Joshua Heath delivered a homily from the pulpit of Trinity Chapel in Cambridge, England, in which he showed several images of medieval paintings of Christ and suggested that Christ had a trans body and that the wound in his side was vaginal.
Heath claimed that non-erotic portrayals of Jesus' penis in historical paintings
"urge a welcoming rather than hostile response towards the raised voices of trans people," and that the spear wound in Jesus' side "takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance.
"In Christ's simultaneously masculine and feminine body in these works, if the body of Christ as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body," Heath said.
Understandably, the congregation, which included children, was unhappy. Shouts of "heresy" rang out several times during the sermon. Several congregants left the building in tears.
One churchgoer wrote a scathing letter to Dr. Michael Banner the dean of Trinity College:
"I left the service in tears…I am 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."
The dean shrugged off the critique and replied,
"[Heath] 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.
"For myself, I think that speculation was legitimate, whether or not you or I or anyone else disagrees with the interpretation, says something else about that artistic tradition, or resists its application to contemporary questions around transsexualism."
Later, a spokesperson for Trinity College tried to roll back the controversy and made the following statement:
"The College would like to make clear the following, neither the Dean of Trinity College nor the researcher giving the sermon suggested Jesus was transgender.
"The sermon addressed the image of Christ depicted in art and various interpretations of those artistic portrayals," the spokesperson continued. "The sermon's exploration of the nature of religious art, in the spirit of thought-provoking academic inquiry, was in keeping with open debate and dialogue at the University of Cambridge."
And this is not the first depiction of a transgender Jesus. The Church of Iceland had a Sunday School ad that portrayed Jesus with makeup and breasts.
Frankly, it all reminds me when President Biden released that video about transgender people being made in the image of God, so we should affirm their identities.
And that got me thinking. It is true that transgender people bear the image of God, but the act of mutilating that image in opposition to His design is likely the reason why God forbids transgenderism and calls it an abomination in the law (Deuteronomy 22:5).
Suggesting that Christ, the perfect image of God, was transgender would mean that He was sinful according to the law, and it would nullify His sacrifice and all of Christianity with it.
And when you look at it from that perspective, these absurd attacks are nothing new – just another generation's attempt to destroy Christianity.
We all know how that goes.
