Acts 17:29

"Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art." And yet for this reason we ought. By no means: for surely we are not like to such, nor are these souls of ours. "And imagination of man." How so? But some person might say, "We do not think this." But it was to the many that he was addressing himself, not now to Philosophy.

For lest, when he says, "Being the offspring of God," they should again say, Thou bringest certain strange things to our ears, he produces the poet. He does not say, "Ye ought not to think the Godhead like to gold or silver," ye accursed and execrable: but in more lowly sort he says, "We ought not." For what says he? God is above this? No, he does not say this either: but for the present this - "We ought not to think the Godhead like unto such," for nothing is so opposite to men. "But we do not affirm the Godhead to be like unto this, for who would say that?" Mark how he has introduced the incorporeal nature of God when he said, "In Him," etc., for the mind, when it surmises body, at the same time implies the notion of distance. Speaking to the many he says, "We ought not to think the Godhead like unto gold, or silver, or stone, the shaping of art," for if we are not like to those as regards the soul, much more God is not like to such. So far, he withdraws them from the notion. But neither is the Godhead, he would say, subjected to any other human conception. For if that which art or thought has found - this is why he says it thus, "of art or imagination of man" - if that, then, which human art or thought has found, is God, then even in the stone is God's essence.

How comes it then, if "in Him we live," that we do not find Him? The charge is twofold, both that they did not find Him, and that they found such as these. The human understanding in itself is not at all to be relied upon.

"As some of your own poets have also said." One wise man, Aratus, said of Zeus: "We are his offspring." But the apostle says of the Creator: "We are His… offspring," — not asserting that the Creator and Zeus are one and the same — …

We ought not to think - A tender expression especially in the first per son plural. As if he had said, Can God himself be a less noble being than we who are his offspring? Nor does he only here deny, that these are like God, but that they have any analogy to him at all, so as to be capable of representing him.