Thursday, March 28, 2019

The Gospel According to Paul in Acts 17:28-29




For in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we also are His children.' "Being then the children of God, we ought to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man." (Acts 17:28-29, NASB)


Latter-day Saints are fond of appealing to Acts 17:28-29 in support of our belief that God and humanity are the same “species.” For a discussion, see my article:


Needless to say, there has been a lot of eisegesis and fallacious reasoning employed by critics of our theology. One prime example is a recent article on the Beggar’s Bread (or, as it should be known as, the Bugger All Exegesis blog) wherein the author pretends to interact with, not just Latter-day Saint theology, but also apologetics:


Fred, of course, has been refuted by myself and others, including my friend Christopher Davis, on such issues before, including his own abuse of sources, such as Brent A. Moody, Function and Meaning of Pagan Quotations in Acts 17:28. For more, see:


Also check out:



We do find this doozy:

To use a modern equivalent it was like when Billy Graham cited the secular song lyrics “What the world needs now is love, sweet love” (from a Dione Warwick song) and “The answer is blowing in the wind” (from a Bob Dylan song) to make his point in sermons during his 1969 Anaheim, California Crusades.2 In both cases, the intention wasn’t to endorse the sources, simply to establish a rhetorical connection with the listening audience from their cultural vantage point. To suggest anything more than that is exegetically unsustainable.

This is nothing short of question-begging and, interestingly, falsified in many other parallel instances. For example, Jude 9 has the author reference and even quote the Assumption of Moses and affirms the underlying theology thereof vis-a-vis Satanology. For a full discussion, see Thomas Farrar, The Devil in the General Epistles, Part 4: Jude