The Rt. Rev. Justin Holcomb has issued a theological pastoral letter rejecting the claim, preached at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, that Jesus “transitioned” at the resurrection. The Bishop of Central Florida calls the idea an old error under a new name.
In a 13-page essay, *The Body of Jesus Christ: Incarnate, Crucified, Risen, Ascended, Returning*, Dr. Holcomb traces the creeds’ account of Christ’s body from the manger to the Second Coming. He argues that at every stage the Church has confessed the same thing: “The body is real. The body is his. The body is forever.”
The letter does not name the preacher or the cathedral. It does, however, describe the argument it answers: “Some now say that the particular body Jesus had in Nazareth, including its sex, was a kind of provisional assignment, and that the resurrection corrected it, so that the one who walked out of the tomb had shed what he was and become at last his true self.”
The letter responds to a homily preached by the Rev. Flourish Klink, an assistant priest at Christ & St. Stephen’s Church in Manhattan, on March 21, 2026, at the cathedral’s Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience. The cathedral’s service bulletin lists the Rt. Rev. Matthew Heyd, Bishop of New York, as presiding and Fr. Klink as preacher. The sermon got little attention until a video clip spread on social media in late September.
In the text published on Fr. Klink’s website the preacher said “it isn’t controversial at all to say that God is non-binary” and then went further: “God is trans.” Fr. Klink argued that when God was born as Jesus, “Mary said ‘Oh, look! A baby boy!’ But God isn’t a boy … God was assigned a gender at birth, and later on, it became clear that that gender wasn’t quite right.”
Turning to the resurrection narratives, in which the disciples did not at first recognize the risen Lord, Fr. Klink acknowledged that “the Bible doesn’t tell us” why, adding, “I don’t know for sure … But I have an idea. I think Jesus was resurrected as Jesus’s true self, which is beyond male or female. I think that Jesus was not only transfigured. I think that Jesus transitioned.”
Bishop Holcomb begins where the sermon began, with the doctrine of God, and grants its premise. “Christians rightly confess that God is beyond sex and gender,” he writes. He cites Gregory of Nazianzus, who ridiculed anyone who concluded from the word “Father” that God must be male.
But he argues that the premise leads the other way. “The Father has no body. Neither does the Spirit. The Son had none until Mary. That is the whole point of the incarnation.” The Son entered creaturely existence “in particular, in a womb, in a manger, in a town, in a body that could be held. His maleness is not a divine attribute showing through the flesh. It is the flesh.”
The bishop rests his case on the Definition of Chalcedon, which confesses Christ as “truly God and truly man,” with the two natures united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” He argues that the “newer error” revives two condemned positions at once. “To say that the maleness of Jesus was an appearance that concealed a truer self beyond male or female is to say that at least one feature of his humanity was not real, and that is Docetism. To say that the divine nature, which is beyond sex, overrode the human nature in this respect is to confuse the natures, and that is Eutyches. The old errors did not die. They moved to a different part of the body.”
He also takes up an objection: if the Savior was male, how is he the Savior of women? Quoting Gregory’s maxim that “that which he has not assumed he has not healed,” he answers that what Christ assumed was human nature. “Christ saves women not by sharing their sex but by sharing their nature. He saves Gentiles not by sharing their nation but by sharing their nature … The scandal of particularity is not a flaw in the incarnation. It is the incarnation.”
The letter answers most directly in its treatment of Easter. Bishop Holcomb argues that the Gospels “go out of their way to establish the identity” of the risen body. He points to the hands and feet shown in the upper room, the broiled fish eaten before the disciples, the wounds offered to Thomas, and the breakfast cooked by the Sea of Galilee. “If the risen body were a different body, the wounds would be a deception.”
He then addresses the non-recognition passages that the sermon relied on. They “are sometimes pressed into saying that the risen Jesus looked like a different person. He did not,” he writes. In each account, he argues, the evangelist places the failure in the people looking, not in the one seen. On the Emmaus road “their eyes were kept from recognizing him,” and “the passive voice is the point. God was doing something to their sight, not to his face.” Mary Magdalene knew him by his voice. The disciples in the boat were a hundred yards offshore at dawn. “Grief, distance, dawn, and the sheer impossibility of what they were seeing explain every one of these scenes. None of them says the body was different.”
He sets the “true self” reading alongside the second-century Gnostic texts. He cites the Gospel of Thomas’ promise that the disciples will enter the kingdom when “the male is not male and the female is not female.” In his reading, “This is not a resurrection. It is an escape, and the thing escaped from is the body … The resurrection does not reveal a truer Jesus beneath the Jesus of Nazareth. It vindicates the Jesus of Nazareth.”
The bishop carries the argument through the ascension and Second Coming. He contends that the Son did not lay aside his humanity: “The body that went up is the body that will come down. Nothing was shed on the way.” He cites the Heidelberg Catechism’s teaching that “we have our flesh in heaven as a sure pledge.”
He argues that the question reaches beyond Christology to Christian hope. Because Christ is the firstfruits of the resurrection, “If his body was a provisional appearance corrected in glory, then our bodies are provisional appearances, and the resurrection is not the raising of what we are but its replacement by something else.” He also rejects the view that the body is “a costume over a truer self.” Against it he writes: “The body is not a prison and it is not a costume. It is you. God made it, the Son took one like it, and the Spirit will raise it.”
The letter’s final pages take a pastoral turn, and they echo the sermon’s own language. Fr. Klink had told the cathedral congregation, “Lord, I am so tired of justifying myself,” and closed with the words, “The world is against us. But God is for us. God sees us and loves us and will justify us as we work to live our lives honestly.”
Bishop Holcomb writes that “many people are exhausted from justifying themselves” and are waiting to hear whether the self they present is acceptable. “The gospel does not ask anyone to locate a true self and offer it up for approval,” he writes. “The approval comes first. It comes from outside. It is not earned by honesty or authenticity or any other achievement. It is given, in a body, on a cross.” Quoting Romans 8, he writes that God’s being “for us” rests “not on God’s sympathy with our situation” but on “Christ Jesus the one who died, more than that, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us … Four verbs, one body.”
No response from the Diocese of New York or the cathedral has been published as of now. Fr. Klink answered the criticism in an Instagram post quoted by Scene Magazine writing, “I’m very happy to discuss my opinions and beliefs with anyone who cares to have a serious, non-abusive conversation. I’m sure I’m not right about everything; how can any of us know the mind of God?”