Pulpit Plagiarism: an acknowledgement

Mmm. I'm not sure I really buy this from the great Prof Don Carson on the wickedness of pulpit plagiarism. I tend to think that what we want is the best possible sermons. The sermon is not an academic essay. It seems to me that citing sources or flagging up "borrowings" might detract from the whole thing. It doesn't seem to me that the preacher is claiming originality for his outlines, forms of expression etc. Sure, you shouldn't tell other people's personal stories as if it happened to you on the way to the church: that would ammount to lies. Save your footnotes for the blog, I reckon.

Revd Dr Tim Keller talks sense on the subject when, whilst warning against plagiarism and especially failure to grapple with the text for yourself, he says:

we must be careful not to over-react. I don’t think anyone expects oral communication to have the same amount of detailed attribution as we expect in written communication. To cite where you got every allusion or basic idea or general illustration in a sermon would be tedious. A certain amount of leeway must be granted. Also, if you take a basic idea or illustration and “make it your own,” I don’t think you have to give attribution. Often the preacher you fear you are stealing from got that idea from some Puritan author and re-worked it into more contemporary form. And the Puritan might have gotten it from someone else. In fact, in the act of preaching, we often say something that we know we heard somewhere, but we can’t even remember where we got it. Again, I think we need to be charitable to preachers and not charge them with plagiarism for every un-new idea. Brand-new preachers, especially, are going to do a lot of copying of preachers that have influenced them.