When the Fences Come Down

From a transgender dean in Milwaukee to a "transitioned" Jesus in Manhattan: what happens when a church sheds Scripture's boundary on sex

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | September 28, 2026

G.K. Chesterton warned against tearing down a fence before you know why it was put up. The Episcopal Church tore down its fences decades ago. It is now discovering what they were keeping out.

Two stories in the space of three weeks tell the tale. In Milwaukee, All Saints' Cathedral installed the Very Rev. Micah Cronin as the first transgender-identifying cathedral dean in the church's history. Cronin is a biological woman who identifies as a man, married to another biological woman, the Rev. Elias Henry, who also identifies as transgender. In Manhattan, from the pulpit of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the Rev. Flourish Klink informed the faithful that God is trans and that Jesus Christ "transitioned" in the resurrection.

The first story is about the bedroom. The second is about the Godhead. The distance between them is shorter than anyone in 1976 would have imagined, and it runs in a straight line.

The Sermon

Klink, who identifies as non-binary and transgender, preached the sermon in March for the Trans Day of Visibility. It sat quietly for six months until LifeSiteNews picked it up this week and it went viral. That alone tells you how little anyone at St. John the Divine thought it worth objecting to.

The argument, such as it is, runs like this. God is non-binary. When God was born in human form, Mary looked at the baby and pronounced him a boy. "God was assigned a gender at birth," said Klink, "and later on it became clear that that gender wasn't quite right." Hence God is trans. Then came the clincher: deny that God is trans and "you're going to be denying the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ."

Read that again. The Creed has been stood on its head. It is now heresy to believe what the Church has confessed for two thousand years, and orthodoxy to believe what no Christian ever believed until the day before yesterday.

Mary, of course, assigned nothing. The angel Gabriel told her before she conceived that she would "conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son" (Luke 1:31). The sex of the Christ child was announced from heaven, not guessed at in a stable. Isaiah had said as much seven centuries earlier: "unto us a son is given" (Isaiah 9:6).

The Risen Body

Klink's second move is to the empty tomb. The disciples did not at first recognize the risen Jesus, so something must have changed. "I think Jesus was not only transfigured," Klink concluded. "I think Jesus was transitioned."

The Gospels answer this directly, and they answer it from the lips of Christ himself. On the Emmaus road, Luke tells us, the disciples' "eyes were holden that they should not know him" (Luke 24:16). The veil was on their sight, not on his body. When they finally knew him in the breaking of the bread, they knew the same Lord they had followed. In the upper room, Jesus showed them his hands and his feet and said, "It is I myself: handle me, and see" (Luke 24:39). He ate broiled fish in front of them. He invited Thomas to put his finger into the nail prints.

The whole point of the resurrection narratives is continuity. The body that was crucified is the body that was raised. Not a new self. The same self, glorified.

There is an ancient name for what Klink is preaching. The Gnostics despised the body as a garment, a prison, a costume to be shed on the way to the "true self" hidden within. Irenaeus of Lyons spent five books dismantling that idea in the second century. Against every Gnostic sect, the Fathers insisted that God made the body, entered the body, redeemed the body, and raised the body. What Klink offers is not progressive theology. It is second-century heresy in twenty-first-century vocabulary.

And it runs straight into the words of Jesus. Asked about marriage, our Lord did not describe sex as a social assignment. He said: "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female?" (Matthew 19:4). A trans Jesus would have to be a Jesus who contradicted himself.

The Dean

Now return to Milwaukee. Cronin, raised Methodist, joined the Episcopal Church at 19, around the time of identifying as transgender, and has written that the churches of his youth "were not able to receive me as I am." The Episcopal Church could, and did, all the way to a cathedral deanery.

All Saints' reportedly draws about 70 worshippers on a typical Sunday in a building that seats several hundred. The Diocese of Wisconsin is itself three failing dioceses stitched into one. None of this has prompted anyone in authority to ask whether the experiment is working.

The Straight Line

Here is what ties these two stories together. Neither could have happened in a church that held to Scripture's teaching that sexual intimacy belongs within marriage between one man and one woman. Both are the logical fruit of abandoning it.

Consider the progression. In 1976, General Convention declared that homosexual persons have "a full and equal claim" upon the church, a sentence that became the lever for everything that followed. In 2003, the church consecrated Gene Robinson, a partnered gay man, as Bishop of New Hampshire, and the Anglican Communion began to tear. In 2012, General Convention added "gender identity and expression" to its non-discrimination canon for ordination. In 2015, it rewrote its marriage canon to remove the words "a man and a woman." Now, in 2026, it has a transgender cathedral dean and a transgender Christ.

Each step was sold as a small, compassionate adjustment. Each step was said to be the last. None was.

Once you concede that the male-and-female pattern of Genesis 1:27 is not binding on the bedroom, you have no ground left to insist it is binding on the body. And once it is not binding on the body, you have no ground to insist it is binding on the Body of Christ.

Paul describes this very slide in Romans 1. Men "changed the truth of God into a lie," and three times the apostle says God "gave them up" to what they desired. It is judgment by permission. God lets a people have what it insists on having.

Why Sex Is Never Just About Sex

The revisionists always said the sexuality debate was a secondary matter, a question of pastoral care, not creed. They were wrong, and the sermon at St. John the Divine proves it.

Marriage in Scripture is not a private arrangement. It is a living icon. Paul says the union of husband and wife is "a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:32). The difference between male and female is written into the very picture God chose to show the world his love for his people. Blur the picture, and sooner or later you blur the One it pictures.

Erase the line between man and woman, and you will end by erasing the line between the Christ of Scripture and the Christ of your own desires.

That is exactly what has happened. The church that would not say no in the bedroom has found it cannot say no in the pulpit.

The Fence Was There for a Reason

The Episcopal Church began by redefining marriage. It has ended by redefining Christ. There was, in truth, nowhere else for it to go.

Long before Chesterton, the Preacher said it better: "whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him" (Ecclesiastes 10:8). The serpent has always lived on the far side of the hedge. His first words in Scripture were a question about a boundary God had set: "Yea, hath God said?" (Genesis 3:1). Every step of the Episcopal Church's long slide has begun with that same question.

The fence was there for a reason. The reason has now climbed into the pulpit of one of the largest cathedrals in the world and announced that the Son of God was born in the wrong body.

The Word became flesh. Not a costume. Not a first draft. Flesh. And that flesh, crucified and risen, is still the flesh of the Son of Mary. No sermon can transition him.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.