Stealing another person’s work is bad enough that it can damage a Presidential campaign, ask Joe Biden. Creating anything is hard enough without the fear that an intellectual or cultural pirate will hoist his flag over your creation.
There is money to be made with a great art work and so the temptation will never end. Christian publishing and ministry is rife with stolen credentials, unacknowledged ghost writing, and plagiarism.
There is a more deadly form of plagiarism . . . spiritual theft. Several times a week, I am sent a profound quotation from the spiritual giant Maximos the Confessor. He is brutal on spiritual falsehood, as he must be as a good father in Christ. The wages of academic dishonesty is only expulsion from the academy, but for spiritual plagiarism expulsion from the presence of God.
Saint Maximos said:
- He who simulates spiritual knowledge merely by the utterance of words filches the mind of those who hear him in order to boost his own reputation. Similarly, he who simulates virtue in his outward behavior pilfers the sight of those who look at him, once more in order to promote his own self-glory. Both steal by means of deceit, the first perverting his audience’s mind, the second the bodily sense of those who see him.
Christian apologists should pause. How often do we simply repeat what a better man or woman has discovered, failing to acknowledge the debt? I might sound smarter if I learn to sound like William Lane Craig, but the depth will still not be there. Even more serious is the spiritual knowledge that goes beyond the argument of a life lived in the light of God. To pretend the knowledge of God that can only come by His grace and (almost) always with hours of prayer, fasting, and study of His Word.
One can put on Francis Schaeffer’s knickers or a monk’s robes and then learn to say what they said, but the clothing covers a spiritual thief. Once can develop that “holy sound” so familiar to religious grifters, Pentecostals have one sound, Baptists another, the Orthodox a third, but one cannot buy the real power of the Word of God for any price.
Notice, however, Maximos does not focus on the sin done to the soul of the thief, but to the sin he commits in the minds of his listeners. We give our minds (with trust) to our teachers. We must. When I teach even a secular topic in philosophy, my students need a certain level of trust in the integrity of my preparation. No teacher should just make up convenient facts! The trust needed is even greater with those called (as I am not!) to be pastors, priests, or spiritual guides. We cannot go to our spiritual fathers and mothers with the skepticism we must deploy at the used car lot or no learning could take place.
Worst still is the man or woman who pretends to virtue he or she does not have. All sin and a sinner in the process of redemption can help the rest of us by pointing to what the Holy Spirit is doing in his life, but what he must not do is pretend victory when there is none. If I am tempted to sin, do sometimes sin in an area, I must not act as if I have it all together.
All of this done, not just for money, but as Maximos says to promote “self-glory.” God help us to never work for a reputation instead of the real thing. Some work harder to seem just than they would have to do to be just. In this way, they hope to have the “benefits” of vice and the “benefits” of a good reputation. Plato deals with these souls in Republic and the noble pagan philosopher is as hard on these thieves as the Christian saint, showing how damnable and unhappy such men are.
We must write what we write, give credit where it is do, and not pretend to have secular knowledge or credentials we lack. In any even more profound level, we must shun pretended super-spirituality or virtue.
We all pray: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.
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