From Donald T. Williams' essay "Christian Poetics, Past and Present":

How can Christians make use of the products of an idolatrous culture? In pagan learning, error and superstition are to be rejected. But pagan learning also included the liberal arts, which are servants of truth: "Now we may say that these elements are the pagans' gold and silver, which they did not create for themselves, but dug out of the mines of God's providence." Therefore, it is proper for Christians to "take all this away from them and turn it to its proper use in declaring the Gospel" (Howie 364). Even the infamous art of the rhetorician (we should remember that through the Renaissance, poetry was considered a species of rhetoric) is in itself morally neutral and capable of being used in the service of truth; therefore, "we should not blame the practice of eloquence but the perversity of those who put it to a bad use" (360). This being so, Christians have not only a right but also an obligation to learn and employ the art of rhetoric. Since it is "employed to support either truth or falsehood, who would venture to say that truth as represented by its defenders should take its stand unarmed?" The result of Christians abandoning the field would be that falsehood is expounded "briefly, clearly, and plausibly," but truth "in such a manner that it is boring ... difficult to understand, and, in a word, hard to believe" (369).