P & C

As promised, more postity-goodness. It's a bit late for me to be writting, so we'll see how coherent this is, and whether or not I say what I intend to say. Or something.

When we read literature from a Biblical perspective we need to look at who wrote it and when it was written. Specifically, one needs to know if the author was Protestant or Catholic/Orthodox (I am referring to anything written over a hundred years ago at the moment). Each group has a very distinct way of reading the Bible, and as such they draw different things out of it.

For example, it is highly uncommon to find a Protestant using the Virgin Mary as a major theme, while the exact opposite is true for a Catholic (try and read any long work of Catholic literature without coming across Marian imagery). Thus it is unlikely that when reading, say, Jane Austen, one will find a lot of Marian imagery, while it abounds in the works of Flannery O'Connor.

In addition, this dichotomy of reading has deep theological implications, the biggest of which is the issue of Tradition (as I believe I have mentioned before). Since a Catholic writes with up to 2000 years of tradition the work takes on a distinctly older character (if the writer is good). Protestant authors, on the other hand, work in a perpetually young faith and thus their writing seems to hold more weight in the hear-and-now.

I'm not going to spell out all the difference (and you wouldn't want to read them if I did). Rather, I am going to let you dwell on the thought that those differences do exist, and they provide for two (three if you count the Hebraic) ways of transforming the words of the Bible into more modern literature.