A fever-and-congestion bug knocked me out this past week. I would have acknowledged Pastor Mark Driscoll’s apology for plagiarism much sooner — and that’s important only because I recently have written so much about the controversy.
Driscoll’s apology, apparently released Wednesday, related to the Trial study guide, which mistakenly used material published by InterVarsity Press.
You can read full statements by Tyndale House and Driscoll here.
Parts of Driscoll’s apology said, “The error was unintentional, but serious nonetheless. I take responsibility for all of this. In order to make things right, we’ve contacted the publisher of the works used in the study guide, offered an apology, and agreed to work with them to resolve any issues they had…. If other mistakes were made, we want to correct them as soon as possible…. Mistakes were made that I am grieved by and apologize for.”
I’m relieved the influential Driscoll has acknowledged the seriousness of the problem, and has done so with a tone of humility and respect.
I’m not comfortable with Tyndale House’s defense of Driscoll’s use of Peter Jones’s work in A Call to Resurgence.
“Pertaining to his Tyndale book, A Call to Resurgence, Tyndale believes that Mark Driscoll did indeed adequately cite the work of Peter Jones. While there are many nuanced definitions of plagiarism, most definitions agree that plagiarism is a writer’s deliberate use of someone’s words or ideas, and claiming them as their own with no intent to provide credit to the original source,” said part of Tyndale’s statement.
Maybe I’ll come back to Tyndale House’s “many nuanced definitions of plagiarism” at a later date.
For now, the statements from Driscoll and Tyndale House absolve Driscoll of the Call to Resurgence issue and apologize for the Trial issue.
However, not all issues have been addressed.
Mefferd had posted two other examples. See Driscoll Plagiarism 3 and Driscoll Plagiarism 4. I have yet to find any acknowledgment or apology related to those.
Furthermore, one of those examples had been raised before, this past summer, in extensive detail. That example dealt with ideas from Dan Allender’s book The Wounded Heart and their apparent appearance in Mark and Grace Driscoll’s book Real Marriage. More here.
Recently, Warren Throckmorton has raised questions about similarities between the same Allender book and Death By Love, written by Driscoll and Gary Breshears.
And now, Wendy Alsup, formerly a minister at Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church in Seattle, says, “despite statements this week from Tyndale publishers, there is a great deal more that Pastor Mark Driscoll has not addressed concerning plagiarism. I am particularly concerned about references in Death by Love and Real Marriage to Dan Allender’s material from Wounded Hearts.” The Allender book was published by Navpress.
Alsup also says, “There are even bigger issues of citation in [the book] Who Do You Think You Are? These three books are published through Thomas Nelson, not Tyndale which released a statement this week. I wrote Thomas Nelson a few times privately, hoping they would address this, but I have not heard anything from them over the last 2 weeks.”
Again, the statement released this week was from Tyndale House. InterVarsity Press sounded off early in the plagiarism controversy, graciously yet directly, concerning Trial. Now we’ll await news from Navpress and Thomas Nelson.
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