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Topics: World News
Anish Vij
A university student who claims Jesus was transgender has been accused of 'heresy'.
Dr Michael Banner, the Dean of Trinity College, backs up the 'legitimate' claims made by fellow junior researcher Joshua Heath.
The researcher displayed Renaissance and Medieval paintings of the crucifixion at last Sunday’s evensong at Trinity College chapel, reports The Telegraph.
The paintings emphasised on a side wound that he compared to a vagina in front of the congregation.
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"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 explained.
Notably, the junior researcher's PHD was supervised by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
An anonymous congregation member told Dr Banner in a complaint letter: "I left the service in tears. You offered to speak with me afterwards, but I was too distressed.
"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."
Dr Banner defended how the sermon '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'.
He added: "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."
However, Dr Banner said he 'would not issue an invitation to someone who I thought would deliberately seek to shock or offend a congregation or who could be expected to speak against the Christian faith'.
A Trinity College spokesman said: "The sermon explored the nature of religious art, in the spirit of thought-provoking academic inquiry, and in keeping with open debate and dialogue at the University of Cambridge."
Reverend Simon Woodman, a pastor at London’s Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, said earlier this year: "I think Jesus transgenders himself on a number of occasions. I think you know, just a little phrase, that Jesus is lamenting over Jerusalem, longing to gather Jerusalem as a mother hen gathers her chicks."
He added: "So I think in Jesus we’ve got a revelation of God as encompassing far more than what historically and, recently at least, Christians have tended to construct God as being.
"And I think there’s a bit of an antidote to heteronormative idolatry in in the story of Jesus."
