Author and pastor Doug Wilson has a lengthy post big-named Christians, ghostwriting, and plagiarism. He’s had to deal with plagiarism accusations in the past and he describes some of them:
One of my first books was one called Persuasions. In that book I have a character compare monogamy to buying a musical instrument and learning to play it, which is not like buying a record album and being stuck with listening to just one album over and over again. Years later I had a friend tell me he was disappointed that I had used C.S. Lewis’s analogy when he thought I was fully capable of coming up with my own. But I had no idea I was borrowing from Lewis. I am sure I got it from Lewis, and had used it in many witnessing conversations, and then when I wrote a book of witnessing encounters, in it went.
Other times I use something consciously. I conclude my weekly homily at the Lord’s Table with a phrase I got from John Bunyan — “come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.” Should I feel bad about not saying, every week, “as Bunyan once said . . .”? But I don’t feel bad.
This reminds me of some devotional emails I used to write. One man praised my writing highly twice, both times after I had simply forwarded a portion of a Puritan prayer printed in The Valley of Vision. I thanked him, but wondered if he thought what I had just sent out was mine. I’m still not sure.
If somebody writes a particularly good devotional text, is the glory theirs, or God’s?
If it is theirs, then stealing it is wrong and you need to be careful about proper attribution. If it is God’s, then it is God’s either way and the need to worry is much less.
I once wrote what I considered a particularly fine line of prose, only to learn later I’d read it first in The Lord of the Rings. Such things are almost inevitable. That’s why copyright law requires that the copied section be of substantial size.
Ori, if I passed off the eloquent words of a local pastor as my own–if he only preaches each week and I write down his words for publication–what would my motive be? Why would I be lying about whose words they are?
You’re right. I was thinking about inadvertent mistakes (like reusing a simile or a metaphor) rather than wholesale copying.