Christian Century: Stolen Goods: Tempted to plagiarize (HT Presbyweb). I thought this was a fascinating article. It raises all sorts of questions about just what exactly is a sermon. Would these plagiarism issues have made any sense to anyone living before the 16th Century and the influence of the Enlightenment, much less in biblical times? Interesting to reflect on.
With a few clicks of the mouse, I had uncovered a crime wave of homiletical petty larceny.
A couple of years ago, a student in one of my preaching courses was struggling terribly. The sermons he preached in class were plodding, disorganized and weakly supported exegetically and theologically. He was aware that he was not meeting expectations, and he was frustrated and embarrassed by his performance. But then, in his final opportunity to redeem himself in the course, he surprised us all by preaching a stunning sermon, both profound and lyrical. It was unexpectedly excellent.
Too good, in fact. Sadly suspicious, I plugged one of his more delicious phrases into Google. Alas, up came the whole sermon on a church's Web site, preached by the pastor of that church many months before. It was an unfortunate but clear case of plagiarism. That was not, however, the whole story. My search actually produced dozens of hits, disclosing that, evidently, my student was not the only preacher to find this particular sermon compelling. A number of others, all with their sermons posted online, had lifted paragraphs and pages from the original sermon, mostly without credit. In a last and unexpected twist, this much-copied sermon itself turned out to contain a long section cribbed without attribution from a Living by the Word column in this very journal. With a few clicks of the mouse, I had uncovered a crime wave of homiletical petty larceny.
…….
Some voices are now arguing that the whole concept of intellectual property, on which many of our convictions about plagiarism rest, is a post-Enlightenment, modernist illusion that is rapidly being unmasked. The very idea that people create new things out of words and thus own them falls in the face of the evidence that every literary creation is an amalgam—known and unknown, acknowledged and unacknowledged—of previous oral and literary acts. We are now entering, goes the argument, a kind of postmodernist "open source" society in which the whole notion of plagiarism evaporates because, when closely examined, everything is a kind of plagiarism. A recent issue of Harper's Magazine includes an elegant essay by novelist Jonathan
…….
Some pastors have picked up a theological version of this open-source argument. Sermon words are gifts from God, they say, and thus fair game for any and all who wish to appropriate them. How dare preachers do anything but sing the doxology, they ask, when their sermons show up in the mouths of other pastors? Moreover, with God-given words in ripe clusters of low-hanging fruit all over the Internet, originality becomes a highly overrated virtue, perhaps even a sign of hubris. For these preachers, the goal is to create an impact upon hearers; who cares where the words come from?
…….
But then he wondered, "Perhaps sermon writing should not be a job requirement." Being a pastor, Cohen said, requires many different gifts, and no one can possess them all in abundance. "If an otherwise excellent pastor is clumsy with his pen," he mused, "his parish would be better served by hearing him deliver the profound and stirring words of a more talented author."
Really? Poor preachers should simply stop the pain and treat their congregations to sermons composed by steadier hands? Surprisingly, Cohen would find agreement from no less an authority than St. Augustine, who wrote, "There are, indeed, some people who have a good delivery, but cannot compose anything to deliver. Now, if such people take what has been written with wisdom and eloquence by others, and commit it to memory, and deliver it to the people, they cannot be blamed, supposing them to do it without deception."
……..
Complicating the plagiarism issue even more is the fact that some congregations in primarily oral cultures—for example, sectors of the African-American church and some Appalachian white churches—preserve and honor the tradition of repreaching well-known "set piece" sermons, such as "Jesus' Funeral" or "The Deck of Cards" (a sermon in which the preacher symbolically deals out cards, one at a time, making a biblical allusion for each one). The preaching of such sermons is folk performance art, and originality of composition is not the issue. Many of the hearers would have heard these sermons time and again and, as in the case of hearing a jazz riff, would be interested mainly in how the performer improvises on the old material.
…….
A good test of this point is to ask, What would happen if the preacher told the truth? "Hey folks, it's been a busy week and I didn't have time to work on a sermon, and honestly, I'm not all that creative anyway. So this is a little something I found on the 'net." The fact that the air would immediately go out of the room is a reliable indicator that the tacit agreement of the sermon event has been violated. This is why plagiarists, for all their blather about God's words being free for all, never confess their true sources and always imply that these words are coming straight from the heart. Yes, Augustine made space for preachers to memorize the words of other, more eloquent proclaimers, but note well that he added the test of truth: "supposing them to do it without deception."
Leave a Reply to neilCancel reply