Straining the philosophical soup

So I just finish some musings for the Alternative Worship Experience service blog that I also work on. In it I try and examine, roughly the connections between our understandings of Light and Language, in particular as seen in Babel, John, and Pentecost, and the understandings of Light and Language as I remember them from Plato's analogy of the cave. I remember from the seminar I took on Plato in college that there was a school neo-Platonic thinkers that worked to try and integrate the ideas of Plato with Christian thought; building on the hintings of Plato that there was some greater force, some sense of some ultimate power or truth and attempting to connect Plato's sense of the ultimate to God. I also remember my professor at the time stating that he believed that this was not a correct interpretation of what Plato thought. I seem to recall agreeing with my professor at the time, that it was inappropriate to make Plato a monotheist based solely on his writings.

Now that being said, I attempted in my blog to strain the metaphor of Plato and to test it against the metaphor of the Word and the Light that John gives us. While clearly Plato was not a Christian I think a lot of his ideas have something to offer our Christian understanding of the world and even point at the possibility of similar truths. I guess the question I have is: can one take such philosophical writings out of context in such a way and use them to argue truths their original author would not have believed in? Or do we have an obligation as good scholars to only present them in their original context? If we never allow ourselves to stretch old ideas beyond their context how do we ever come up with new ideas and new understandings? And if we do allow such thoughts, what do we open the door up to? How does this effect our understanding of how we read Scripture? Can we stretch Scripture based on new understandings, or are we forced to try and take a strict interpretation that always seeks to root Scripture only in the intents of the original author and never to look at it afresh from our perspective. My fear in only allowing Scripture to say what the original author meant is that we limit Scriptures ability to speak powerfully and prophetically to our time and our place. However if we do allow Scripture to be stretched we open the door for intrepreations such as the one seen during the 1800's where the slavery enforced in Scripture was seen as analgous to the slavery of that time and place and so Scripture became a way of justifying on set of actions. There is an appreciable difference between straining the philosophical thoughts of Plato for whatever meaning we find in them today and straining Scripture looking for the same. No one really claims it is true because Plato said it was true. The truth of Plato comes in how much his ideas resonnate with our own understanding of the world. Scripture however we use to define the world and what is true. We place in it a reverance and value we do not usually subscribe to philsophers, even the really good ones. Scripute is meant to convict us and change us, even when we do not agree with it. Philosophers we do not agree with typically get discarded or at least resevered for intellectual debate, but they do not change the way we behave in the way we let Scripture change us. So there are differences, but still I come back to that question, how do we allow ourselves to re-read philosophers and incorporate their ideas with new ones and how do we allow ourselves to do the same thing with Scripture?