If the deity is the father writ large, then this divine masculinity is by no means simply a confirmation of human masculinity. It is at the same time a fundamental threat and challenge to it…Indeed…in at least on respect men’s relationship with God is even more problematic than women’s, for on a heterosexual model of intimate relationships, women are more appropriate objects of divine desire than are men. One way of escaping this problem is by symbolically displacing male tensions and contradictions onto women. The otherness of women is exaggerated to minimize the ways men are made into others in a system which validates male authority.
–Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus