Is God really a boy?

Christianity said so. The Bible doesn’t.

The Father was a boy. The Holy Spirit was a boy. Jesus was a boy. The disciples were boys. Elders and deacons were boys. They didn’t like women too much. Wasn’t Christianity like a gay bar?

There was even drag queens.

I’m fine with gay bars, but what I really didn’t like was a theology that banished the female. It felt . . . unnatural?

When I started reading Bible scholarship, I didn’t think I’d learn much. Hadn’t I heard it all in church? What I found, however, was a Bible I’d never read. There she is in Genesis 1:27:

And God made humankind;
according to the divine image he made it;
male and female he made them. (NETS)

If humanity is the image of God, and we’re male and female, then as Johannes C. de Moor observes, “God himself too was both male and female.”

We hadn’t been able to see her? But in the Bible, God is often female.

Mimi Haddad notes: “Holy Spirit (in Hebrew is feminine, ruah; in Greek, neuter) is frequently associated with the birthing process (John 3:5; cf. John 1:13, 1 John 4:7b; 5:1, 4,18).”

Ann Nyland explains: “The pronoun used to refer to the Holy Spirit in the original Hebrew language of Scripture is ‘she, and the…