“No one has ever seen God,” wrote the apostle John. Which is strange, because we all know what God looks like. God is white; God is getting on a bit; and God is male.

So the words of the archbishop of Canterbury on the matter of God’s gender will no doubt be startling to some and outrageous to others. Speaking this week at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, London, the Most Rev Justin Welby said: “God is not male or female. God is not definable.” A gender-fluid God? What will Christianity’s more reactionary outriders make of that?

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The fact it is so hard to think of God as anything but male shows how deeply embedded in the popular imagination this particular fallacy has become. It is an internalised heresy, and the archbishop is quite right to draw it to our attention. Welby’s belief on this matter is entirely in keeping with orthodox Anglicanism, which states that God is “without body, parts or passions,” and with the Roman Catholic catechism, which proclaims: “He is neither man nor woman: he is God.” But this is not just a matter of bad theology, for its implications spread far beyond the church.

The idea that God is male is evidence of two things. One is the power of the old, white men who have made God in their own image, to their immense benefit. It is vanity in excelsis, psychological projection at its most revealing. The message is that men are the default humans, and their power on Earth is a mirror of that wielded by the Divine. It positions the female as subordinate. It simultaneously reflects and reinforces the subjugation of women. It has done untold harm.

This damaging misconception also exposes a deep flaw in our thinking. It shows the danger of our placing undue faith in words. Yes, Jesus frequently used masculine language when talking of God, but its metaphorical nature is too often overlooked. “God is not a father in exactly the same way as a human being is a father,” said Welby this week. “All human language about God is inadequate and to some degree metaphorical.”

This may sound to some like a postmodern cop-out but it has been a central understanding of the church since its early days. The notion finds its most direct expression in what is known as apophatic theology, which dates back in Christian terms to the second century and teaches that language will always fall short of that which it purports to describe. So rather than speak of God as “loving”, it will go only as far as saying that God is “not unloving”. The supremacy of language was also challenged by the Christian mystics of medieval times, while the weakness of words is acknowledged in church services around the world, which at their richest are multisensory experiences, appealing to faculties beyond the intellect.

Then there are the flaws in individual languages. English, for example, lacks a commonly accepted pronoun that denotes personhood but not gender, so “he” and “himself” are still used widely when discussing God; some do their best to work around this with the linguistically clunky but theologically sturdy “Godself”. And arguably most problematic of all is the word “word”, which carries various meanings. As Welby said: “It is extraordinarily important as Christians that we remember that the definitive revelation of who God is was not in words, but in the word of God who we call Jesus Christ”.

The danger with all this is that we grow too comfortable with a sort of vagueness, and find ourselves sounding like Alan Partridge: “God is a gas … but not a small gas, like Calor Gas.” But the persistent, pernicious notion of the male God is one that plainly needs challenging, not least because depictions of God as female still feel oddly subversive (even when Alanis Morissette is involved). So let’s bung a few “she”s in among the “he”s, but not take either of them too literally. After all, history shows us that when we make our abstract language concrete, we build walls around God.

• Peter Ormerod is a journalist with a particular interest in religion, culture and gender