Lily Allen and the Bishop

The suggestion by the Bishop of Sheffield that Lily Allen's song 'The Fear' makes useful accompanying listening for a Bible-study course speaks into a 2,000 year old debate about Christians' attempts to ventriloquise secular or non-Christian cultural sources into speaking on matters of their faith. 

Paul famously tried this in a soap-box moment at the Aeropagus in Athens, quoting both Cretan philosopher Epimenides and the Cilician Stoic philosopher Aratus as speaking of the God known by Paul as a disciple of Jesus (Acts 17:28).  The narrative in Acts then takes Paul from Athens to Corinth, and there's the implication in one of the letters that Paul wrote to the church there that he'd reflected on the preaching technique used in Athens and (perhaps) rejected it as ineffectual:

When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.  For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.  My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.  (1 Corinthians 1:1-5)

Strictly speaking, the use of the song in the course is not because it consciously articulates Christian doctrine but rather (says the Bishop) because it captures "something of the spirit of the age", and Lily Allen has endorsed its use in this way. 

I'd have no blog if I didn't think that cultural artifacts spoke both into, and from, religious experience but it leaves me wondering about an uncritical approach to this, or at least to an attitude that would view such approaches with great skepticism.