My First English Literature Assignment: Why Is It Important for Christians to Study Non-Christian Literature?

I turned this in for the discussion board: (Keep in mind that I attend a Baptist University, so for the sake of not causing a turmoil in the classes I use Jesus Christ and God in school, but prefer Their Hebrew names and use them when possible.)

Being that I am an avid reader (not of literature, per say, but of history and the like) I can say that I think it is very important to study history for the importance of knowing where we came from; that is to say what culture stood behind ours, what their beliefs were, what is so important about their writings that carried through to today. Two examples that I can think of to back up what I say are the Enlightenment Period and the Renaissance Period. The Enlightenment Period advanced humanism heavily in the world, and the Renaissance Period brought about liberal democracies and social reform. Literatures from these periods demonstrate that. Henry David Thoreau and Ernest Hemmingway, for example, employed humanism in their writings. When we look at these illustrations, and others, then we can begin to decipher history and culture, and see where society stopped depending so much on God and started looking more to subjective morals.

I watched a movie a few weeks ago, called Time Changer. It was about a man, who wrote a book in the late 1800’s, saying that Jesus Christ’s morals must be taught, even when He could not be the object of the teaching. A co-worker of his objected to his book, saying that if morals had no objective (Jesus Christ) then they would become worthless and ineffective. The second character had developed a time machine and allowed the first character (the writer) to travel to modern time, as we know it. He saw the condition of the world today, in which morals are taught, but are, indeed, largely separated from the deity of Christ, and was surprised to witness how sin had grown and flourished.

These may not be the reasons, which you were expecting that one would say it is important to study non-Christian literature, but for me, these are the most important reasons.