Okay, so it’s not exactly the Communist Manifesto or some terrorist call to arms. But it was enough to cost Bruce K. Waltke his job as a professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary.
His offense? Waltke suggested that maybe, just maybe, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was not entirely incompatible with evangelical faith. “If the data is [sic] overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult,” he said in a video that made its rounds on the internet, “some odd group that is not really interacting with the world. And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God’s Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness.”
Michael Milton, president of Reformed Theological Seminary, was not amused. Waltke submitted his resignation, Milton (according to Inside Higher Ed) prayed about it and then accepted the resignation.
Milton also characterized his school as open to a diversity of interpretations of Genesis. Some members of the faculty, he said, insisted that the world was created in seven 24-hour days, while others—the radical fringe, we can only assume—thought that the Hebrew word (yom) might be understood as a “framework” for a period of time longer than 24 hours.
Slippery slope, no doubt.
Although my purpose here is not to engage the substance of Waltke’s argument, I’ve never understood why all the fuss about the Genesis account(s) of creation. The first couple of chapters of Genesis purport to be neither history nor science. Yet evangelical and fundamentalist literalists insist on interpreting them as such. The purpose—and the beauty!—of the first two chapters of Genesis, it seems to me, is that these creation narratives tell us something important about the character of God, the nature of humanity and the importance of the natural world. That’s plenty—more than enough without burdening the text with literalism. It cheapens the story, in my view.
I digress. I’m more interested in what the Waltke kerfuffle says about the state of evangelicalism these days. I wonder if we’re not witnessing a retrenchment of sorts, a turning inward in response to a growing sense among evangelicals, especially politically conservative evangelicals, that things are not going their way in the larger culture. The election of Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in Congress together with the generation gap that has enervated the Religious Right might be prompting a kind of “purity purge” not unlike that which convulsed fundamentalism in the 1920s.
Following the Scopes trial of 1925, fundamentalists retreated into their own subculture, having concluded that the larger culture had turned against them. They grew increasingly more fractious and separatist, insisting on doctrinal and ideological purity.
It’s far too early to tell whether or not Bruce Waltke is a victim of another fundamentalist retrenchment, but his departure from Reformed Theological Seminary may be a harbinger of further purges. Stay tuned.
