In my “Faith and Reason” seminar this past week, our reading was Genesis 1–11. We did not engage “creation-vs.-evolution” issues in my section this week; rather, we tabled that discussion until later in the semester, when we will be reading excerpts from Darwin’s Origin of Species and selected chapters from Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God. My students (most, but not all, conservative Christians) were, well, pretty freaked out by the notion of the “divine council,” which is explicit in other biblical texts but implicit in Genesis 1, 6, and 10. They also had never really considered the differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. I tried to focus the discussion primarily on literary themes, so the students could see that the differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are not just matters of superficial detail, but run deep into the conceptual frameworks the different stories instantiate (different controlling metaphors for God, different views about the “godlikeness” of humanity, and so on).

Yesterday, the table of contents for the October 2007 issue of Teaching Theology and Religion (published by Blackwell) landed in my inbox. This issue includes an article by David Bosworth entitled “Teaching Creation: A Modular Approach.” (The abstract is available here; you need a subscription to the journal—your own or a library’s—to read the full article, or you can pay a one-time access fee.) In the short (four pages) note, Bosworth describes how he teaches the Genesis creation stories. It’s an interesting approach, though it requires about three days of class, and I’m not sure how large Bosworth’s courses are. Some of his strategies sound a lot like my own, although I can really only spend one day of my “History and Religion of Israel” class on the creation stories, and I teach Genesis 1–2 alongside Psalms 74; 89 and Proverbs 8, so the students can see just how varied “biblical creation faith” really was.

But Bosworth’s non-literal approach apparently wouldn’t go over too well at Southwestern Community College in Red Oak, Iowa, where Steve Bitterman alleges that he was fired from his part-time appointment teaching Western civilization courses because he taught the Genesis story from a non-literalistic perspective. This story was brought to my attention by Hector Avalos, who was interviewed by the Des Moines Register for the story. Here’s a long excerpt from the story, though I encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself:

A community college instructor in Red Oak claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted.

Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class Tuesday. He said he was fired Thursday.

“I’m just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master’s degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job,” Bitterman said.

Sarah Smith, director of the school’s Red Oak campus, declined to comment Friday on Bitterman’s employment status. The school’s president, Barbara Crittenden, said Bitterman taught one course at Southwest. She would not comment, however, on his claim that he was fired over the Bible reference, saying it was a personnel issue.
“I can assure you that college understands our employees’ free speech rights,” she said. “There was no action taken that violated the First Amendment.”

Bitterman, who taught part time at Southwestern and Omaha’s Metropolitan Community College, said he uses the Old Testament in his western civilization course and always teaches it from an academic standpoint.

Bitterman’s Tuesday course was telecast to students in Osceola over the Iowa Communications Network. A few students in the Osceola classroom, he said, thought the lesson was “denigrating their religion.”

“I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn’t given any more credibility than any other god,” Bitterman said. “I told them it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there.”

Bitterman said called the story of Adam and Eve a “fairy tale” in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney. He declined to identify any of the students in the class.

“I just thought there was such a thing as academic freedom here,” he said. “From my point of view, what they’re doing is essentially teaching their students very well to function in the 8th century.”

I think it’s shocking, too. I might have expected such behavior at a private, Christian college where professors are required to affirm “statements of faith” and that sort of thing; even at Pepperdine, I know that my colleagues sometimes choose their words very carefully to avoid certain vocabulary (“myth”) while communicating the same concepts. But for a community college to fire a Western civilization professor for not teaching the “garden of Eden” story as historical fact is just mind-boggling. Besides that, Bitterman is quite right to say “it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there”—which loops us right back around to the first paragraph in this post. The Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 stories dramatize some very deep-seated (for the authors and their ancient audiences, anyway) questions about humanity and its place in the cosmos, and they offer diferent answers to these questions. That the editors of the book of Genesis left both stories in testifies to their ambivalence about the issues, and their sense that the two stories, which are incompatible if taken literally, represent two “poles” in a debate over these humanistic questions.

If Bitterman’s firing really was about the way he treated Genesis in his Western civilization course—and as far as I know, there has been no further comment from the school adminstration to the contrary, beyond the vague denial reprinted above—the school’s actions are reprehensible (and probably legally actionable as well, though I’m not really competent to speak on legal matters). One would think that if there were other serious reasons to fire Bitterman, the school wouldn’t have put him on the teaching rotation for the current term. The fact that the course is close-circuited over to another campus certainly suggests that they don’t have much depth in the bullpen. The timing is also suspicious. I’ll be surprised if Southwest comes out with a really convincing defense of Bitterman’s firing, but time will tell.