The Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, has defended a woke and highly graphic Evensong service in which an academic likened depictions of Jesus Christ’s wounds to bleeding vaginas and said He had a “trans body”.
The bizarre but, for both the Church of England and Cambridge University, not particularly off-brand sermon saw research fellow Joshua Heath show congregants images depicting Christ’s crucifixion, telling them that the wound in His side from being pierced with the Holy Lance had “a decidedly vaginal appearance,” according to The Telegraph.
“In Christ’s simultaneously masculine and feminine body in these works, if the body of Christ [is] as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then His body is also the trans body,” Heath claimed — heedless of the fact that scripture is unambiguous in its description of Jesus as the Son of Man, and even recounts His circumcision in the the Gospel of Luke.
Despite leaving congregants “in tears” the Dean of Trinity College, Dr Michael Banner, defended Heath’s sermon, saying that it “suggested that we might think about these images of Christ’s male/female body as providing us with ways of thinking about issues around transgender questions today”.
Congregants had complained to Banner that the sermon was “heresy” after it was delivered, with some claiming they felt “violated” and “unwelcome in the Church” as a result.
One wrote Banner a letter in which they said they said they were “contemptuous of the idea that by cutting a hole in a man, through which he can be penetrated, he can become a woman.”
“I am especially contemptuous of such imagery when it is applied to our Lord, from the pulpit, at Evensong. I am contemptuous of the notion that we should be invited to contemplate the martyrdom of a ‘trans Christ’, a new heresy for our age,” they added.
Anglican deacon and conservative commentator Calvin Robinson quipped that this particular form of heresy might be described as “Transwokism”.
The Church of England has long been using Christianity a vehicle to promote woke identity politics, however, with Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury who serves as its de facto leader, declaring God “gender neutral” as long ago as 2018.
Archbishop Welby has also hectored Christians about depicting or thinking of Jesus as “white”, while the Archbishop of York has asserted that “Jesus was a black man” — although on what basis he never explained.
The woke Anglican church is not the first to push a link between Christ and transgenderism in recent years, however, with the Church of Iceland having beaten them to the punch in 2020 by running Sunday school adverts showing a cartoon Jesus with make-up on and jiggling breasts.
“We’re trying to embrace society as it is. We have all sorts of people and we need to train ourselves to talk about Jesus as being ‘all sorts’ in this context,” explained a spokesman for the Evangelical Lutheran church at the time.
“[I]t’s really important that each and every person see themselves in Jesus and that we don’t stagnate too much. That’s the essential message… It’s okay that Jesus has a beard and breasts,” they insisted.
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