Full Contact Christianity

It’s relatively easy for an unattached single man to make his way in the world. If he’s willing to do hard work, he can end up with quite a lot of money, and not much in the way of expenses. If he wants to take a trip to France, or buy a nice guitar, or upgrade to a better car, all he has to do is pick up some extra shifts and not be a complete goof…or sometimes, just wait until next payday.

It’s *way* harder for him to generate the kind of surplus required to sustain a wife and raise a family. So here’s the question: what would move a man to give up the autonomy and simplicity of the single life? Why should he trade that in for the constant needs and obligations of a wife and children? (Those of us who’ve pursued marriage and children can attest to the glory of it, but looking in from the outside, the glory is sometimes obscured by the large quantities of poop and the small quantities of sleep involved.)

The drive that would motivate him to abandon his autonomy that would have to be very powerful indeed — and in God’s providence, it is. The strong sex drive God gave men is designed to move a man to do all the extra work involved in winning a good woman, providing for her, and raising the children they will have together. For her, he’ll do anything. With her, he wants to be fruitful and multiply, and a good man willingly takes on all the responsibilities that come with that.

The male sex drive is not strong because of sin. The male sex drive is strong because God designed it to be. It’s good, and we should celebrate it.

Let’s get a couple things out of the way real quick. Copying someone else’s essay online and turning it in for your Freshman Comp class assignment is bad. Don’t do it. The point of the assignment is for the professor to see how you write and think, and you’re cheating when you pretend someone else’s stuff is yours. Taking swathes of someone else’s research and presenting it in your book without attribution, as if it was yours, is wrong. Thou shalt not. Likewise, watching a John Piper sermon on Youtube and then delivering that same sermon to your congregation, pretending that you wrote it, telling his story of what happened in the grocery store line as if it happened to you — that’s wrong, mmkay? (I’ve written about this last case before, and the problem is much bigger than plagiarism, it’s dereliction of pastoral duty.) I hope these disclaimers go without saying, but since I’m going to redraw some lines here, I guess I’d better say them.

Those things said, I argued last week that our contemporary take on plagiarism is a historical and cultural oddity founded on highly questionable presuppositions. Even here in the West, we didn’t think that way about authorship until very recently. The older model, the one that obtained throughout the ancient world and right on through Christendom, made very free use of source material, and at the same time made very free modification and adaptation of that source material. Everything was presumed to be a derivative work; what kind of idiot would try to compose anything of significance totally on his own?

Which is to say, they had an ethos of apprenticeship. You mimicked the best. You made modifications as your own vision and situation called for it. That’s how they did everything.

That approach to composition is largely dead, but it survives in effective preaching. A sermon is not a novel. When I get up to speak on (say) Ephesians 1:3-14, there is no expectation that I am going to say something unique in the history of exegesis and theology. In fact, very much the opposite. The goal is to say things that are true, and nourishing for the people God has given me to serve. In service of that end, I am able to make very free use of source material, and at the same time make extensive modifications to it to make it suit my setting and situation, If the “hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,” then I didn’t do my job. But if they were fed, then I did do my job, and that’s all that matters.

There is a type of preacher that will liberally festoon his sermon with verbal footnotes, lest he be accused of plagiarizing something. I understand the motivation, but that kind of name-dropping is just bad practice. The emphasis should be on the Word, not on how much homework you did and who you read when you were doing it. Don’t give your people a list of authors; give them what the text says and what to do about it.

Now of course, if someone asks you where you got a particular point, feel free to point them to the author and work you got it from. You shouldn’t conceal your sources. But you don’t need to flaunt them either. Flaunt the Scriptures.

Medieval and ancient authors cheerfully borrowed from one another in a glorious free-for-all. Folk tales were copied, added to, adapted, synthesized — and so were nonfiction works.

The same is true in music. Folk songs were passed down, modified, new verses added. Tunes were repurposed — sometimes for directly opposite ends, as when the tune from “The Battlecry of Munster” became the base for the Irish Protestant song “The Boyne Water,” and later for Dominic Behan’s IRA anthem “Come Out Ye Black and Tans.” (Which is actually a very recent example) No one thought of this as theft.

In the modern era, we have succumbed to the myth of the artist. According to this myth, an artist produces something utterly unique — as we would now say, an “original work.” Our changing conception of the artist’s role can be traced in the changing meaning of the adjective “original.” Initially, it referred to being the source, or close to the source, as in the theological term “original sin.” The meaning here is synonymous with “first;” it doesn’t mean “unique.” Not until the 1600s does the term have the modern denotation of something an artist made up out of his own head, something sui generis, and not until the late 1700s does “original” acquire the modern connotation “new, fresh, exciting” as we would use to describe someone as “an original thinker,” for example.

The modern take on artistry is not necessarily a bad thing as an option — we certainly want to be open to our artists and authors making things up out of their own heads — but under modernity, this understanding is not optional. We have put in place legal and moral structures that make this understanding into dogma. Today, departure from the modern myth of the artist is sin (even though we no longer use that word); it’s heresy. We denounce it in starkly moral categories.

Join me in a little thought experiment, and I think you’ll see what I mean. Suppose that you made up a children’s story about the adventures of an outsized red dog named Clifford and his human family. No publisher would take such a book, of course, but suppose you self-publish it. Norman Bridwell’s estate would join with Scholastic (his publisher) to sue you, and they’d certainly win. But it wouldn’t just be a legal/financial matter. You would be denounced in moral categories as a thief for taking a character that someone else invented and using it in your own story — doubly so if you didn’t even make up your own story, but just embellished one of Bridwell’s existing stories. Suppose the whole affair made national headlines. There would be somber think pieces in venues like Christianity Today about how plagiarism violates the eighth commandment by stealing, the ninth commandment by claiming something is your own when it’s not, and so on.

Now the author who dared commit this heinous infraction would be joining some fairly exalted company. Thomas Mallory certainly did not invent King Arthur, nor the overall story arc. Dante also did the same thing you would be doing, as did Chaucer and Shakespeare and…well, everyone back then. Prior to the modern era, retelling stories was simply a matter of course, and nobody expected a storyteller to have invented it all out of his own head.

But let’s say you were not quite as transparent as all that. Let’s say your animal character is a gigantic blue ox green parrot instead of a gigantic red dog, and you make up your own stories instead of embellishing Bridwell’s. You can probably get away without being sued or overtly accused of theft, but there will be lesser charges: “derivative,” “imitative,” even (ironically) “unoriginal.”

Now, I am not saying you should self-publish your own Clifford stories, or even your own Green Parrot stories (make them about Babe the Blue Ox instead — that should be safe). I am saying that modern people have developed a very peculiar, unduly prickly relationship with source material. Considered across the sweep of human history and culture, we’re definitely the outliers here. We definitely think any other way of doing things is morally wrong — and isn’t that the very definition of provincialism?

That doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to do things our way, and it doesn’t mean that our way has no advantages. It does, in fact. Our way makes it possible to get a return on a really big investment. As one recent observer put it, without modern copyright, we’d still have novels, but probably not summer blockbuster films — who’d put up the money for a $100 million special-effects extravaganza with no hope of return on investment?

However, the fact that we’re the outliers should mean that we can contemplate other approaches without reflexively condemning them all in starkly moral terms. And it does mean we should be willing to interrogate our particular take on things. Are our beliefs about artistry and originality even true? What’s the use case for doing things our way? What are the disadvantages? What situations might call for a different approach, a different set of standards?

Next week I’m going to make the case for one such situation that, even in the modern world, calls for a different approach.