Plagiarism is pandemic in higher education, so much that online universities have mandatory "plagiarism checkers" for every single assignment. When they post their work, the software starts looking for text-matching, which is not perfect but certainly handy.
Apart from dishonesty and laziness, the problem with plagiarism is the lack of study and reflection on the text of the Bible. The popular sermons are quite shallow and manipulative, so their effect is to take the pastor farther away from the Word than before.
WELS has a great formula at Mordor. They hate Lenski for teaching Justification by Faith. The faculty encourages "good sermons writers" to share on a server so the overworked, hungover brothers do not have to write their own. WELS leadersare so full of themselves that they make the graduates think they have reached a genius level of Biblical studies, even though their education has been watered down year after year, following the LCMS-ELCA model.
In the past WELS has paid pastors to attend Fuller and Willow Creek, so they can grow their churches the way Calvinists do.
How you gonna keep them down on the farm,
After they've seen Church Growth?
How you gonna keep them away harm
After they've heard such things from Parlow?
At Gettysburg Seminary, in the good old days, seminary was a series of Greek and Hebrew courses in the Scriptures, with homiletical courses added - German preaching expected.
Many pastors were intellectual giants because of their constant study, as were the leaders of the Lutheran Reformation.
We are not all equally moved to study and write, but this formula is still true for all composition -
"Great writing comes from great research, because research is the energy behind thought and composition." - G. Jackson
I teach that to every class I have whether it is an MA in education or a graduate degree in theology. Those who linger and malinger at the textbook level have nothing new to say. They simply repeat the bromides they have learned from the text.
When I read the verbose volumes of liberal scholars, I usually see the endless repetition of rationalism from the past. The theologians are anxious to prove they have devoured the works of Karl Barth, or more honestly - his mistress Charlotte Kirschbaum. Thus we have Calvinistic human reason on both sides, with nothing to offer from the Word itself.
Halle University launched the Easter Absolution of the Entire Word (without faith, of course). Halle also promoted Biblical rationalism and culminated in Schleiermacher's pivot into modernism - faith without belief. He taught the academics to write enormous volumes where all the words of faith were used, but emptied of meaning. That remains the "genius" of Barth-Kirschbaum, the theology of Fuller Seminary, and the method of the modern Lutherans who ape Calvin so marvelously well.
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| Barth and his Commie mistress - Charlotte Kirschbaum. He plagiarized the documents/research his colleagues sent him, kind of a Walmart of theology. Charlotte did all of his research and received no credit until very late. |
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| Ow! - I need eye bleach. This is the after picture. |
