Is God a Man? Why God Is Not Male, Yet Called Father

Is God a man? In His own nature, no: God is spirit, without a body and without sex, so He is neither male nor female. Scripture still calls Him Father and speaks of Him as He, because those names describe a relation that is true of God first and of human fathers second. And in Jesus Christ the eternal Son became a man, one Person who is truly God and truly human, so the Christian answer has two halves, one about God's own nature and one about the Son made flesh, and they stand together.

Key takeaways

• God has no body and no sex. Scripture forbids any image of God "formed like a man or a woman," and the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that God "is neither man nor woman: he is God."
• "Father" is a proper name of God and makes no claim about sex. Gregory of Nazianzus called it "the name of the Relation," and Aquinas taught that it is said of God before creatures.
• Numbers 23:19 is about truthfulness. "God is not a man, that he should lie" sets God's faithfulness against human fickleness.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) keeps both halves of the answer. Where Latter-day Saint teaching gives the Father a body and revisionist theology trades "Father" for "Mother," it holds the divine nature free of sex and the Son's humanity fully male, in one Person.

Is God a man? What people are really asking

People who type "is God a man?" are usually asking three questions at once. The first is about the body: is God male or female, and does He have a body at all? The second is about language: why does the Bible call God Father, King and Lord, and why do Christians speak of God as "He"? The third is about Jesus: if Jesus is God, and Jesus was a man, then in some sense is God a man after all?

The three need separate answers, and the stakes are practical. Christians pray "Our Father in heaven" (Matthew 6:9, NIV) as Jesus taught them, and they ought to know what they mean by it. Scripture also sets a limit on any answer in its first chapter:

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." (Genesis 1:27, NIV)

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If God were male, the man would seem to bear His image more fully than the woman, and the verse forbids that reading. Scripture also speaks of God's hand, His arm and His face, and of the Lord God "walking in the garden in the cool of the day" (Genesis 3:8, NIV), and that bodily language needs an account.

Three terms need defining. Sex is a bodily quality of living creatures that reproduce. Grammatical gender is a feature of words. A word said by analogy is true of two things in related but unequal ways, as "bright" is said of the sun and of a student.

That God has no body is the subject of its own article, is God a spirit?, so here we take one line from Aquinas as settled: "It is absolutely true that God is not a body." Incorporeality is one of the classical attributes of God.

Volume One of the series sets out the method behind these distinctions, and you can read it free.

What does "God is not a man" mean in Numbers 23:19?

Most searchers land on Balaam's second oracle, and its point is God's truthfulness, not His sex. Balaam spoke it before the king of Moab, who had hired him to curse Israel:

"God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?" (Numbers 23:19, NIV)

The next verse gives the point: "I have received a command to bless; he has blessed, and I cannot change it" (Numbers 23:20, NIV). God does not retract His word as a hired man might. The Hebrew words, 'ish and ben-'adam, mean human beings as such, which is why the 2011 NIV reads "God is not human, that he should lie." The contrast is between God's reliability and ours, and Samuel draws it again over Saul: "He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind" (1 Samuel 15:29, NIV). The relenting passages belong to does God change His mind?

Hosea makes the contrast a ground of mercy. After describing God as a parent who "taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms" (Hosea 11:3, NIV), the Lord refuses to destroy His people: "For I am God, and not man, the Holy One among you" (Hosea 11:9, NIV).

One passage does speak to sex directly, and it rules out both answers:

"You saw no form of any kind the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully, so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman." (Deuteronomy 4:15-16, NIV)

The series reads every verse it cites in its context before building on it.

Is God male? The strongest case for saying yes

The case for a male God comes from two opposite directions.

The first is the text. The language of Scripture for God is masculine almost without exception. He is Father, King, Lord, Husband and Shepherd, and the pronouns are masculine. Pastor David Guzik of Enduring Word counts "thousands of Bible references to God in a masculine sense." Scripture compares God's care to a mother's, but it does not address Him as Mother. When the Son became incarnate, He became a man and not a woman. A reader who takes the Bible's words at face value seems driven toward the conclusion that God is, in some real sense, male.

The most consistent version of that reading belongs to Latter-day Saint teaching, which accepts the conclusion outright. Its scripture states that "The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's" (Doctrine and Covenants 130:22). On this view God's walking in the garden is a walk, Genesis 1:27's image includes the body, and the Incarnation is the Son taking a form like the Father's own.

The second direction is the critic's, and it accepts the same premise in order to reject the tradition. In 1973 the feminist theologian Mary Daly put it in one sentence: "If God is male then the male is God." If the masculine names are literal, maleness stands nearer to God than femaleness, and Genesis 1:27 is overturned.

Put together, these make a dilemma. If "Father" is literal, God is male, which the Bible's own denials forbid. If "Father" is only a metaphor, it is one picture among many, beside the mother who comforts her child (Isaiah 66:13) and the hen who "gathers her chicks under her wings" (Matthew 23:37, NIV). Then keeping "Father" while refusing "Mother" looks like custom rather than truth. Either way, the Church's practice seems to lack a reason.

Volume One shows how a dilemma of this kind can rest on a single word used two ways, and it is free to download.

Three standard answers to "is God male or female?"

There are three main answers, and each sees something true.

Embodied theism. Latter-day Saint teaching holds that the Father is an exalted, embodied person. It takes the narrative of a God who walks, speaks and is seen at face value, and it makes the Incarnation a natural extension of what God already is. Its strain is the rest of Scripture: "God is spirit" (John 4:24, NIV), the warning of Deuteronomy 4 against any form "like a man or a woman," and the flat denials of Numbers 23:19 and Hosea 11:9. A God with a body is somewhere rather than everywhere and is made of parts, which classical theism denies through divine simplicity and the omnipresence of God.

Revisionist theology. Following Daly's critique, a number of theologians have proposed balancing "Father" with "Mother" or replacing gendered names with neutral ones such as Creator. The strengths are real. Genesis 1:27 is honoured, and Scripture's maternal images are taken seriously, including God's "Though she may forget, I will not forget you!" (Isaiah 49:15, NIV). The strain is the source of the name. Jesus does not choose "Father" from His culture's options. He gives it as the content of His own revelation: "No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Matthew 11:27, NIV). The revision also concedes the literalist's premise that "Father" means "male," and once every name is our metaphor, the names of the Trinity become ours to choose.

The classical answer. Gregory of Nazianzus met the literal reading in the fourth century and turned it into a reductio. "Or maybe you would consider our God to be a male," he wrote, "according to the same arguments, because he is called God and Father, and that Deity is feminine, from the gender of the word, and Spirit neuter" (Oration 31.7). Grammar, in other words, proves nothing about sex. What the name does signify, he said elsewhere, is a relation: "Father is not a name either of an essence or of an action … But it is the name of the Relation in which the Father stands to the Son, and the Son to the Father" (Oration 29.16).

Thomas Aquinas, the source of Thomism, built on this. Scripture, he wrote, "puts before us spiritual and divine things under the comparison of corporeal things" (ST I q.3 a.1). Yet "Father" is no mere comparison. The Word "is properly and not metaphorically called Son, and His principle is called Father," and such terms "are said of God before creatures as regards the thing signified, but not as regards the mode of signification" (ST I q.33 a.2). The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§239) gathers the tradition: calling God Father signifies "that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority" and also "goodness and loving care for all his children"; His tenderness "can also be expressed by the image of motherhood"; and "He is neither man nor woman: he is God." John Piper of Desiring God gives the modern evangelical version: "'Male' is a biological word and God is not a biological being."

The classical answer keeps the names and denies the sex, which is right. Its strain is that critics hear "proper, yet not male" as a distinction without a difference. The account needs a stated rule for what crosses from human fatherhood to God and what stays behind.

Theistic personalism, which pictures God as a person much as we are, only without our limits, tends toward the literalist's inference.

The statement of FICT sets out the rule that the classical answer needs and that the embodied and revisionist answers both miss.

How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers "is God a man?"

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single error: one term carried across two frames, God's and ours, as though it meant the same thing in each. FICT keeps the classical answer and supplies its missing rule. On this question, Latter-day Saint embodiment and the revisionist answer reach opposite conclusions from the same move, and theistic personalism leans toward the first.

The starting point is that God's nature and ours differ in kind. God exists of Himself, and we exist by depending on Him. Male and female are qualities of a created, bodily nature, and Genesis 1:27 says that God created them. Within God's own frame, the word "male" names nothing at all. That is why Numbers 23:19 and Hosea 11:9 can say "not a man" without qualification, and Volume Four reads texts of this kind as statements about God as He is in Himself.

Words like "father," by contrast, are learned in our frame, from our parents. Carried into God's frame without an index, they produce the dilemma above. The literalist carries the whole human meaning across, sex included, and gives God a body. The revisionist assumes the whole meaning must carry, and so gives up the name. The series calls this the Many Beings Fallacy: treating a word's meaning in God's frame and in ours as interchangeable.

Indexed, "Father" is neither univocal nor equivocal. It is analogical, in the sense Aquinas gave. What it signifies is true of God first: He is the source of all things, the eternal Father of the Son, the one with authority over all, and the one whose care is complete. The creaturely mode of signifying, a body, a sex, one generation following another, stays on our side of the line. A name crosses only where the perfection it signifies is really in God, and this name is given by the Son Himself (Matthew 11:27). Scripture's maternal images are true in the same disciplined way, as similes of His care used as Scripture uses them. Paul kneels "before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name" (Ephesians 3:14-15, NIV), and the Greek word for family, patria, is built on the word for father, pater. Aquinas read the verse as naming every fatherhood from God's.

The second half of the answer is the Incarnation. "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14, NIV). In taking a human nature, the Son also took the human frame, without losing anything of the divine. He is one Person, as the Council of Chalcedon defined in 451, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation" (Chalcedonian Definition). So "God became a man" is true of the one Person through His human nature, and "God is not a man" is true of the divine nature. Jesus is male. The divine nature is not. "For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5, NIV). This is why kenoticism is unnecessary: the Son added a nature and laid down none of His own, and the same distinction lets Him suffer without the divine nature changing.

Is God a man, then? Of God as He is in Himself, no. Of the Son made flesh, yes, and permanently. Neither half cancels the other, because each is true in its own frame.

Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, gives the full account of how one Person bears two natures.

Four attacks on this answer, and how they are met

We have run thousands of simulated attacks against Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, drawn from academic and peer-reviewed sources. Four bear directly on the question "is God a man?", and they press the answer above at the two points where it parts from Latter-day Saint embodiment and from revisionist theology: the name "Father" and the one Person of Christ.

If "Father" is only analogy, can any name be applied to God?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

The objection comes from logicians in the Thomist tradition of analogy, from Aquinas's question on the divine names (ST I q.13) to Cajetan, who systematised it. The series holds that no word of this kind applies in the same sense in God's frame and in ours, and an earlier wording allowed an exception for "controlled analogy." If analogy is the escape clause, the attack runs, then any word can pass through it, and the rule forbids nothing. Applied here, "Father by analogy" would license any name at all, and the classical preference for "Father" would be arbitrary.

The defense is that the analogy is controlled by a stated rule. Every word that differs between the frames is judged within its own frame, and it crosses only by a sanctioned route. An analogical name is admissible when it is indexed, or when it is restricted to a perfection God and creature really share. That is Aquinas's own discipline, and after this attack the series reworded the clause to point to the rule. Applied to this question, the perfection fatherhood signifies, being the source of another and standing in an eternal relation to the Son, is really in God and is revealed by the Son, so it crosses. Sex is a mode of bodily existence, so it stays behind. Carrying the creaturely meaning across intact is the error of univocity the rule prevents.

If God became a man, did two subjects meet in Christ?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

This objection comes from Catholic dogmatic theology, and the Reformed confessions (Westminster Confession 8.2) press it equally, since both hold Chalcedon's one Person in two natures. Volume Three had described Christ as the one in whom the divine and the human "meet." A meeting needs two parties. The phrase reads as two subjects placed side by side, the divine Son and a human being joined to Him, which is the Nestorian picture the councils condemned. If that is what "God became a man" means, the answer above has split Christ in two.

The defense is the creed itself, and the text now states it in creedal words: Christ is the one "in whom the divine and human natures are united in one Person." There is one subject, and He is the eternal Son. Volume Four adds that the human nature He took is real and complete but has no person of its own. Its "I" is the Son's. So "God became a man" does not mean that a man was attached to God. It means that the Son, without ceasing to be God, began to live a human life as His own.

Can one Person be God and a man without two streams of consciousness?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

The objection draws on the philosopher Tim Bayne, who argued in Religious Studies (2001) that a single subject of experience can have only one stream of consciousness at a time. If Christ knew all things as God while His human mind did not know the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), He seems to have had two streams of awareness at once. Then either there were two subjects, which is the Nestorian split again, or there was one stream and Christ was not fully both.

The defense notes that "stream" and "at a time" are words of time, and the divine frame has no times. God's knowing is a single, complete act without before or after. At each moment of Christ's earthly life there was one stream of experience, the human one, which Volume Four calls "genuinely limited, genuinely sequential." The divine nature was not a second stream at that moment, because it is not located at moments at all. To produce two streams, the attack has to place the timeless divine life on the human timeline as a rival experience, using a temporal word in God's frame as if it meant what it means in ours. What the one Person possessed and what His human mind accessed are different questions, since "possession is not the same as access." Bayne's condition is met, and the subject throughout is the one Son. Volume Three treats time and eternity at length.

If God cannot sin, was the temptation of Jesus real?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

This objection belongs to the long debate over whether Christ was able to sin, and it presses the series' own sentences against each other. Scripture says that "God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone" (James 1:13, NIV), and also that Christ was "tempted in every way, just as we are" (Hebrews 4:15, NIV). Volume One says the outcome of His temptation was "genuinely at stake," because an outcome never in doubt could not purchase salvation. Volume Four says His victory was "never in doubt from eternity." Put the two together, the attack says, and either the temptation was theatre, or the Son of God could have sinned.

The defense is that "in doubt" is being used in two frames. Within His human life, the openness was real. Christ faced a creaturely trial, and "he learned obedience from what he suffered" (Hebrews 5:8, NIV), so the obedience was won and not staged. From eternity, the victory is settled and known. Volume Four puts both in one line: "open in the human frame, eternally actual in the divine frame." Asked without saying which frame, "could the Son have sinned?" has no answer. What can be said is that the "I" who acts in every act of Christ is God, whose nature admits no sin, and that this security rests in who He is without forcing His human will. God is not a man, that He should lie. The Son became a man, and He did not lie.

If you want to test these answers against the full arguments, the books set each one out from first premises.

Frequently asked questions

Does God have a gender?

No. Is God a man or a woman? Neither: in His own nature God has no body, and so no sex. Scripture forbids any image of Him "formed like a man or a woman" (Deuteronomy 4:16, NIV), and the Catechism states that God "transcends the human distinction between the sexes." The masculine words Scripture uses for God are names of relation and authority, and they carry no biology.

Why is God called Father?

Because Jesus calls Him Father and reveals Him as Father. The name signifies that God is the source of everything and the eternal Father of the Son, together with His authority and care. Gregory of Nazianzus called it "the name of the Relation." Aquinas taught that it belongs to God first, and that human fathers are named after Him.

Why do Christians call God "He"?

Christians follow Scripture's own usage, which is consistently masculine and follows from the names Father, Son and King. The pronoun does not assign God a sex. Gregory of Nazianzus pointed out that by the same logic the Greek word for Deity would make God feminine.

Can we call God Mother?

Scripture compares God's care to a mother's (Isaiah 66:13; Isaiah 49:15) and Jesus compares His longing to a hen with her chicks (Matthew 23:37). Those similes are true and may be used as Scripture uses them. The classical churches keep "Father" as God's proper name because it is the name the Son gives, and it names His eternal relation to the Son.

Is Jesus still a man?

Yes. The Incarnation did not end at the ascension. Paul writes after the resurrection that there is "one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5, NIV). The eternal Son remains truly human, body and soul, while His divine nature remains without body or sex. He is one Person in both.

Where to go from here

Jesus taught His disciples to pray "Our Father," and He was a man speaking to His Father when He taught them. The prayer holds both halves of the answer in two words: the Father, who is neither male nor female and is the origin of every family, and the Son, who became a man so that we could say those words with Him.

Volume One sets out the method that holds those halves together, and it is yours free. The series carries it into evil, time and changelessness.