Cambridge sermon: Jesus may have been trans

Leaving aside the deepy iffy theology, since when was a vagina under the ribs?

🤣🤣🤣🤣

I think that you'll find that it can be wherever you want to pretend that it is these days!

@KatMcBundleFace "And as if medieval painters thought about Jesus embodying the female as well as the male."

Well, there was the whole Roman Catholic obsession with making everything about Mary...? The art-historians are firmly placing things in that context.

The art history I've studied has been pretty rigorous, and I'm somehow who is all about seeing things in context.

Isn't there that advice to writers, something like 'kill your darlings'? This bloke should have heeded that, then gone for a lie down.

Nothing is sacred (literally) any more.

@Ginmonkeyagain No, it doesn't. But sometimes historians (including within theology and art) get rather too comfortable with the awful things they're discussing (like doctors, I suppose). Think of all the praise we heap on Classical Civilization, which was entirely built on slavery.

As someone who sometimes writes short talks in an academic kind of setting, I can easily see how this particular bit of nonsense happened. "Oh! Isn't this fascination with vaginal imagery fascinating? I never knew about that, I should share it in this sermon!! Now, how I can I make it more of a sermon; oh yeah, bodies transcend the male/female distinction, so we're all part of Christ. Oh, I know, I know! I can widen this to include trans issues too."

I do like the idea of God - as opposed to Jesus - being essentially non-binary though.

You are right Magpie, I will educate myself and try to do better in future!! 😂

Correct me if I'm wrong but:
It's a bloke in the picture
It was blokes painting the pictures
It's blokes analysing the picture

And have any of them ever been near an actual vagina? They are not actually blood weeping gashes.....

And as if medieval painters thought about Jesus embodying the female as well as the male. I'm pretty sure women weren't very important at all in these periods. Why on earth would this be a thing? Do art historians even contemplate wider historic context, or do they just make things up to, I dunno, get a PHD.

Hey Cambridge, I can make stuff up too!! Give us a Doctorate!

This takes me back to some of the arguments against women priests back in the dark ages when I were a lass - I recall someone called Tom Stacey wittering on in the Telegraph about the ‘eternal feminine’ giving life and giving suck, in a rather creepy fetishistic sort of vein (the priest was apparently the ‘eternal masculine’ and only men could be priests because logic and words and reason were masculine). I rolled my eyes at this as a teenager and wondered if he could tell the difference between religious faith and sexual fantasy.

Of course, the terms of discourse have shifted somewhat and women are now trying to take back ownership of the arguments around biological definitions of femaleness - but the above illustrates the dangers in allowing ourselves to be exclusively defined by male ideas of our biology.

@PhotoDad oh indeed, think of the etymology of vagina for a start.

Doesn't make it any less offensive though!

Anyone singing "Mary's Boy Child" will be called out for the BIGOTS that they are!

I'm.not in the slightest bit religious but am.thinking WTF🙈

Op, how’s about providing contact detials of said preacher…seems ther3 are some good pints here to write to him on future sermon themes 🤣🤣

Yep, that’s what I’m going “eh?” about
most pre 20th century pictureed Christ as white Caucasian fgs 🙄, whereas he was a Middle Eastern of Jewish descent - maybe the trendy clergy should have started with the racist issue of portraits of Christ first ?
perhaps you should speak or drop him an email saying how interesting his sermon was, and next time he pre he’s is he going to discuss the racist element ? And mention you are surprised at the priority given there is a bigger majority of people than trans population ;that can be affected by this sort of cultural discrimination 🤷🏼‍♀️🤦‍♀️

Exactly.

Manages to be offensive to women and Christians and Muslims.

(I did wonder how this sermon would go down with the elderly Northern working-class congregation of my FiL's church).

@Ginmonkeyagain It is, but that symbolism is definitely found in pre-modern art, which (I think) is what the preacher was pointing out. It's part of a far longer story of "woman as disfigured man" (all the way to Adam's rib). (That's not unique to the monotheistic religions, by the way, although there are interesting texts about sex and gender in Buddhism. But that's a very different thread!)

I mean it is pretty offensive to women. Vaginas are not holes, wounds or gashes.

@PrinceYakimov !!!

I think we agree on the main points here. Being completely honest, the thing which first struck me was that so many people could actually hear the sermon, last time I visited King's Cambridge, I was about five miles from an un-amplified, mumbling, preacher. But this one had visual aids...

I also suspect that although this is pushing peoples' buttons because of the particular sermon, many people (including Christians) don't appreciate just how strange Christianity is, as a belief system. (Of course, for some, that's it's attraction. "I believe what is impossible" proclaimed Tertullian... who ended up leaving the Church for a heretical sect himself.)

Is nothing sacred?

Oh I think it's legit to read that into the art itself, and possibly as a historical view of Christ's personhood too - I just don't agree we have to buy into that view ourselves, which is what the preacher seems to have done.

And I went to a similar college so I know what college chapel sermons are like - if it is done well it can be very good and illuminating of the Gospel too! This seems however to have missed the mark.

The most delightfully bonkers university sermon I have heard was at a wedding, where the (Anglican) priest delivered a stone-cold sermon on the virtues of a celibate priesthood 🤔

Yes, if that theory is true, nuns must 'really' be trans men.

[Contemplates Dr Heath advancing this theory to certain nuns, then tiptoes away quietly]

Conceptualising penetration as the thing that makes you "feminine" is yuck too.

Fantastically misogynist.

Thanks for the discussion that PhotoDad and others are having, v interesting.

This is hilarious.
Finally something I can get on board with. Won over. No longer GC. 😂 There are a few people I can't wait to tell I reckon Jesus was a t***.

Even in my day, long before gender issues became so prominent, a lot of sermons I heard in university chapels were bonkers.