WHY GOD IS MALE

Christ and His Adopted Human Father, St. Joseph the Guardian

Divine Fatherhood, Prophetic Revelation, and the Eternal Masculinity of the Incarnate Son

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West) 

The modern mind recoils instinctively at the language of Scripture when it dares to speak plainly: “I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Ephesians 3:14–15). The discomfort is not born of textual obscurity, and not of exegetical difficulty, but of a prior ideological commitment; namely, that all distinctions must be rendered negotiable, all asymmetries flattened, and all hierarchies subjected to suspicion. This is the Gospel of Postmodernism, not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Thus, what the Ancient Church received as revelation is recast as a problem, and what was once confessed by all as a basic truth of Christianity becomes something to be explained away and perceived as “problematic” or “non-essential.” It is somehow easier to believe that Scripture is the product of a “Patriarchal Culture”, and softly rejected through clever reinterpretation, rather than God-breathed truth that we are bound to follow in loyalty and obedience. 

Yet the Church of God did not invent her language. She received it. And what she received, she guarded with trembling care. Bishops, who are to “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15), are bound to pass on the ancient tradition, received from the Apostles, not adding their own interpretations or deleting anything that contemporaries find distasteful. The question before us, therefore, is not whether modern sensibilities find the Fatherhood of God agreeable, but whether God has in fact revealed Himself in this manner in Holy Scripture, and whether that revelation bears theological necessity.

At the outset of this discussion, we must be extremely precise, or the whole matter falls into confusion and heresy. God, as God, is not a creature. He is not composed or compounded, not material, not subject to division, and therefore not sexually differentiated in the manner of His created beings. As the councils declare, God’s “essence” (His “Ousia”) is unlike anything in the created world and is only comprehensible through analogy. As St. John of Damascus in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith writes, the divine nature is “simple and uncompounded… neither male nor female.” To assert biological maleness in the divine essence would be to collapse Creator into creation, and to mistake the infinite for the finite.

And yet this same God who transcends all categories of creation has not remained silent or hidden in darkness. He has spoken by His Holy Prophets. He has revealed Himself, not as an abstraction or a genderless orb, as Origin once posited, but as Father of All. This is not an optional metaphor, and not a poetic flourish among many equally valid alternatives. It is the given name of God within the covenantal life of His people. The Law, the Prophets, the Psalms, and finally Christ Himself agree on this single, commanded form: “Our Father which art in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). God chose to reveal Himself in a masculine role and in fatherly language, not by accident, but intentionally. 

This naming is not arbitrary. It is revelatory. For in calling God Father, Scripture does not merely describe a sentiment; it discloses a divine structure that is at the base of biblical cosmology. God is consistently made known as the source, the initiator, the one from whom all proceeds. He elects, He calls, He sends, He gives. He establishes covenant, promises inheritance, and brings forth life. “Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Ephesians 3:15). He acts and moves in a way that is only analogous in nature to the reproductive force of the biological male, inseminating the world with the “Logos Spermatikos,” the “Seed of the Word” that St. Justin Martyr so eloquently defended just a few years after Christ’s Ascension. The Fatherhood of God is thus not reducible to human projection; rather, human fatherhood is itself a derivative reflection of the divine prototype.

The prophetic witness maintains this pattern with remarkable consistency. God is not only Father, but also a Husband: “I will betroth thee unto me for ever” (Hosea 2:19). He is King and Lord, the one who commands and orders. Even where maternal imagery appears, as when the Lord comforts “as one whom his mother comforteth” (Isaiah 66:13), it is always secondary, illustrative, and never displaces the primary name of Father or the way in which He relates to the creation. The asymmetry is deliberate. The revelation is total, cumulative and undeniable. The pattern is not confused or defused by modern discomfort with maleness or the patriarchy. 

To understand this more deeply, one must pay attention to the structure of creation itself. The opening chapters of Genesis present a world brought into being not through undifferentiated continuity, but through ordered distinction: light from darkness, waters above from waters below, land from sea. This is all accomplished through God’s “vibrations” or His “moving” upon the waters. Creation unfolds through separation and relation, difference and harmony. This culminates in the creation of man: “Male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). This binary is fundamental. 

Here the pattern becomes explicit. The binary is not incidental, and not merely biological. It is metaphysical. It reflects the deeper order of reality: giver and receiver, initiator and responder, source and manifestation. In Genesis 2, this is rendered in the language of Ish and Isha: “She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” The man is presented as the originating principle; the woman as the one who receives, embodies, and brings forth life into fullness. This is not a statement of value, but of order, and an order that finds its highest meaning not in domination, but in communion and union. It can be argued, biblically, that there are three states of humanity, reflecting the sacred image of the Holy Trinity - Male, Female, and the Joined “One-Flesh” of the Covenantal Family. 

This ancient Hebrew worldview binds together life, blood, and generation in a unified metaphysic that is central to salvation’s plan. “The life of the flesh is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11). Blood is not merely biological substance; it is the covenantal bearer of life. Within this framework, the father is understood as the one who imparts the generative principle, the seed from which life proceeds, while the mother receives, nourishes, and brings that life to manifestation. Whether or not modern biology agrees with these categories is beside the point; the theological system of Scripture is built upon them and they are spiritually true. 

And it is precisely this system that undergirds the sacrificial economy of grace, imparted life. For sacrifice is always the offering of life through blood. “Without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). The entire logic of atonement depends upon the coherence of these categories: source, gift, life, blood, offering. The blood carries, represents, binds and seals those from whom it comes, those it represents, to the source of Divine Life, God Himself. 

All of this prepares the way for the decisive moment in which analogy becomes reality: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The Incarnation is not the assumption of a generic humanity, or even, as St. Maximos profoundly postulates in his Ambigua “the general humanity of all mankind.” The Son is born of the Virgin Mary as a particular male, circumcised according to the Law and is this confirmed to be biologically and functionally male, recognized among men, crucified in a male body, and raised in that same body. He is the Son of the Father, the Son of David, the New Adam, the Bridegroom of the Church. He is no longer an analogy of maleness. He is truly and fully man. 

Nor is this assumption temporary. The Resurrection does not dissolve the humanity of Christ, but glorifies it permanently in a cosmic state. “Handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39). The Ascension confirms the permanence of this union: the God-Man reigns bodily. As the Apostle declares, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). Christ will return in the same way He ascended into heaven, to rule and reign forever… as a man! 

Here, then, the argument reaches its proper clarity. Prior to the Incarnation, the maleness of God is revealed analogically and functionally: in Fatherhood, in initiation, in generative and covenantal action. These are not empty metaphors, but true disclosures of divine order. In the Incarnation, however, that which was revealed becomes embodied. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity assumes human nature as male and retains it eternally.

Thus, one may say with precision and without any confusion: God is male, not because the divine essence possesses biological sex, but because God has revealed Himself as Father and has eternally united Himself to male humanity in the Person of Jesus Christ, never to be separated. 

The Incarnation does not introduce something foreign into the life of God; it confirms and fulfills what was already revealed. The Father who begets, the Son who is begotten, the Bridegroom who gives Himself for the Bride: these are not cultural accidents, but the architecture of salvation itself.

The theological stakes are not insignificant. To relativize or neutralize the Fatherhood of God is not a minor linguistic adjustment. The dominance of feminism in the Christian mind risks dissolving the very relations that make the Gospel intelligible. If God is no longer meaningfully Father, then the Sonship of Christ is reduced to metaphor, the eternal relations of the Trinity are obscured, and the sacrificial logic of the Cross becomes unintelligible. Salvation is at stake. The Bridegroom and the Bride, Christ and the Church, lose their coherence. What remains is not the faith once delivered, but a reconfigured system shaped by external pressures. Heresy is introduced as it always is, through capitulation to the spirit of the age. 

The Ancient Church did not hesitate to resist heresy. As uncomfortable and difficult as it is, we must reject it, rebuke it, and work against it. The Church has always confessed what was given at the beginning: God as Father, Christ as Son, the Incarnation as real, embodied, and permanent. And in this confession, we do not find oppression or the rejection of women (whom we love, protected and give our lives for), but truly find salvation.

COLLECT

Almighty and everlasting God, who hast revealed thyself unto us as Father, and hast sent thine only-begotten Son to take upon him our nature and redeem us by his precious Blood: Grant that we, receiving faithfully the mystery of thy revelation, may hold fast the truth delivered unto thy saints, and never depart from the order thou hast established; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.