Unintended Sex Leads to Unintended Fall

Call it the case of a fictional falling man who threatens to cause the downfall of a real man, or call it a case of political correctness run amok. Whatever you call it, Graydon F. Snyder, a professor of New Testament at Chicago Theological Seminary, suddenly finds himself the most famous Bible scholar in the country—and dearly wishes he weren’t.

A committee at the seminary last year found the 63-year-old Snyder guilty of sexual harassment for recounting in class a fictional incident from the Talmud, the compendium of Jewish law and lore that has been at the heart of post-Biblical Judaism for nearly 2,000 years. The Talmudic case concerns an act of accidental sex between a man and a woman. A committee at the school found Snyder’s retelling of it offensive to the point of constituting sexual harassment. Snyder has countered by suing the school for defamation of character, saying he was just trying to throw light on the Bible by comparing it to a passage from an ancient Jewish text.

Newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Christian Century and the Associated Press, have covered the story. The seminary is closely affiliated with the liberal United Church of Christ. Snyder is a member of the Church of the Brethren and came to the seminary in 1986 as a professor and academic dean. Before that he had taught at Bethany Theological Seminary, in Oak Brook, Illinois.

Snyder’s unintended journey into the limelight began innocuously in March 1992, when he lectured to 35 students on one of Jesus’ sayings in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:27–28, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Many Americans will recall Jimmy Carter’s reference to this teaching when he admitted in an interview during the 1976 presidential campaign that he had been guilty of “lust in his heart.”

As he had done for 34 years of teaching this portion of the Sermon on the Mount, Snyder added that the Talmud approaches the same question—the relationship between sinful acts and sinful intentions—from a different angle. Snyder quoted a theoretical case recorded in the Talmudic tractate Baba Kamma (page 27a), which tells the story of a man working on a roof on a very hot day. The work is so laborious and the day so hot that the man soon sheds his clothes. At the same time, a woman inside the house—and not married to the man—decides to shed her clothes as well. A sudden wind blows the man off the roof; he lands atop the woman and accidently engages in intercourse with her. The Talmud rules that the man is responsible for any medical expenses the woman may incur as a result of his fall and that he has to repay her for any wages lost due to her injuries, but it finds that because the man did not intend to have sex with the woman he is not guilty of any sexual offense.

“I was simply trying to explain the Bible,” Snyder told BR. “The New Testament says if you think about doing the act, you’ve done it. The Talmud says if you do the act but didn’t think about it, you didn’t do it.” (For Snyder’s expanded explanation of the point he was trying to make, see the sidebar to this article, “Warning: This Lesson May Be Sexually Harassing.”)

After the class Snyder little realized that he was about to be accused of an offense himself. Snyder says no one in the class raised any objections to the roofer story at the time. But later that week, a female student accompanied by another female student told him that she had tape-recorded the lecture and said she would file a complaint with the Seminary’s Sexual Harassment Task Force. “She said that she was offended because men in her life generally say that they don’t intend to do anything and they do it anyway,” Snyder told the Washington Post. “And that I gave support to men who abused women, who may not intend to hurt them but hurt them nonetheless.”

Snyder insists he told the roofer story without sexual innuendo, a view supported by other students in the class. Valerie Carnes told the Post, “I just did not feel offended. I did not find anything inappropriate.” She added that she was “very impressed by [Snyder’s] sensitivity to women’s issues.” A second student, Joanne Nolan, told the Chicago Sun-Times, “I remember Professor Snyder telling that story in a lecture on intent, but I didn’t consider it harassment at all. It was like any other story and perfectly appropriate.”

For his part, Snyder told the Post that he did not expect the student’s complaint would be taken seriously. “The Chicago Theological Seminary is one of the most liberal schools in America and it prides itself on freedom of speech, so it didn’t even cross my mind …. I was absolutely sure the task force would say, ‘We’re sorry you’re hurt, but it doesn’t fall into the category of sexual harassment.’”

He was wrong. Almost one year to the day later, the task force circulated a memorandum to the school’s faculty, staff and 200 students. It found that Snyder had “engaged in ‘verbal conduct of a sexual nature’ that ‘has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work or academic performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working or academic environment.’ The task force has issued the following actions: 1) a formal reprimand for sexual harassment, with specified expectations for changed behavior; 2) probationary standing, with specified terms.”

The seminary recommended that Snyder undergo therapy and attend sexual harassment workshops (he declined) and forbade him to be alone with students. As a result, Snyder can teach only elective courses, not required ones, so that no one who does not wish to take a class with him will need to. During the fall semester last year a seminary official taped all his lectures, in case he said anything sexually offensive; the school stopped the practice in the spring.

This past February, Snyder fired back at the seminary. He filed a lawsuit claiming the task force denied him due process and defamed his character. Snyder is especially peeved because he says he was never notified of a formal charge against him and was not allowed to present a defense or cross-examine witnesses. The seminary and the members of the sexual harassment task force are not talking to the press. Richard Lewis, dean of students at the school and a member of the task force, told the New York Times only that Snyder’s case involved “more than just this one case.” Unless the two sides come to an out-of-court settlement, Snyder’s lawsuit could take several years to come to trial.

The woman who brought the sexual harassment charge against Snyder is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Snyder says his complaint is only with the seminary’s handling of the charges against him. Indeed, both sides have preserved the woman’s anonymity; press reports identify her only as 36 years old and as having since left the Chicago area.

Snyder told BR that he believes the charges against him were part of a set-up, orchestrated by his opponents on the faculty. Three weeks before Snyder told the roofer story, a female student accused him of rubbing himself against her in a school office. Snyder says he merely accidentally bumped into her near the copying machine. The student did not file a harassment charge with the school.

Two days after the class in which he recounted the roofer story, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, a faculty member whom Snyder describes as a “leading feminist in the theological world,” accused him during a public chapel service of having hugged her in an erotic manner. Snyder says the only time he had hugged Thistlethwaite was several years earlier, when she had been given tenure at the seminary. He countered by filing his own complaint, claiming that Thistlethwaite’s public charge amounted to sexual harassment against him. Snyder says he was never questioned about his complaint. Six days after the sexual harassment task force found Snyder guilty in the roofer incident, it informed him that while it did not support making accusations during chapel services, Thistlethwaite’s claim did not itself constitute sexual harassment. Thistlethwaite did not return messages left by by BR on her office answering machine.

Newspapers not usually noted for their interest in the Bible have had a field day with the Snyder case, using it to make their own ideological points. The New York-based Jewish weekly Forward, in a story titled “Chicago Censors Talmud,” accused the seminary’s task force of putting the Talmud itself on trial. “The task force also found the Talmud guilty—of being one of the world’s oldest dirty books,” the paper said. It quoted Snyder as asking the task force, “Are you aware that this is the Talmud I’m talking about, that I took this story from a Jewish holy book? … By telling me that I can’t tell stories from the Jewish tradition—that’s anti-Jewish.”

An editorial in the politically conservative Wall Street Journal on the case began, “For some time now comedians and cartoonists have found a rich source of material in the sex harassment industry—and who can blame them? … The latest entry in what we might call the wait-till-you-hear-this-one category of harassment claims comes from the Chicago Theological Seminary.” The editorial concluded, “It is quite clear that irrationality has replaced wisdom as the moving spirit at many institutions of higher learning in this country.”

Snyder told BR that all the charges against him were “inane.” He added that he was an example of being “at the wrong place at the wrong time. In liberal seminaries nowadays teaching Bible is not very respectable. In my case it’s even worse because I teach Paul. Students here concentrate on pastoral care, studying psychology, Freud, Jung and so on.”

When asked if he regrets moving to a liberal seminary, Snyder did not answer at first. After a pause he said only, “I never thought a liberal would tell me what I could and could not teach.”

Call it the case of a fictional falling man who threatens to cause the downfall of a real man, or call it a case of political correctness run amok. Whatever you call it, Graydon F. Snyder, a professor of New Testament at Chicago Theological Seminary, suddenly finds himself the most famous Bible scholar in the country—and dearly wishes he weren’t.