The practice of representing collective entities with female images or personifications is a very ancient one. It is also found in Scripture in relation to the people of Israel and the church. However, these female images were understood on the basis of the meanings attributed to women in patriarchal contexts, whereby they were essentially thought of as submissive, incapable of autonomy and salvation, and essentially receptive. This paper will attempt to analyse some female metaphors, in particular those of bride and mother, used for the church in the New Testament and in some traditional (including recent) texts, in order to highlight how these metaphors have been used to establish patriarchal gender representations as inherent to human nature or even to God. Typical of femininity, for example, expressed by the metaphor of the church as bride, would be to be loved and saved, and for this reason, in the church, women, concrete types of this abstract and ontologised femininity, would not be suitable for public and governing roles or for representing the one who loves and saves (Christ). The maternal metaphor has also determined gender representations that see women as a receptive principle of an active principle that would be masculine: in baptism, for example, the church generates thanks to God who fertilises. Not only does this view fail to take into account the dynamics of motherhood and human procreation, but it also attributes to God a masculine (which he cannot have, since God is not sexual) and patriarchal role. Once the use of these metaphors has been deconstructed and it has been highlighted how they have been and continue to be used to exclude women from positions of power and leadership in the Church, an attempt will be made to reinterpret the metaphors themselves in order to reposition them within the Christian mystery, once they have been purified of patriarchal and oppressive elements that affect the lives of women and everyone else.