eventually I had to ask myself:

Why?

Why should divine femininity feel inherently stranger to me than divine masculinity?

Why should Father immediately sound holy, biblical, and natural while Mother sounded suspicious?

Why, as a woman made in God's image, had I learned to experience femininity within God as foreign?

One pastor I spoke with told me:

“You should not read God back into your own nature.”

I understand the thinking behind that statement.

Human beings should not manufacture God in our own image.

But that was not what I was trying to do.

I was asking whether God had revealed this about God in Scripture.

And the possibility was immediately dismissed.

That interaction now makes me deeply sad.

Because after years of study, I believe the divine feminine was not something I was trying to invent.

I think I had learned to read Scripture through a framework that made this difficult for me to see.

And even now, when I talk with Christians about the possibility that the Holy Spirit is our divine Mother, I sometimes encounter the reaction I once had myself:

It sounds strange.

It sounds off.

Sometimes it can even sound cultish.

But I now find myself asking the opposite question:

What if divine Motherhood is not the strange idea?

What if the strange thing is that Christianity became so accustomed to understanding personal divinity overwhelmingly through masculinity that femininity within God now sounds un-Christian?

I Feel More Affirmed as a Woman

Discovering the feminine within God has affected me more deeply than I expected.

I feel more affirmed as a woman than I ever remember feeling before.

Genesis 1:27 has become more beautiful to me:

“God created man in his own image. In God's image he created him; male and female he created them.”

I always believed women were made in God's image.

But something is different when I understand male and female not merely as two kinds of creatures who somehow equally reflect a predominantly masculine God, but as two dimensions of humanity reflecting something genuinely revealed within God.

Father.

Mother.

Male and female.

I feel represented.

I feel that femininity is not secondary to ultimate reality.

It is not merely something God happened to create.

Femininity reflects God.

That has been extraordinarily empowering to me.

I Want to Know the Holy Spirit

Perhaps the most important fruit has been my relationship with the Holy Spirit.

Before, I did not understand Her.

I knew the Spirit was important.

I knew Christians were supposed to be led by the Spirit.

I knew the Spirit inspired Scripture, gives gifts, sanctifies believers, and dwells within Christians.

But I did not really understand who the Spirit was.

The Spirit often felt like the least comprehensible member of the Trinity.

Now I find myself in awe of Her.

I want to know Her.

I want to honor Her.

I want to worship the Holy Spirit.

Passages about being born of the Spirit, taught by the Spirit, comforted by the Spirit, led by the Spirit, and transformed by the Spirit have become intensely personal.

What once seemed vague has become relational.

The possibility that the One who gives me spiritual birth is truly my Mother makes John 3 feel radically different:

“Unless one is born of water and spirit, he can't enter into God's Kingdom. That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” — John 3:5–6

The Spirit is not merely divine power operating somewhere behind the Christian life.

She is someone I want to know.

So, understanding the Spirit as Mother has helped me desire and want to know God in a deeper way.

I Am More in Awe of God

This understanding has not made God smaller.

It has made God more beautiful to me.

I understand God's unity differently than I did before.

Father and Spirit are personally distinct, yet completely united in divine life, love, creation, purpose, and action.

And within that unity I now see something beautiful:

difference without inequality.

Father and Mother.

Masculine and feminine.

Distinct without one needing to be more divine than the other.

Different roles may exist.

Different ways of relating may exist.

But neither masculinity nor femininity needs to stand above the other.

Both belong within God's own life.

That makes the creation of humanity as male and female seem less arbitrary.

Humanity reflects God.

The diversity within humanity reflects something of the richness within the One who created us.

And I find that beautiful.

Knowing God Is Eternal Life

Jesus says something extraordinary:

“This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and him whom you sent, Jesus Christ.” — John 17:3

Knowing God is not a peripheral issue within Christianity.

Jesus describes knowing God as eternal life itself.

That means that discovering something true about who God is matters enormously.

If the Holy Spirit really is our divine Mother, then recovering that truth is not merely an interesting correction to Christian terminology.

It means knowing God more fully.

It means knowing someone Christians may have spoken about constantly while still understanding Her incompletely.

For me, that has been exactly the experience.

I feel that I understand God better than I did before.

The Trinity often left me confused about who exactly I was relating to and how the persons related to one another.

Understanding God as Father and Spirit—Father and Mother—with Jesus as God's human Son has made the relationships much clearer to me.

My increased clarity does not prove that theology true.

But if the biblical case developed throughout this section is correct, then clarity is an important fruit of recovering what Scripture has been saying all along.

God-Language Is Not Socially Neutral

The effects extend beyond my individual experience.

There is empirical evidence that the way people imagine God can influence how they understand human beings and human authority.

Andrew Whitehead examined data from a national random survey and found that viewing God in masculine terms was robustly associated with more traditional gender ideology (Whitehead 139–56).

Simon Howard, Debra Oswald, and Mackenzie Kirkman went further. Across three studies, participants with male concepts of God showed greater gender-system justification and greater hostile or benevolent sexism. Most significantly, when researchers experimentally primed people to think about God as male rather than female, participants became more supportive of the existing gender status quo (Howard, Oswald, and Kirkman 216–30).

Another seven-study research program examined the social identities people attribute to God and ideas about leadership. Among U.S. Christians, conceptualizing God as a white man predicted seeing white men as particularly suited for leadership even after researchers controlled for several other attitudes. Experiments using invented groups and an invented deity likewise found that people tended to identify members who shared the deity's social identity as more naturally leadership-worthy (Roberts et al. 1290–1315).

None of these studies proves my theology.

They certainly do not prove that calling God Father is harmful.

I believe God is our Father.

Nor do they prove that masculine God-language caused the historical subordination of women.

History has many causes.

But they demonstrate something important:

Our image of divine authority can affect our image of human authority.

God-language is not necessarily socially neutral.

Christian History Makes That Question Important

For most of the history of European universities and academies, formal intellectual institutions were overwhelmingly male. A recent large historical study identified only 108 women who taught at universities or belonged to scholarly academies in its database of tens of thousands of European scholars before 1800. The researchers conclude that very few women had opportunities to teach in universities or participate in the intellectual life of academies during this period (de la Croix and Vitale 506–32).

This does not mean Christian women were simply uneducated or powerless.

Women studied in convents and homes.

Women wrote.

Women taught.

Women became mystics, abbesses, missionaries, theologians, patrons, founders, and spiritual leaders.

But the formal structures that produced professional Christian theology were overwhelmingly populated by men.

And some highly influential theologians incorporated assumptions about women's lesser rational capacity into their explanations of male authority.

Thomas Aquinas famously wrote:

“Woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates.” (Summa Theologiae I, q. 92, art. 1).

Again, Aquinas's thought about women was considerably more nuanced than simply claiming women lacked reason, dignity, or spiritual worth.

But the reasoning still matters.

I cannot prove the counterfactual:

If Christians had always understood God as Father and Mother, women would have been treated equally.

History cannot tell us what would have happened in a world that did not exist.

But neither should we confidently assume theology had no relationship to Christian social understanding.

Generation after generation could see:

God the Father.

God the Son.

Masculine language surrounding personal divinity.

Male priests.

Male bishops.

Male theologians.

Male university scholars.

Male ecclesiastical authority.

At minimum, modern research gives us reason to take seriously the possibility that overwhelmingly masculine representation of divine authority could reinforce an already male-dominated social and ecclesiastical world (Howard, Oswald, and Kirkman 216–30; Roberts et al. 1290–1315).

If Scripture actually reveals Father and Mother, then recovering that balance matters.

The Divine Feminine Changes the Meaning of the Image of God

Traditional Christianity already affirms something extremely important:

Men and women possess equal dignity because both are made in God's image.

I do not want to pretend my theology invented Christian belief in women's equality.

It did not.

Many Christians who understand God predominantly through masculine personal language passionately affirm women's equal value and oppose their mistreatment.

That is good fruit, and it should be acknowledged.

But I believe Father-and-Mother theology gives Genesis 1:27 an additional coherence.

Traditional Christianity says:

Male and female equally reflect God, even though God is personally represented overwhelmingly through masculine language.

My reconstruction says:

Male and female equally reflect God, and both masculinity and femininity are personally reflected within God's self-revelation.

Those are not identical ideas.

If Father and Spirit are truly divine Father and Mother, then the equality of men and women is not merely a conclusion Christians must maintain alongside overwhelmingly masculine God-language.

It is visibly reflected within the divine life itself.

Masculinity does not stand closer to God than femininity.

Neither sex possesses a greater resemblance to divine personhood.

Men do not have a uniquely natural claim to representing God simply because God is imagined personally as male.

Both men and women see something of themselves reflected in the God who made them.

I think that is extraordinarily powerful.

The Holy Spirit Comes Into Focus

There is another advantage.

Traditional Christianity unequivocally teaches that the Holy Spirit is fully divine.

Nicene Christianity does not officially consider the Spirit less important than Father or Son.

Nevertheless, in ordinary Christian life, the Spirit can sometimes become the least clearly understood divine person.

Father is easy to conceptualize.

Jesus has an earthly story, face, body, teachings, death, and resurrection.

The Spirit can become harder to picture.

Recovering the Spirit as Mother gives Her identity an extraordinary relational coherence.

Christians are:

born of the Spirit (John 3:5–6).

The Spirit teaches.

The Spirit comforts.

The Spirit nurtures Christian life.

The Spirit dwells within God's children.

The Spirit gives life.

The Spirit forms Christ within believers.

These themes do not prove motherhood individually.

But once the larger biblical argument for the Spirit as Mother has been made, they begin fitting together into a deeply relational portrait.

For me, that has brought the Spirit out of theological abstraction and into personal relationship.

Scripture Itself Opens Up

My understanding of Scripture has also changed.

Lady Wisdom becomes more significant.

Proverbs repeatedly depicts Wisdom as a woman who calls, teaches, gives life, guides, and stands near God.

Wisdom of Solomon portrays Wisdom in extraordinary intimacy with God and describes Her as participating in God's works.

Sirach similarly portrays Wisdom maternally.

Traditional interpreters have often understood such passages as poetic personification, and historically many Christians connected divine Wisdom particularly with Christ.

Those interpretations deserve serious consideration.

But if the Holy Spirit is Wisdom, another possibility opens.

What looks like a collection of scattered feminine images begins to form a pattern.

Genesis.

Wisdom.

Birth by the Spirit.

Maternal divine imagery.

The Spirit's life-giving and teaching work.

Early Christian references to the Spirit as feminine and Mother.

Some early Christian traditions—especially Jewish-Christian and Syriac ones—did in fact speak about the Spirit this way (van Oort).

Again, historical precedent cannot establish doctrine.

But the reconstruction allows passages that previously seemed disconnected to illuminate one another.

That is another kind of fruit:

greater biblical coherence.

A Comparison of the Two Frameworks

The traditional Christian framework has produced enormous good.

It has taught billions of Christians that God is the loving Father.

It has affirmed the full divinity of the Holy Spirit.

It has taught that men and women are equally created in God's image.

It has produced extraordinary women saints, missionaries, theologians, scholars, caregivers, reformers, and Christian leaders.

Any comparison that denies that good fruit would be unfair.

The question is therefore not:

Has traditional Christianity produced good fruit?

Obviously it has.

The more useful question is:

If the biblical case made throughout this section is correct, which framework more fully expresses what Scripture reveals about God and humanity?

Fruit / Biblical Criterion	Predominantly Masculine Traditional Framework	God as Father and Mother
God as loving Father	Strongly affirmed	Fully preserved
Divinity of the Holy Spirit	Strongly affirmed	Fully preserved
Men and women made in God's image	Strongly affirmed	Strongly affirmed and personally reflected through Father and Mother
Equal human dignity	Strongly affirmable and increasingly emphasized	Strongly affirmed and reinforced through equal masculine and feminine representation within God
Masculine representation of God	Personal divine language remains overwhelmingly masculine	Masculine and feminine divine representation coexist
Women's resemblance to divine personhood	Women equally bear God's image, though personal divine identities are represented predominantly through masculinity	Women see femininity itself personally represented within God
Relationship with the Holy Spirit	Spirit is fully divine, though Her personal identity can remain difficult for Christians to conceptualize	Motherhood gives the Spirit a concrete relational identity connected with birth, life, teaching, comfort, and nurture
Fatherhood and motherhood	Fatherhood is personally divine; motherhood appears primarily through metaphor or created analogy	Both Fatherhood and Motherhood belong personally within divine self-revelation
Gender and divine authority	Equal dignity can coexist with predominantly masculine divine authority	Divine authority itself is represented through both masculine and feminine personhood
Genesis 1:27	Male and female equally image a God described personally mainly in masculine terms	Male and female image divine Fatherhood and Motherhood together
Wisdom traditions	Usually understood as personification and/or associated with Christ	Can be integrated into the identity and work of the feminine Spirit
Early feminine Spirit traditions	Historically interesting but usually peripheral to doctrine	Become potentially important witnesses to an ancient interpretation
Understanding the Spirit	Spirit's full deity is doctrinally affirmed, but Her identity can remain less intuitively clear	Spirit is understood relationally as Mother while remaining fully divine
Difference and equality	Father, Son, and Spirit are equally divine despite personal distinctions	Father and Mother model equality across masculine and feminine distinction within divine life
Beauty of male and female creation	Both sexes equally created and loved by God	Male and female visibly reflect a masculine-feminine fullness within God's own self-revelation

The table does not prove that my framework is correct.

Several traditional-theology cells contain genuinely excellent fruit.

That matters.

I am not choosing between a completely good system and a completely bad one.

I am asking whether something true and beautiful within Christianity has nevertheless remained incomplete.

Does This Understanding Produce Better Fruit?

For me, it does.

It preserves everything I treasured about God as Father.

I have not lost my Father.

I have gained a Mother.

It preserves the divinity of the Spirit.

But the Spirit has become more personal to me.

It preserves the belief that men and women equally bear God's image.

But now I understand why that may be profoundly fitting.

It preserves divine unity.

But divine unity now contains a masculine-feminine equality that makes the creation of male and female more intelligible to me.

It preserves Christian reverence for Scripture.

But passages about Wisdom, motherhood, spiritual birth, and the feminine Spirit become more interconnected.

It preserves worship of God.

But my worship has expanded.

I find myself wanting to honor the Spirit in a way I never did before.

And it has increased my awe.

Not only at womanhood.

Not only at the Holy Spirit.

At God.

Father and Mother creating humanity together.

Male and female reflecting God together.

Difference existing without inequality.

Love existing within unity.

Humanity arising from that love.

I find that picture extraordinarily beautiful.

Could This Matter Beyond Theology?

There is reason to think it could.

Research already suggests that gendered God-concepts can influence gender attitudes and perceptions of leadership (Whitehead 139–56; Howard, Oswald, and Kirkman 216–30; Roberts et al. 1290–1315).

And the way Christian institutions treat women can matter to the way people experience Christianity. Pew Research Center found that dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church's treatment of women contributed to the departure of substantial minorities of former Catholics, including nearly four in ten who became religiously unaffiliated and 31 percent who became mainline Protestant (Pew Research Center).

That does not mean:

Teach God as Mother and people will suddenly become Christian.

The research does not demonstrate that.

But it does demonstrate that these questions are not irrelevant to human experience.

Christian theology teaches people what ultimate reality looks like.

If ultimate reality is represented almost entirely through masculinity, that matters.

If Scripture instead reveals both Father and Mother, that matters too.

A Word about Error, Responsibility, and Grace

Many Christians have inherited a predominantly masculine understanding of God without ever being presented with serious evidence for the Spirit as Mother. I do not believe every Christian  who has failed to see the divine feminine has sinned in any way. I include myself in this category as I simply did not think divine femininity was a biblical option. I think God cares far more how a person treats both men and women (with love and equal dignity) then whether someone recognizes God is revealed in Scripture (and creation) in both masculine and feminine ways to the degree I argue on this blog.

But neither do I think the issue is morally insignificant. If Scripture really reveals the Spirit as our Mother, then losing that truth has affected how Christians understand God, women, divine authority, and even the image of God. At some point, especially for those entrusted with teaching and leadership, inherited assumptions should be examined rather than simply repeated, especially given the broad biblical witness for the divine feminine.

I therefore think there is room here for both grace and repentance: grace toward Christians who sincerely inherited an incomplete picture of God, and repentance wherever bias, indifference, or unwillingness to reconsider has helped keep that picture incomplete.

The Fruit Does Not Establish the Doctrine

I want to end where I began.

My experience does not prove the Holy Spirit is Mother.

Psychological studies do not prove it.

The oppression of women in Christian history does not prove it.

The attractiveness or beauty of the theology does not prove it.

Scripture must establish the doctrine.

That is why the biblical argument throughout this section comes first.

But once that case has been made, I do not believe Christians need to pretend the fruit is irrelevant.

Jesus told us to pay attention to fruit.

And when I compare the two frameworks, I find something remarkable.

I do not believe knowing God as Father and Mother requires me to surrender the good fruit of Christianity's traditional understanding of God.

I still have a heavenly Father.

I still believe God transcends human bodily sex.

I still believe men and women possess equal dignity.

I still believe the Spirit is fully divine.

I still believe God is one.

But I gain something too.

I gain a divine Mother.

I gain a clearer understanding of the Spirit.

I gain a more symmetrical understanding of the image of God.

I gain a theological reason to see masculinity and femininity standing alongside one another without either being intrinsically closer to divine authority.

I gain new connections throughout Scripture.

And personally, I have gained a deeper desire to know God.

That final fruit matters most to me.

Jesus said:

“This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and him whom you sent, Jesus Christ.” — John 17:3

If the biblical argument of this section is correct, then discovering the Spirit as Mother means discovering more of who God actually is.

And knowing God more truly is not a peripheral theological achievement.

According to Jesus:

it is eternal life.

For me, knowing God as Father and Mother has produced love.

Joy.

Wonder.

Greater dignity.

Greater clarity.

A deeper relationship with the Spirit.

And a greater desire to know God.

That is very good fruit.

Works Cited

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. I, q. 92, art. 1. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Benziger Bros., 1947. New Advent, www.newadvent.org/summa/1092.htm. Accessed 6 Sept. 2026.

de la Croix, David, and Mara Vitale. “Women in European Academia before 1800—Religion, Marriage, and Human Capital.” European Review of Economic History, vol. 27, no. 4, 2023, pp. 506–532. https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/heac023.

Howard, Simon, Debra L. Oswald, and Mackenzie Kirkman. “The Relationship between God's Gender, Gender System Justification and Sexism.” The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, vol. 30, no. 3, 2020, pp. 216–230. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2020.1737420.

Pew Research Center. “Leaving Catholicism.” Faith in Flux, 27 Apr. 2009, www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/04/27/faith-in-flux3/. Accessed 6 Sept. 2026.

Roberts, Steven O., Kara Weisman, Jonathan D. Lane, Amber Williams, Nicholas P. Camp, Michelle Wang, and Mishaela Robison. “God as a White Man: A Psychological Barrier to Conceptualizing Black People and Women as Leadership Worthy.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 119, no. 6, 2020, pp. 1290–1315. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000233.

van Oort, Johannes. “The Holy Spirit as Feminine: Early Christian Testimonies and Their Interpretation.” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, vol. 72, no. 1, 2016, article a3225. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v72i1.3225.

Whitehead, Andrew L. “Gender Ideology and Religion: Does a Masculine Image of God Matter?” Review of Religious Research, vol. 54, no. 2, 2012, pp. 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-012-0056-3.