Unlike many deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel
shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine
husband or lover of any. Yet the language they use daily in
worship and prayer conveys a different message: who, growing up
within Jewish or Christian tradition, has escaped the distinct
impression that God is masculine? And while Catholics revere
Mary as the mother of Jesus, they never identify her as divine
in her own right: she is “mother of God,” but not “God the
Mother” comparable with God the Father. Christianity, of course,
added the idea of the trinity to the Jewish description of God.
Yet of the three divine “Persons,” two—the Father and the
Son—are described as masculine, and the third—the
Spirit—suggests the sexlessness of the Greek neuter term for
spirit, pneuma. Studying the early history of Christianity (the
field called “patristics,” that is, study of “the fathers of the
church”) one is not surprised to come across passages like the
one that concludes the recently disc