The Church of England’s first-ever transwoman priest has declared that “God is non-binary” and questioned whether He is “just genuinely like a guy?”
Reverend Canon Sarah Jones, currently of the St John the Baptist Church in Cardiff, Wales, was ordained by the Church of England some two decades ago, telling the Anglican state church at the time: “‘Look, there’s this medical history that you need to know about.”
The cleric told ITV News that “They were fine” with the disclosure, although, as she put it, they were initially “a little bit sort of, ‘Oh, OK, we don’t really know what to do, but give us some time, and we’ll work it out’.”
“And it did take them time, but they did work it out and eventually I was ordained,” Jones recalled.
The canon claimed that “There have been some occasions where it’s been made pretty plain to me that I wouldn’t be welcome in a certain post and that people disagreed that I should even be ordained” but that, for the most part, support has been “tremendous” — particularly in Wales.
Anglican clergy in Wales have on occasion displayed a marked tendency towards the “woke” politics of the social justice left, with female bishop Joanna Penberthy recently feeling compelled to delete her personal Twitter account after reports revealed she used it to abuse Brexit and Conservative supporters in vitriolic terms.
On the subject of God being “non-binary” — similar to claims by the Church of England’s senior Archbishop, Justin Welby, that God is “not male nor female” in 2018 — Reverend Canon Sarah Jones elaborated by suggesting: “[W]hen you really think about it, does God really have a body? I don’t think so, so could God really be ‘He’, just genuinely like a guy?”
“I don’t think so and I think if God created everything, God’s beyond all of these boundaries so whatever God is, I really don’t think God is a standard ‘He’,” Jones insisted, adding: “I would absolutely say that God is non-binary in the sense that God is neither male nor female and I think it’s helpful.”
“It’s not just helpful for the queer community, I think whether you’re straight or gay or whatever you are, the fact that God is not [un]equivocally male perhaps is actually quite helpful in our understanding of humanity,” Jones added.
Such a view may have raised the eyebrows of C. S. Lewis, the Oxbridge don, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, and the leading Anglican apologist and one of the leading apologists for all Christian denominations in the 20th century.
In his seminal 1948 tract ‘Priestesses in the Church?’ the author was clear that “Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential… it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity.”
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