OK, it never really was in the news. But it did happen. One Leah Fowler wrote an article in the school’s “Women in Theology” September 2002 newsletter describing the way in which she came to know that God was, in fact, a female: She developed a crush on another woman in her all-female Bible study group as a college freshman.

We would sing, read and reflect on scripture and pray. Each of these rituals involved elements of intimacy . . . Our prayers were passionate, as we called out to Jesus with moans, the whole while holding and even stroking each other’s hands . . . The intimate nature of our meetings opened us up to experiencing God in an intimate way. Indeed, in my budding crush for one of the women in the group I saw God, for I could not quite separate [the] joy, love and excitement I held for God from the joy, love and excitement I felt in relationship to this woman. At the center of the erotic stood God: beautiful, life-giving, and . . . a woman.

Well, just what do you say to that?

I could use this column to discuss the heartbreaking sadness of neopaganism and the reasons why it’s gripped the popular consciousness with such force; but others, who are much better suited to such discussions, have already done so on this site (click here and here). I could spend it dismantling the feminist argument verse by biblical verse, discussing the various ways in which God might have meant the phrase “let us make man in Our image,” but for that, you’re going to have to Ask Theophilus.

Instead, I thought I’d start by taking the idea seriously, just for a moment. What if God the Creator really were a woman? What would that mean for us, the creations?

The short answer to that question is: We’d be toast. If you think the male God of the Bible is impossible to figure out now . . . well, with a female God, you’d have to multiply that confusion by infinity.

My Bible says that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. If he were really a woman, that fact would be reduced to a hormonal impossibility. Think about that for a moment. If God were a woman, She would be subject to mood swings. If God were a woman, She would find herself alternating between crying jags, laughter and sometimes, a sort of consuming rage, all for no apparent reason. If God were a woman, She would be subject to That Bloated Feeling.

On the bright side, if God were a woman, She wouldn’t have supplied manna to the Israelite children wandering in the wilderness; it would have been Ben & Jerry’s ice cream that came raining out of the sky, in all the glory of its assorted flavors. If God were a woman, no one would have zits. Ever. And everyone would be good at multi-tasking — even men.

But this is simply not the case. If we had no Bible to tell us otherwise, these facts, if nothing else, should be enough to let us know that God is most definitely not a woman.

All right, now let’s get serious (really, this time).

Jesus Christ is in very nature God (as Philippians 2: 6-8 tells us), and who “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing . . . being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, (emphasis mine) he humbled himself and become obedient to death — even death on a cross!” Would it not make sense for God, when choosing to incarnate Himself as a human, to stay true to His heavenly gender?

Let’s go back to Genesis for a moment, where Moses tells us that God, in the throes of creative passion, made His masterpiece: man (emphasis mine again) from the dust of the ground in His own image — with an eternal spirit, with the capacity to love and reason and rule over all creation. And it was only afterward, when He saw the incompleteness of the man, that God made woman — not from the dust of the ground, but from the rib of the man. If God had been female, why would man be the firstborn of creation?

Don’t misread what I’m trying to say here. I’m not claiming to have all the answers on the nature of God, and I certainly don’t subscribe to the theory that women are some kind of afterthought or second-class citizens that God just doesn’t care about as much as men. The New Testament is rife with mentions of the women in Jesus’ life, and the special place many of them held in ministry. The Old Testament talks about special women with particular kinds of strength. Like Sarah, who God honored in part for her obedience when Abraham was being a fearful idiot and selling her into harems (not once, but twice). Like Deborah, the prophetess who led Israel to victory over the Canaanites in Judges 4-5. Like Jael, who drove a tent peg through the head of an evil king in the process of that victory.

Still, Scripture is not genderless, and all references made to God (the Father) and to Jesus (the Son) are indisputably male. Argue if you will about the adequacy of conventional gender terminology to encompass all that God is. But you can’t argue that it’s the terminology God uses to speak to us — not without rejecting the Bible itself and seeking out some substitute deity you like better.

I think the major lesson to be learned from the sexual deviation thriving within the goddess movement, and the dreadful truth it tells us about the times in which we live, is that we’ve got to take God at His Word, or we won’t know Him at all. It is incumbent upon us to accept Him as He presents Himself to us, and to humble ourselves beneath those truths. When we try to recreate God in our own image, or when we try to manipulate the inescapably difficult truths of the Bible in order to make ourselves more comfortable, we invite disaster and death. The Bible warns that in the last days, “some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons” (2 Timothy 4:1). That sure seems to describe what’s going on at the Candler School of Theology.

The bottom line is simply this: No matter whether Jesus had lived and ministered on this earth as a male or a female, without the sacrificial death on the cross to pay the penalty for human sin and create a way for us to enter into a true relationship with the eternal, sinless and holy God, we would be completely without hope.

And then we’d really be toast.