Thealogy is a deliberate coinage, replacing the Greek theos, god, with thea, goddess, to name reflection on the divine feminine from within the Goddess Movement and related strands of feminist spirituality, a term that spread through feminist religious writing from the 1970s onward and is associated in particular with the scholar and priestess Carol P. Christ, among the concept's most influential popularizers and theorists.
The wordplay is not merely cosmetic: thealogy's proponents argue that centuries of theology conducted in exclusively masculine language for the divine shaped not only how God was addressed but what qualities were considered divine at all, favoring transcendence, hierarchy and disembodied reason over immanence, relationality and embodied experience, qualities thealogy positions as more central. Thealogy draws on a range of sources including reconstructed and reimagined pre-Christian goddess traditions, contemporary Wiccan and Pagan practice, and feminist critique of the major monotheistic religions, without being confined to any single organized religious body, making it as much a mode of theological reflection practiced across several communities as a single doctrine belonging to one of them.