 Discussion of the problem of God is standard fare for all schools of philosophy of religion. Long a lynchpin holding up other structures of patriarchal rule, the concept of a male God has been judged by every major feminist thinker, including Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Naomi Goldenberg, Daphne Hampson, Judith Plaskow, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, to be both humanly oppressive and, on the part of believers, religiously idolatrous according to the terms of their own theologies. Feminist philosophers of religion ask why a single set of male metaphors should be absolutized as though supremely fitting about the subject. Critical of the literary gesture of writers who hope to avoid sexist language by recourse to rhetorical disclaimers, feminist authors argue that it is not persuasive simply to declare that the concept of God transcends gender and, therefore, “he” is not literally male, and then to presume that all can go on as before. The problem remains that once the masculine is raised to the universal human, beyond gender, the feminine alone bears the burden of sexual difference.