Moving Past Spiritual Plagiarism

My bro and his family are here from San Fransisco for some quality family Christmas time. When we first moved to Durham, they were just twenty minutes away, it's great to have them back for a couple of days.

Daniel teaches New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, a great place for any of you aspiring seminarians out there. Yesterday he was telling me yet another story about plagiarism in one of his classes.

"Seems like you've got at least one in every class you teach," I said. He paused. "Yep, it averages out to be just about one a class."

And this is at a seminary. I can only think that the average undergrad class has at least four or five students dabbling in or up-to-their-eyeballs in plagiarism. This is a pretty major epidemic in the academy.

To be fair, he only counts one or two of those as pernicious. The rest, he says, are just clueless about what it means to cite a web site, for example, or what constitutes plagiarism versus a summary of someone's ideas.

The irony, he was telling me, is that the students are required to do a fair amount of research. If they cited these sources rather than plagiarized them, they would actually get credit for their work. Instead, they try to pass someone else's ideas off as their own and they get in trouble for it.

I think all of us are tempted to plagiarize in our lives somewhere--to take credit for something that is not ours to be credited for. This is true in parenting (perhaps our kids good attributes are not as correlated to our great parenting as we would like). It's true in our work, in our relationships with one another, and I think it's true in our spiritual lives.

I think the core obstacle for most of us in our spiritual journey is that we would rather imagine ourselves as basically good and decent people who simply need a little boost occasionally than as desperately needy people who must cling to grace because we have no other lifeline.

There are few things in which most westerners are more self-deceived than in our self-assessment of our own goodness. We over-estimate our own goodness and under-credit God for his work of grace in our lives. This is true for those of us who claim to be Christians as well as it is for those who do not.

And the irony of all of it, like with the students in my brothers' classes, is that to live into reality bears life-giving fruit. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," says Proverbs. To enter into a rightly-relating place of understanding our need for grace begins to grow us up into wisdom, and "whoever finds wisdom, finds life" (also in Proverbs).

So here's a New Year's resolution suggestion: stop plagiarizing goodness from God. Instead, let's confess and embrace the reality of his goodness and his grace and love and joy poured out into our lives....and receive that with gladness.

Feel free to quote me on that.