Paul and the Philosophers
[ Contents ]
The God of Life and Being
“God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone — an image made by human design and skill.” (Acts 17:27–29)
Athens stood at the height of human speculation. Its temples were filled with images of gods, its schools were filled with words of philosophers, and its citizens were confident that they could define reality through their own wisdom. Into this atmosphere Paul announced that God had ordered the world, shaped nations, and directed history so that men might seek him. The purpose of the world was not human self-display but divine knowledge. Nations had been set in their times and places by God’s design, and the proper result was that men should look upward to the one who had arranged their steps.
This turned the Athenians’ confidence into condemnation. They thought of themselves as wise seekers, charting paths of speculation that spanned centuries. Paul described them instead as groping in the dark. Their minds did not bring them closer to God but left them stumbling like blind men reaching for what they could not see. Even so, Paul added that God was near to every one of them. He was not absent from the world. He was not hidden in some remote region of heaven, nor was he bound within temples. He sustained their very existence. To speak, to move, to breathe, and even to think was only possible because God upheld them.
God’s nearness was more than a matter of geography. Paul was not saying that God could be reached by walking to a temple or climbing a mountain. His nearness was metaphysical. Every heartbeat rested on him. Every thought assumed his order. Every word was carried on breath that he provided. He was nearer than the idols in their shrines, nearer than the philosophers in their academies, nearer than the very sensations of touch and sight. Men did not need to cross seas or ascend heights to find him, for they already lived in his presence and power.
This truth is also epistemological. Men cannot reason without God. When the mind interprets a scene, grasps identity and relation, and traces cause and effect, it relies on a framework that experience does not supply. Categories like number, continuity, and logic are not inventions of men. They are the order of God’s own mind, reflected in the structure of reality and impressed on the human mind. When Paul said that God is not far from any one of us, he must have included the fact that every act of thought already presupposes the God who sustains thought. The Athenians imagined that reason could bring them to God, but reason itself was possible only because God was already near.
Paul reinforced his words with the statement, “In him we live and move and have our being.” This was a line from one of their poets, and Paul used their own words against them, turning the fragment into testimony for the truth. Once severed from its pagan associations, the words direct attention to the God who upholds all things. This goes deeper than creation at the beginning. It speaks of continuous preservation. The world does not run on its own, like a clock wound up and left to tick. Existence depends on God at every moment. Without his act, the world would vanish. Without his will, men would have no thought, no breath, and no step. To deny God is to affirm the products of his power while rejecting their source. It is like enjoying the warmth of fire while insisting that no flame exists.
The statement has three parts, each full of meaning. “In him we live.” Life is not self-sustaining. Organisms do not explain themselves. It is nonsense to suggest that life arose from matter by chance, because chance is not a thing or a cause, and because matter, remaining what it is, has no power to produce consciousness. Life exists because God imparts it, moment by moment. “In him we move.” Every action presupposes continuity and relation. A step, a gesture, a word spoken, all are threads in a fabric woven by God’s ordering power. If God withdrew his hand, motion would freeze into nothing. “In him we have our being.” This is the broadest claim of all. Existence itself rests on God. Identity, logic, permanence, and the difference between something and nothing, all derive from him. His mind upholds the categories that make reality intelligible.
Some philosophers thought that reason itself could explain the order of the world. They identified God with reason, or with the universe as a whole, and concluded that the world was a living organism infused with rational principle. Scripture also identifies God with reason, for he is the Logos, the one whose wisdom is the rational principle of all things. But Scripture never identifies God with the universe itself. To confuse Creator and creation is to confuse what depends on something else with what depends on nothing. The world is made of changing and finite things. Anything that changes does not explain its own existence, because it depends on what came before. Anything that is finite does not explain itself, because it has limits it did not set. A whole made of dependent parts cannot explain itself any more than a single dependent part can. If God is the world, then he cannot be the one who gives existence to the world. Something cannot explain itself by pointing to itself. A cause must be distinct from its effect, and an explanation must be distinct from what it explains. To call the world divine is to deny this distinction and to dissolve the very concept of divinity. It is incoherent. The true God is both near and distinct. He upholds all things without being identical with them.
Pantheism, ancient or modern, strips divinity of meaning. If everything is called God, then nothing is God. If the whole universe is treated as divine, then “divine” becomes a synonym for “everything,” and the word loses significance. If God is absorbed into the world, then the world is left without explanation. Cause and effect collapse into the same thing, which is no explanation at all. By erasing the distinction between Creator and creation, the pantheist erases the very categories of thought. Distinction is the basis of reason. If everything is collapsed into one, there is no longer identity and relation, no longer cause and effect, no longer truth and falsehood. Pantheism does not expand thought but annihilates it.
Paul then turned to words the Athenians would have recognized from another of their poets, saying, “We are his offspring.” This was not an attempt at common ground. It was a counterstroke. Paul seized their own words, stripped them of pagan meaning, and turned them into a witness against their idolatry. For if men are God’s offspring, then they depend on him. They do not exist from themselves. They are not autonomous. They are derivative beings who carry in every thought and action the mark of their dependence.
This was no concession to the poets. It was their undoing. They had confessed something they could not explain. If they claimed that all things came from nature or from impersonal fate, their admission of divine parentage contradicted them. If they claimed that men could ascend by wisdom to godlike status, their admission of dependence made it impossible. Their words revealed that even in paganism there were fragments of suppressed truth. These fragments, when examined under the light of revelation, served not as allies but as accusers. They showed that the non-Christian cannot escape awareness of God, but that his systems cannot sustain even the truths he mutters.
All unbelievers know that the God of the Christians is real and true, even the only God who created all things, but because they are foolish and wicked, they repress this knowledge deep in their minds. Their feelings and opinions betray them, showing that God is their most basic assumption even as they deny him. Secular thinkers speak of human dignity, as though man has value beyond the animal kingdom. They speak of universal rights, as though justice has absolute standing. They speak of reason and science, as though truth is objective and binding. Yet none of these claims fits their worldview. If man is a product of blind evolution, then his value is arbitrary. If morality is the result of culture or consensus, then rights dissolve when consensus shifts. If thought is the product of chemical motion, then truth has no authority. These modern poets, like the ancient ones, reveal their suppressed knowledge of God even as they deny him. Their own statements testify against them, showing that they depend on what they refuse to acknowledge.
Paul then pressed the point further. “Since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone — an image made by human design and skill.” If men receive life from God, then God’s nature must be greater than anything men can fashion. An image takes its shape, its details, and even its place from the hands of its maker. To treat such an object as a likeness of the divine is to reverse the order of things. It insults the Creator by comparing it to a product of the creature. It suggests that what is lifeless could point to the source of life, and that what is dependent could represent the one who depends on nothing. The contradiction is clear, for the one who sustains all things cannot be represented by something made and set in place by men.
Every statue, every image, every crafted likeness that people present as divine shows the folly of their thinking. They take stone, carve it with skill, cover it with metal, and then bow before it as though it stood for the very ground of their existence. The process itself shows the lie. The idol owes its form and its place in the temple to the one who made it. It cannot move, it cannot think, it cannot act. To treat it as representing the divine empties the word “God” of meaning. If God is life, a dead object cannot represent God. If God is the one who gives being, then shaped matter cannot be likened to the divine. Idolatry is the attempt to lift up the work of human hands in place of the one who made human hands. It is nonsense.
The Athenians were renowned for art and architecture. They filled their city with what they regarded as beauty. But Paul dismantled their pretension. He showed that beauty without truth is depravity, and skill without sense is vanity. Crafting an idol displays talent in the service of a lie. The object may dazzle the eyes, but it insults reason. Divine being is not captured in gold or silver. God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being. He sustains art, but art cannot sustain him. He gives beauty, but beauty does not define him.
Modern men repeat the same folly in different forms. They may not carve statues for temples, but they fashion ideologies, systems, and symbols, and then treat these as ultimate. Money is lifted as a power that sustains life. Politics is treated as the source of order. Science is exalted as the key to existence, replacing God and Reason, which is Christ. But these too are idols, lifeless things adorned by human imagination. Money is only paper or digital entries. Politics is only human agreement. Science is only human method, inferences from false assumptions and epistemologies. When men treat these as divine, they are as stupid as those who bow to stone. Those who exalt them fall into the same contradiction that marked Athens.
Paul’s reasoning forced a sharp division. God is the source of being, the one who sustains every thought and every breath. Idols are the opposite, products of imagination and craft, unable even to account for their own presence. The issue is not only about worship but about reason itself. God makes the world intelligible, while idols dissolve it into contradiction. God explains life, while idols stand blind, mute, and dead. Worship directed to him rests on truth, while worship directed to images is nothing more than men honoring their own inventions.
Pantheism continues to blur the distinction between Creator and creation. Idolatry continues to fashion gods of metal, stone, or ideology. Modern men who scoff at ancient temples still build their own shrines in laboratories and parliaments, treating science or politics as the ultimate source. But they remain bound to the same irrationality. If God is excluded, the categories of thought and life disintegrate. If existence is attributed to blind matter, the very notion of truth dissolves. If human life is attributed to pagan idols or impersonal forces, then reason and knowledge vanish, because idols depend on man and impersonal forces cannot produce a thinking mind.
God, as affirmed in the Christian worldview, is a rational necessity. Men live in him, and without him they cannot live. They move in him, and without him they cannot move. They have their being in him, and without him they cannot exist. In denying him, men embrace both sin and contradiction. The Athenians could not escape this. Their temples stood as monuments to their foolishness, but their own poets betrayed an awareness of truth. Their art boasted of their skill, but their skill only magnified their irrationality when they thought their creations represented the divine.
Since God is near, sustaining all things, and since men are his offspring, then ignorance is inexcusable. Idolatry is indefensible. Pantheism is incoherent. The only response is repentance, with a conversion in nature and disposition, and a total change of worldview. Paul would press this point soon enough, but even here the demand is implied. God’s nearness is not a comfort to be enjoyed by those living in error. It is a summons to acknowledge dependence and to worship the God who gives life and being.