Until this month, John Candide had taught religion at Calvin College, affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church, for 25 years. But his "fall from grace," as the website InsideHigherEd put it, came after he "wrote about challenges science poses to a literal reading of the gospels." For that offense, he has agreed to leave his tenured teaching job.

As Mr. Candide explains, he recently became troubled by conflicts between science and literal readings of gospel accounts of Jesus' resurrection: "The more I read, the more I talked with biologists, the more it became clear to me: science tells us that when people die, they stay dead." He adds that he continues to believe in the importance of the Bible.

In their joint statement, Mr. Candide and Calvin College said that they agreed to part ways because of tensions raised by his scholarship and a desire not to create "harm and distraction." Despite this peaceful resolution, his departure raises questions about freedom of scholarship at the college.

Or not—I invented John Candide. The actual story at InsideHigherEd, from which I have borrowed liberally above, was a bit different. The alleged offense involved challenges posed by science to a literal reading of Genesis, not of Jesus' resurrection. And the professor in question is named John Schneider.

As he wrote in an academic journal earlier this year, Mr. Schneider has concluded that human ancestry can't be traced to a single couple, the Adam and Eve of the Genesis account. Moreover, he believes—on the basis of science, he says—that the very notion of a fall from a primal state of beatitude must be false.