Stolen goods

by Jason Byassee

Tom Long’s recent piece on plagiarism is important. I had hoped that the number of instances of plagiarism I’ve bumped into was abnormal, but I fear it is not. I’m thinking of a senior minister who downloads every word of every sermon, and of another prominent cleric who preached a plagiarized sermon at a funeral for a fellow minister, with loads of other clergy present (you didn’t think any of them would notice?)

More than one “famous” clergy friend has had his or her work regularly plagiarized by others. A friend and I were lamenting this plague of plagiarism recently, but giving thanks it was “famous” preachers whose work is stolen, and not us mere plebs. Then we thought to check: he googled himself and found two large churches in which his sermons had been re-preached without attribution.

I share Long’s ambivalence about this. Every preacher knows (or ought to) that her words are not hers: they are God’s. And not only God’s, but the church’s. Our sermons are not our private intellectual property, they are the church’s treasures entrusted to us, which we in turn hand down to others. The ancient church had a word for thing preached that were particular to the individual preacher: heresy.

For most of its history the church studiously trampled upon the very thing our laws are designed to protect—intellectual property. The act that will get you kicked out of divinity school was expected of you if you were a cleric in another age. John Wesley recorded his sermons so others could use them. The church long before him published sermons of great preachers so the not-so-great would have something to say. To use one arcane slice of church history: St. Thomas Aquinas probably never heard of St. Gregory of Nyssa—it took the 20th century to revive Gregory’s fame. But he knew his ideas. How? St. John Damascene simply copied whole-cloth huge sections of Gregory’s work. What Aquinas thought came from Damascene actually came from Gregory. Who cares as long as it all came from God? What was going on the night Wesley converted at Aldersgate Street? Someone was reading from Luther’s commentary on Romans (as Tony Campolo likes to say—who thought that would be an interesting evening’s substitute for a guest speaker?).

But that’s the thing: the reader announced he was reading from Luther’s commentary. Present-day pastors generally give no indication they’re using others’ work, and their churches expect them to do just that. When a layperson thanks a pastor for a moving sermon, or praises her for a particularly appropriate illustration, how does that pastor look her in the eye when he lifted it off the Internet the night before?

It’s the laziness that troubles me the most. When Rick Warren says, “If my bullets fit your gun, fine,” is he referring back to the ancient church’s attribution of all truth to God, or is he making allowance for pastors who long since quit reading, thinking, working out the content of salvation on behalf of their churches? In the instances I know about that is indeed the case. It’s not as though these pastors have such interesting, important and dynamic ministry that they couldn’t spare a day or even a few hours preparing something fresh. They’re just burnt out: they need love and care, but not a pulpit. As for the rest of us: if Dietrich Bonhoeffer could write fresh sermons at Finkenwalde, if Desmond Tutu could in Apartheid South Africa, if pastors in Zimbabwe can now, surely we can too.