Two polite young people stop you outside a railway station. They carry a Bible, they smile, and they ask one question: “Did you know the Bible teaches about God the Mother?” Before you can reply they’ve turned to a verse you’ve never studied. And suddenly you feel unprepared.
The same words can arrive from a very different direction. A friend at church, worn down by preaching that made God sound like an angry headmaster, asks quietly: “Why may I not call God my Mother? The Bible itself says He comforts us like a mother.”
Those are two different conversations needing two different answers.
Here’s the encouraging part. The Bible holds far more mother-language than most churchgoers have noticed. The answer to the Mother God theory isn’t to look away from those passages, but to read them carefully—because read carefully, they don’t lead where the Mother God teachers say.
First, sort out which “Mother God” you’re dealing with
One label covers three unrelated claims.
| THE CLAIM | WHAT IT ACTUALLY CLAIMS | WHAT IT NEEDS FROM YOU |
|---|---|---|
| The Mother God church | That Ahn Sahng-hong was the returned Christ, and that Zahng Gil-jah is God the Mother—a second divine person | A clear, kind warning. This is a different gospel, not a variation within Christianity |
| Re-imagining God as Mother | That the one God of the Bible may equally be named Mother, and that “Father” is just an old cultural habit | Patient argument from Scripture, and honesty about the real hurts behind it |
| An honest reader’s question | The Bible plainly compares God to a mother, so why do we never address God as such? | It’s a sincere question and deserves a detailed answer |
Most people searching for “God the Mother” have met the first group. But fire that answer at the third and you’ll likely wound someone who was only reading her Bible attentively. So it’s best we begin with a question of our own: “Tell me where you first heard this.”
An admission that surprises many Christians: God isn’t male
Before we say what’s wrong with the Mother God theory, we must say something many defenders of the faith get wrong. The Bible nowhere teaches God is male.
Jesus said, God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24). “Spirit” means a being without a body. No body means no biology, and no biology means no sex.
Moses made the same point with unusual force. At Sinai, Israel saw no shape at all, and the warning that follows names both sexes: no image in the likeness of male or female (Deuteronomy 4:16). Carving God as a man was forbidden as firmly as carving God as a woman.
WHAT THE CONFESSIONS SAY
- God is Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q4
- God is a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions. Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 2
Add Genesis 1:27, where man and woman together bear God’s image, and the conclusion is unavoidable: whatever is glorious about motherhood comes from God, not the other way round. So our answer to a woman asking about Mother God is never “God is male, so stop asking.” That’s not merely unkind. It’s untrue.
Our answer: God is neither male nor female—and God has told us His name.
The Bible really does compare God to a mother
This is where many Christians get nervous. They shouldn’t. Scripture isn’t shy here.
MOTHER-LANGUAGE FOR GOD IN SCRIPTURE
- Isaiah 66:13 — As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you.
- Isaiah 49:15 — Can a nursing mother forget her child? Even she may forget; God will not.
- Isaiah 42:14 — God cries out like a woman in labour.
- Deuteronomy 32:18 — You forgot the God who gave you birth.
- Psalm 131:2 — The believer is calmed like a weaned child with its mother.
- Matthew 23:37 — Jesus longs to gather Jerusalem as a hen gathers her chicks.
These aren’t awkward exceptions to be explained away. They’re gifts. The fierce, self-giving love a mother has for the child at her breast is a small copy of something infinitely larger in God.
The old word for this is accommodation—God stooping to speak in language small creatures can carry.
God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children. — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.13.1
The hinge of the whole question: a picture isn’t a name
Here’s the point on which everything turns.
Scripture says God is like a mother. Scripture never calls God Mother.
Think about how ordinary language works. We might say of a colleague, “She fought like a lion in that meeting.” Everyone understands us. But nobody then puts “Lion” on her name badge. A comparison tells us what someone is like. A name tells us who they are.
The Bible compares God to a rock, a shepherd, a lion, a bear robbed of her cubs, a moth, an eagle, a hen, a labouring woman, a housewife with a lamp. Yet no Christian prays, “Our Rock, who art in heaven.” Not because the picture is false, but because it was never given as a name.
| MOTHER-LANGUAGE | FATHER-LANGUAGE | |
|---|---|---|
| Can it be used as comparison? | Yes, often and beautifully | Yes |
| Can it be used as God’s name? | Never, in any of the 66 books | Yes—constantly |
| Can it be used in prayer to God? | Never | Our Father in heaven (Matthew 6:9); Abba, Father (Mark 14:36) |
| Cried by the Spirit in us? | Never | Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6 |
| Can it be used in baptism? | Never | of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19) |
That table is the whole debate on one page. Mother-language is simile; Father-language is name, address and confession. And Jesus, who knew God better than anyone who ever lived, chose the second when He taught us to pray.
Why we simply cannot add “Mother” to the name
If God isn’t male, what harm is done by adding Mother alongside Father? Three things go wrong. And they’re bigger than they look.
1. A mother gives birth from herself; God creates out of nothing
This is the sharpest argument in the discussion, and it belongs to the American exegete Elizabeth Achtemeier. She observed that when the surrounding nations named their gods as mothers, the world was always understood to be born out of the divine body. Mothers produce children from their own substance—so a mother-deity produces a universe made of the same stuff as God.
The Bible allows no such thing. God speaks, and what didn’t exist begins to exist (Genesis 1:3; Hebrews 11:3). The world is God’s workmanship, not His offspring. Erase that line and you drift towards pantheism—the belief that the universe is God’s body. And if it is, then sin, cancer and cruelty belong to God too. The tender language people reach for quietly removes the Saviour they wanted comfort from.
2. Father and Son aren’t job titles
If “Father” were merely a label for authority, we could swap it. But Father and Son are relational names—they name who the persons of the Trinity eternally are to one another. The Son wasn’t born into that relationship at Bethlehem; He entered our world already the Son.
Change the name and the relationship blurs. Call the first person Mother and you’ve quietly suggested the Son was carried, formed and delivered—the very picture the church rejected when it confessed the Son as begotten, not made. This is why Herman Bavinck insisted God’s names are given by revelation, never invented. They’re the handles by which we hold what we could never grasp.
3. Naming God isn’t ours to do
At the burning bush Moses asks for a name and God supplies it: I am who I am (Exodus 3:14). The pattern holds throughout Scripture—God names Himself, and the third commandment guards that name. Human beings name animals. We don’t get to name God.
Philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach argued God is merely a projection of human fathers onto the sky, and modern writers repeat the charge. Paul answers the argument in advance, kneeling before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named (Ephesians 3:14–15). Human fatherhood is the copy. God’s the original.
The Mother God church: examining the verses
The group behind most of these conversations teaches that Ahn Sahng-hong, who died in South Korea in 1985, was the second coming of Christ, and that Zahng Gil-jah is God the Mother, alive today. Nobody, members are told, is saved without receiving her. Four passages carry almost the whole argument.
| THEIR VERSE | THEIR CLAIM | WHAT THE PASSAGE SAYS |
|---|---|---|
| Genesis 1:26–27 | “Let us” plus “male and female” proves a divine couple | The plural points to the fullness of the one God, later revealed as Father, Son and Spirit. |
| Galatians 4:26 | “The Jerusalem above is our mother” means a heavenly woman | Paul says plainly he is speaking figuratively of two covenants (verse 24). The mother is the covenant of grace, embodied in the church |
| Revelation 21:9–10 | The Bride is God the Mother | The angel identifies the Bride himself: the holy city, new Jerusalem. Ephesians 5:25–27 leaves no doubt she is the church |
| Revelation 22:17 | “The Spirit and the Bride say, Come” makes the Bride divine | The Bride invites, and in the same verse drinks. The giver of living water has no need to drink it |
There’s a quiet irony here. Christians have always spoken of a mother—Calvin himself says that for those to whom God is Father, the church is mother. She is our mother. She’s not our God.
But the claim collapses long before Revelation, on a far simpler test. The Bible describes Christ’s return in terms nobody can fulfil quietly.
THREE THINGS THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT CHRIST’S RETURN
- Visible to all. Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him (Revelation 1:7).
- Unmistakable. Like lightning flashing from east to west (Matthew 24:27).
- In the same manner He left. Bodily, in the sight of witnesses (Acts 1:11).
A man who died in 1985 and was buried satisfies none of these. Paul’s warning is severe because the stakes are: even an angel preaching another gospel must be rejected (Galatians 1:8–9). Peter allows no additions either—there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).
The pain behind the respectable version
The academic argument for Mother God deserves better than mockery. Writers such as Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Sallie McFague were reacting to something real: churches where God was preached as a bad-tempered patriarch, where women were belittled, and where fatherhood meant control rather than care.
Two things must be said, and both warmly.
- The grievance is often just. Where the church has used the fatherhood of God to prop up male self-importance, it has misrepresented Him. Jesus told His disciples greatness means service, not status (Mark 10:42–45).
- The remedy isn’t a new deity. Adoption in Christ makes women heirs, not spectators. There’s no male and female where inheritance is concerned (Galatians 3:28), and every believer receives the Spirit who cries Abba! Father! (Romans 8:15–17). A woman needs no goddess to be at home in God’s family. She already is.
One more point is often missed. Christ’s manhood doesn’t prove God is masculine. He came as the last Adam (Romans 5:12–19), representing women as fully as men—otherwise no woman could be saved by Him. And in the Bible’s picture-language the church is feminine, so men who believe are part of the Bride.
If your own father failed you
For some readers this isn’t an argument at all. It’s a wound. If “father” means a man who left, or shouted, or frightened you, “Our Father in heaven” is the last thing you want to say.
Scripture meets that directly, and never asks you to pretend.
- God is father of the fatherless (Psalm 68:5)—a title chosen for those with no father worth the name.
- My father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in (Psalm 27:10). Both parents may fail. God does not.
- Isaiah 49:15 goes further than any comparison can. A nursing mother might forget her child—God will not forget you.
Read Ephesians 3:14–15 again in that light. You were never told to imagine God as a larger version of the man who raised you. The opposite is true: He is the real Father, and every earthly father is measured against Him and found wanting. Everything we hope to find in a Mother God is already promised in Him. And He promises more.
This isn’t a new argument
The church has met this before. Second-century Gnostics had a divine female figure called Sophia; the Shakers taught a female element in God; Mary Baker Eddy popularised “Father-Mother God”. Each time the claim was tested by Scripture, it has been set aside.
One complication deserves mention. Julian of Norwich addressed Jesus as “our Mother”, as Anselm of Canterbury had before her. Neither proposed a fourth divine person or a new name for worship. They were reaching for a simile, as Isaiah did.
So what’s the best answer?
Not anger, and not embarrassment, but something better than both: read the Bible more closely than the person asking, and be kinder than they expect.
FOUR SENTENCES WORTH MEMORISING
- God isn’t male. He is spirit, without body or sex, and every good thing in motherhood comes from him.
- The Bible compares God to a mother, but never names God Mother. A picture isn’t a name.
- Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father”—and He was never shy about revealing God.
- A second divine person beside the Father isn’t a version of Christianity. It’s another religion that only sounds Christian.
Then do one more thing. Read Isaiah 49:15 slowly to the person who asked. If they were looking for a mother’s tenderness in God, it was waiting in the Father all along.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
The Hebrew word for Spirit, ruach, is a feminine noun. Doesn’t that make the Holy Spirit female?
Grammatical gender is a feature of language, not a statement about biology. In French a table is feminine and a book is masculine, and nobody imagines either has a sex. The same Spirit is named by a feminine noun in Hebrew (ruach), a neuter noun in Greek (pneuma) and a masculine noun in Latin (spiritus)—which would make the Spirit change sex on translation. More decisively, Jesus repeatedly refers to the Spirit with masculine personal pronouns in John 14–16, even though the Greek noun is neuter, and he calls him the Helper who teaches and reminds. The argument proves too little to be useful.
Doesn’t El Shaddai mean “the many-breasted one”, showing a maternal God?
This popular claim rests on linking Shaddai to the Hebrew word shad, meaning breast. Most Hebrew scholars judge the likelier root to be the Akkadian shadu, meaning mountain, giving the sense “God of the mountain” or “God Almighty”. The confusion is understandable because Genesis 49:25 mentions blessings of the breasts and the womb in the same breath as Shaddai—but there the blessings are what God gives, not what God is. Even if a maternal echo were present, it would be one more comparison, not a name. The pattern of the whole Bible would still stand.
Archaeologists found ancient inscriptions mentioning “Yahweh and his Asherah”. Did Israel believe God had a wife?
Some Israelites clearly did, and that’s exactly what the prophets spent their lives condemning. The inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud are evidence of popular religion mixing with Canaanite practice, not evidence of what Scripture taught. Jeremiah 44 records women burning incense to the “queen of heaven” and defending it as tradition, and Jeremiah tells them plainly this is why judgement came. Archaeology confirms the Bible’s account rather than contradicting it: Israel kept slipping into goddess worship, and God kept calling her back.
Wisdom is called “she” in Proverbs 8. Is that a divine woman standing beside God?
Proverbs 1–9 uses personification, a literary device in which an idea is dressed as a character so it can be loved or refused. Wisdom calls in the street; so does Folly, her mirror image, two chapters later—and surely, nobody proposes a goddess named Folly. The New Testament settles the matter by identifying divine wisdom with a person who is emphatically not a fourth deity: Christ is called the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24, 30). The chapter is beautiful poetry pointing to Christ, not a doorway to a female divinity.
Julian of Norwich called Jesus “our Mother”. Was she a heretic?
She wasn’t, and the distinction matters for our whole argument. Julian wrote devotional meditation, using motherhood as a comparison for Christ’s nourishing, self-giving care—much as Jesus compared Himself to a hen gathering chicks. She never proposed a female person in the Godhead, never revised the baptismal formula, and confessed the Trinity in ordinary terms. There’s still a caution here: language repeated often enough starts to function as a name, which is why the church has kept such images in private devotion rather than in creeds and prayer.
Is the Mormon teaching about a Heavenly Mother the same thing?
It’s a different structure with the same fatal problem. Latter-day Saint teaching holds God the Father has a wife, that human beings are their spirit offspring, and this Heavenly Mother is generally not to be prayed to. So she isn’t usually worshipped as the Mother God church worships Zahng Gil-jah. But both systems make God part of a family of divine beings and blur the line between Creator and creature, which the first commandment and Isaiah 43:10 defend absolutely. There has never been a God before the Lord, and there will never be another beside Him.
A couple I know is keen to join the Mother God church. How do I talk to them?
Ask questions instead of firing verses: who taught you this, what happens if you leave, why are the Bible studies so intense at first? Members are usually taught heavy schedules and are discouraged from testing the claims outside the group, so an argument won in one evening rarely lasts the week. Keep the conversation on the two questions the system cannot survive—whether Christ’s return was visible to every eye, and whether any name beside Jesus saves. Above all, stay reachable; people who leave such groups almost always leave towards someone who never gave up on them.
Related Reads
- Can We Be Sure Isaiah 48:16 Is a Clear Early Hint of the Trinity?
- Why Is God Jealous? Does That Make Him Evil?
- What Do Jehovah’s Witnesses Believe? A Biblical Examination of JW Doctrine
- Christianity vs Mormonism: 7 Core Differences That Cannot Be Reconciled
- Mormonism’s Jesus vs the Bible’s Jesus: 5 Critical Differences
- Ancient Heresies, New Disguises: Identify the Modern Variants
